The Sparks Carry a $700 Million Price Tag Into Lottery Week

LAS VEGAS

No WNBA team played a game on Wednesday. The league still produced a for-sale sign with a $700 million number on it, a four-day countdown to the draft lottery, and a New York Times bestseller list with a point guard at the top of it. The offseason is eleven days old. Here is the WNBA on November 11.

A $700 million for-sale sign in Los Angeles

The asking price has been public since Bloomberg reported it last month, and it picked up fresh legs on Wednesday when Athlon Sports laid out the full arc of it. Mark Walter is seeking $700 million for the Los Angeles Sparks and the team’s new practice facility in El Segundo. In 2014, the group Walter led with Magic Johnson bought the franchise for $10 million. The previous owners had lost more than $12 million since 2007 and told the league they could not keep the team afloat; Walter and Johnson stepped in to save it, and the Sparks won the title two years later, in 2016.

Seventy times the purchase price is a bold number for a team that just went 16-28, owns the league’s longest active playoff drought at six seasons and fired head coach Lynne Roberts after the season. The facility does a lot of the work in that price. It cost $150 million, covers 64,000 square feet in El Segundo, was billed on its announcement as the largest investment in the history of women’s sports for a single team, and opens before the 2027 season. Sportico valued the Sparks at $400 million this year and Forbes at $350 million, seventh in the league in Forbes’ accounting. Even if you strip the building’s $150 million cost straight out of the ask, the team alone would be priced at $550 million — $250 million above the league record Tilman Fertitta set this year by paying $300 million for the Connecticut Sun, who move to Houston as the Comets next season.

Two obvious buyers have already passed, at least for now. Josh Kushner and Bob Iger, who agreed to buy Walter’s majority stake in the Lakers at a record $12.5 billion valuation in August, discussed acquiring the Sparks as well but are not among the expected buyers, per Bloomberg. Whoever does write the check gets the Los Angeles market, a young roster built around Cameron Brink, a building no rival can match — and a coaching vacancy, because the Sparks still have no head coach. Somebody is going to pay a record price for potential. The league has reached the point where that sentence is not even strange.

Sunday’s lottery, in one place

The winter’s first real event arrives Sunday, November 15, when the 2027 WNBA Draft Lottery airs at 7:30 p.m. ET on ESPN, right after UConn plays Louisville, with TSN carrying it in Canada. It is the 26th lottery in league history. Bethany Donaphin, the league’s head of league operations, will reveal the results, Ernst & Young oversees the drawing, and the first two picks are decided by the machine before the remaining teams slot in by record. Odds are built on two-year cumulative records — except for expansion teams Toronto and Portland, whose 2026 season counts alone. Seven picks, six teams, 1,000 combinations:

• Houston Comets — 32.9% (329 combinations; 22-66 as the Connecticut Sun across 2025-26). The tiebreaker with Toronto means Houston cannot fall below the No. 3 pick.
• Toronto Tempo — 32.9% (329; 11-33 in their first season). Toronto is guaranteed a pick no worse than No. 4.
• Washington Mystics — 16.1% (161; the pick is Chicago’s, 26-62, acquired in the Ariel Atkins trade — which is how a playoff team holds the third-best ticket in the drum).
• Seattle Storm — 9.3% (93; 31-57).
• Portland Fire — 5.2% (52; 17-27 in their first season back).
• Los Angeles Sparks — 3.6% combined (their own pick at 2.4% off a 37-51 record, plus Phoenix’s pick at 1.2%, acquired in the Kelsey Plum trade in August).

The prize at the top is understood to be JuJu Watkins, who has spent the first two weeks of the college season reminding everyone why — and who plays at No. 1 South Carolina on Sunday afternoon, hours before the balls bounce. Watkins is the presumptive No. 1 pick if she declares, per the Associated Press, but the NCAA’s fifth-year eligibility rules leave her a real option to stay at USC, and nobody in a front office can plan around her answer yet. Behind her, the class is expected to run through Texas forward Madison Booker and Notre Dame guard Hannah Hidalgo. In Houston, Comets president Jennifer Rizzotti told USA Today the franchise deliberately built salary-cap room to take big swings in free agency, and that who the Comets draft will shape who they chase. The draft itself is April 12, 2027.

