Ever since the buzzer sounded on October’s thrilling WNBA Finals, anticipation has been building about what 2025 might have in store. With free agency under way, we’re about to find out.
For Jan. 11-20, teams are allowed to extend reserved, restricted and core qualifying offers to players. Some notable stars — the New York Liberty’s Breanna Stewart, Las Vegas Aces’ Kelsey Plum, Indiana Fever’s Kelsey Mitchell, Connecticut Sun’s Alyssa Thomas, Dallas Wings’ Satou Sabally and Seattle Storm’s Gabby Williams — already received a core qualifying offer, what is often referred to as “being cored.”
Negotiations officially begin Tuesday, and players can sign contracts starting Feb. 1, but news of moves and trades will leak well before then. With a new CBA featuring massive salary bumps expected to come into effect in 2026, expect to see players sign only one-year deals.
What movement might we see? We can expect two significant changes: Seattle’s Jewell Loyd isn’t a free agent, but she has already requested a trade from the Storm. And earlier this month Sabally announced she has played her last game for the Wings and is working to find a new home. Because she has been cored, that would have to come via trade.
Other big-name free agents to watch include Sun teammates DeWanna Bonner and Brionna Jones, who are both unrestricted free agents, as are the Storm’s Nneka Ogwumike, Phoenix Mercury’s Brittney Griner and the Liberty’s Courtney Vandersloot. And questions still surround the future of WNBA legend Diana Taurasi, who indicated toward the end of the 2024 season that it could be her last in the league. There’s also uncertainty surrounding the future of Elena Delle Donne, who is technically an unrestricted free agent yet hasn’t appeared in the league since 2023.
Keep it here all offseason long for the latest buzz, news and reports surrounding the WNBA. The 2025 season — the league’s 29th — will tip off May 16.
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Jan. 17 update
The Connecticut Sun extended a core qualifying offer to Alyssa Thomas.
Jan. 16 update
The Indiana Fever extended a core qualifying offer to Kelsey Mitchell.
Jan. 14 updates
The Seattle Storm designated Gabby Williams as their core player, meaning she will not become an unrestricted free agent, Kevin Pelton reported.
Williams joins Kelsey Plum (Las Vegas Aces), Satou Sabally (Dallas Wings) and Breanna Stewart (New York Liberty) as players with the core designation, which allows them to sign the one-year qualifying offer at the WNBA’s highest possible salary ($249,244) but prevents them from signing with another team as a free agent.
What is the WNBA’s core system?
The WNBA’s core player designation is akin to the NFL franchise tag. A team can “core” a player to prevent them from becoming an unrestricted free agent by retaining their exclusive rights.
A core qualifying offer is a guaranteed one-year contract at the supermax, but the team and player can negotiate different terms to a deal. Each team can core only one player, and the 2020 CBA reduced the number of times players can be cored in their career gradually from four to three and, as of 2022, to two, a major change that opened up free agency movement throughout the league.
Six players — Sabally, Plum, Stewart, Mitchell, Thomas and Williams — have been cored so far in 2025, the most in one offseason under this current CBA. But that doesn’t mean those players will return to the teams that cored them. Sabally has already said she’s moving on from Dallas. With the Wings coring her — which they likely did to ensure they’d get some return for Sabally leaving — the only way for her to change teams is via trade.
According to tracking via Across the Timeline, the last time multiple players were cored and traded in one offseason was 2020 (Tina Charles and Skylar Diggins-Smith), but expect other big names to join Sabally in departing their franchises this free agency via that mechanism. And that doesn’t even include a trade that’s suspected to come when Seattle parts with Loyd, as the star requested out in December.
