WNBA Draft Lottery Rules, Odds and Teams Announced

The 2025 WNBA Draft Lottery, perhaps better known as the Paige Bueckers sweepstakes, will take place on Sunday.

Four teams, the Los Angeles Sparks, Dallas Wings, Chicago Sky and Washington Mystics, will have ping-pong balls in the league’s 24th annual draft lottery. Odds are based on two-year (2023 and 2024) cumulative records of four teams that did not make the playoffs last season. The Golden State Valkyries, the WNBA expansion team that begins play in 2025, will automatically be assigned the fifth pick in all three rounds of next year’s draft.

ESPN will air a 30-minute sweepstakes special on Sunday at 5pm ET following the women’s basketball game between TCU and NC State.

To make things interesting, Dallas has the right to swap their first-round pick with Chicago following the 2023 trade that sent Marina Mabrey from Dallas to Chicago. Dallas will exercise its trade rights if Chicago’s first-round pick goes above its own after the draw. This gives the Wings a 45.4% chance of winning the No. 1 pick; This means Sparks has a good chance of winning the lottery.

During the draw, 14 ping pong balls numbered 1 to 14 will be placed in a lottery machine and mixed. Four balls will be drawn to determine the winning four-digit combination. The team with the tied combination will be awarded the No. 1 overall pick. The same process is then repeated to determine the second selection. The team with the lowest two-year overall record that does not qualify for the first or second pick will pick third, and the remaining team will pick fourth.

UConn star guard Paige Bueckers is the likely prize and franchise-changing player for the team that picked the lucky combination to go first in the 2025 WNBA Draft. It could also be argued that USC’s Kiki Iriafen could be the No. 1 pick depending on how the season goes. Other top candidates could include Notre Dame’s Olivia Miles, UConn’s Azzi Fudd, UCLA’s Janiah Barker, LSU’s Aneesah Morrow and France’s Dominique Malonga.