Clark wrote a No. 1 bestseller

Caitlin Clark can add a line to the résumé that has nothing to do with shooting. Her debut children’s picture book, “EXTRAordinary! A Little EXTRA to Reach BIG Dreams,” debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times children’s picture books bestseller list on Wednesday, per USA Today, a little more than a week after its November 3 release. Clark posted the announcement on her Instagram story.

The book is a 32-page rhyming picture book for ages four to eight, published by Random House Books for Young Readers, illustrated by Adriana Predoi and priced at $19.99. Its title comes from a line that hung on a mirror in Clark’s childhood home — “the difference between ordinary and extraordinary is the little extra” — as Clark described it during launch week, according to USA Today. She promoted it the way stars promote things now — Good Morning America and the Today show on release day, then her Tonight Show debut on November 6, cheeseballs and all.

The book lands on top of a season that was loud enough on its own. Clark averaged 22.3 points and 8.3 assists across 40 games in 2026 and made the All-WNBA First Team for the second time, per Athlon Sports, while Indiana went 28-16 and took the No. 6 seed before falling to the Las Vegas Aces 2-1 in the first round. She also launched her first Nike signature shoe, the Caitlin 1, this fall. She enters the final year of her rookie contract in 2027. The Fever’s front office has a negotiation coming that will reset the league’s pay scale; the bestseller is a reminder of exactly how much leverage is sitting across the table.

Everybody wants Kelsey Mitchell

The free-agent admiring has started early, and it started on a podcast couch. Washington Mystics forward Shakira Austin, appearing on Post Moves with Aliyah Boston and Candace Parker, was asked to name one player she would love to play alongside. “I was thinking. I ain’t going to lie. No shade but Kelsey Mitchell,” Austin said, per EssentiallySports — a choice that landed awkwardly, and then interestingly, because Mitchell has been Boston’s backcourt partner for Boston’s entire career in Indiana.

There was no suggestion Washington is recruiting her, and the answer would not be news at all if Mitchell were locked up. She is not. Mitchell averaged 24.7 points a game in 2026, set the league’s single-season scoring record with 1,086 points and hit a record 135 three-pointers, per EssentiallySports. She has spent all nine of her WNBA seasons with the Fever, who kept her the last two winters with the core designation. Under the new collective bargaining agreement, that option is gone in 2027 — Mitchell can hear every offer in the league, and Indiana cannot stop her from taking one. The basketball fit in Washington writes itself, too: the Mystics went 28-16 and made the playoffs, then scored fewer than 80 points in both games of a first-round sweep by Atlanta. Mitchell, Napheesa Collier, Jackie Young and Kelsey Plum headline the winter’s unrestricted class. Free agency does not open until the new year. The jockeying, clearly, already has.

The small print

Dallas guard Azzi Fudd turned 24 on Wednesday, and the birthday wishes rolled in from across the sport — FIBA’s World Cup account dug up her USA Basketball youth highlights, and Wings teammate Alysha Clark was among those posting, per EssentiallySports. Fudd earned the attention as a rookie: the No. 1 pick in the 2026 draft averaged 13.1 points on 45.6 percent shooting across 30 games, made the All-Rookie Team and became the first rookie ever to win the league’s 3-Point Contest, before right knee surgery ended her season thirteen games early and kept her out of Dallas’s first-round series against Golden State. Year 2 is the one Dallas is building around.

That is the league on a Wednesday with no games: a franchise priced like a small NBA team, a lottery that will point JuJu Watkins at a city, a bestseller written by the player every one of those franchises wishes it had drafted, and the winter’s best scorer already hearing her name in other teams’ colors. Sunday, the balls bounce. Previously will be back with what they decide.