It’s a jam packed basketball episode of The IX Sports Podcast! Hosts Howard Megdal and Jackie Powell kick off the episode with a preview the upcoming women’s Final Four. Then, Powell speaks with The IX Basketball’s Emily Adler and Lincoln Shafer to break down the WNBA’s double expansion draft taking place on April 3. Finally, Megdal and Powell discuss the sale of the Connecticut Sun and the subsequent revival of the Houston Comets.
First, Megdal and Powell compared the two pairs of No. 1 seeds facing off in the Final Four, UCLA vs. Texas and UConn vs. South Carolina. First, they covered the matchup between UCLA and Texas, and how the parity between the two teams stands in contrast to what we saw early in the regular season.
“UCLA, Texas is such a fascinating matchup,” Megdal said. “Again, there’s much more to it, but you can just take it at the base level. Texas plays such difficult defense. I mean, we saw this when it came to the game against Michigan, where they just absolutely decimated a Wolverines team that you and I both talked about, we thought had a real chance to win the game outright. UCLA can kill you in so many different ways. Gianna Kneepkens has been every bit the player we thought she would be … Cori Close has this team playing incredibly well. We saw it right through to the Big Ten conference championship when they beat Iowa. 96 to 45 that’s not a made up number. That’s a real number. Either of these teams has now gotten to the point that they will challenge in the championship game no matter who they’re facing. And that is different than where we were, where I was, I don’t want to speak for you on this one, back in the early part of the season, where it felt like there are some really, really good teams, and then UConn is a level above and is going to beat anyone by 30.”
Then, Powell brought in Adler and Shafer to discuss Friday’s WNBA expansion draft, which will officially bring the Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo into the league. Adler explained the general format of the expansion draft, which will feature two rounds of picks.
“Toronto won the coin toss, they elected to have the No. 6 pick instead of the No. 7 in the first year player draft, which means Portland gets pick No. 1 in the expansion draft,” Adler said. “If anyone’s ever played fantasy sports before, this is going to work like a snake draft. So there’ll be 12 picks in the first round, Toronto picks 12th, alternate one by one, and then when we get to the second round it flips, Toronto has both round one, pick No. 12, and round two, pick No. 1, and we keep alternating from there. Next step is … all the teams have to submit their protections … there are some steps that can go along the way, in terms of trades, in terms of decisions. And then after that comes the draft itself.”
Then, Shafer discussed the specific differences between this year’s expansion draft, and the 2025 expansion draft that brought in the Golden State Valkyries. In particular, he touched on the differences in how many players each team can protect and what those protections actually do, in part because a vast majority of the league’s players are unrestricted free agents.
“The protection list for each team moved from six players last season to five players for each team this season, and they kind of changed the nature of protections in a slight way,” Shafer explained. “Teams can still only draft one unrestricted free agent or, as the league designated, a potential unrestricted free agent, which is any player that is going into free agency this year that has five or more years of service. Last year, if the player was core ineligible, having been cored two or more times under the the previous CBA, that meant that they were ineligible to be drafted at all by the Valkyries.”
“Becoming Caitlin Clark” is out now!
Howard Megdal’s newest book is here! “Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar” captures both the historic nature of Clark’s rise and the critical context over the previous century that helped make it possible, including interviews with Clark, Lisa Bluder (who also wrote the foreword), C. Vivian Stringer, Jan Jensen, Molly Kazmer and many others.
“But that has changed this year, and the league has designated all of the potential unrestricted free agents as draftable, regardless of their core eligibility, which makes a difference, because these players, even if they’re not eligible to be cored by the team that drafts them here, they are still given exclusive, supermax negotiating rights by the league off of the new team that they’re drafted to. And they could only get that that big, shiny, $1.4 million salary based on negotiations with the team that drafted them in the expansion draft, and no other team in the WNBA.”
Tune in to hear more from Powell and Megdal about their Final Four predictions and reflections on the sale of the Connecticut Sun, as well as more from Adler and Shafer about the upcoming expansion draft.
Make sure to subscribe to The IX Sports Podcast for in-depth coverage of women’s soccer, hockey and basketball; and tune in each weekday morning for a quick overview of the biggest headlines on Women’s Sports Daily.
What you missed on Women’s Sports Daily: The Final Four stage is set for Phoenix
Related