The Atlanta Dream, in search of a flexible participant to assist rebuild their roster, chosen guard Rhyne Howard from the College of Kentucky because the No. 1 decide within the W.N.B.A. draft on Monday at Spring Studios in New York.
Forward of the draft, Dream Common Supervisor Dan Padover mentioned the staff was in search of a participant who introduced “recent vitality and sparks one thing beneath our franchise.”
The Indiana Fever chosen NaLyssa Smith, a senior ahead from Baylor College, with the No. 2 general decide. At No. 3, the Washington Mystics selected Shakira Austin, a middle from the College of Mississippi.
Howard mentioned she deliberate to carry to the Dream the identical “aggressive spirit” she had with Kentucky, the place she made positive to remain “calm, cool and picked up” to make an affect. In Atlanta, Howard mentioned, she is going to “proceed to make everybody higher.”
There’s little or no Howard can’t do. She is within the prime 10 of virtually each statistical class at Kentucky, and has scored the second-most factors in program historical past for men and women. Final month, Howard led Kentucky to its first Southeastern Convention match title since 1982 when the staff handed South Carolina, the 2022 nationwide champion, its second and ultimate lack of the season. Howard, who’s from Chattanooga, Tenn., completed her senior 12 months averaging 20.5 factors and seven.4 rebounds per recreation.
Kentucky, a No. 6 seed within the N.C.A.A. Division I girls’s basketball match this 12 months, misplaced to No. 11 Princeton within the spherical of 64. However Howard’s profession at Kentucky has helped draw consideration to the ladies’s basketball program at a faculty finest identified for its powerhouse males’s staff.
To have the ability to choose her, the Dream shook up the draft last week by buying the No. 1 decide in a commerce with the Washington Mystics. In return, the Mystics will get the Dream’s No. 3 and No. 14 general picks. The Mystics even have the proper to swap first-round picks within the 2023 draft, which is anticipated to attract deep expertise from across the nation.
Atlanta completed final season 8-24, the second-worst document within the W.N.B.A., and has missed the playoffs for the previous three seasons. Including Howard to the Dream’s roster instantly bolsters their perimeter recreation, which ought to assist after the staff traded guard Chennedy Carter to the Los Angeles Sparks within the low season.
“Some drafts are top-heavy; some are deep,” Padover mentioned. “This one might be essentially the most deep greater than something.” He added that this 12 months’s draft supplied the most effective expertise since 2018 or 2019.
This 12 months, 108 faculty gamers renounced their remaining N.C.A.A. eligibility to be thought of for the draft, greater than double than in 2021. Worldwide gamers and people who are now not eligible to play within the N.C.A.A. can even be thought of. However the possibilities of getting a spot on a roster are slim: There 36 draft slots for the W.N.B.A.’s 12 groups, which have simply 12 roster spots every. With solely 144 roster spots in all, many gamers and followers are calling for larger rosters and extra groups, needs the W.N.B.A. has resisted.
One motive for the rise in college-eligible draft prospects often is the pandemic. Faculty athletes are usually eligible to play 4 seasons over the course of 5 years. After the pandemic disrupted schedules, the N.C.A.A. added a special bonus year of eligibility for any athlete who misplaced taking part in time in the course of the 2019-20 season.
Ought to they not make it to the W.N.B.A. this 12 months and nonetheless have a season of eligibility, athletes can return to their faculty (assuming there may be nonetheless a spot for them on the roster).
Julie Roe Lach, the commissioner of the Horizon League, mentioned this 12 months’s draft class mimics the parity seen within the 2022 N.C.A.A. girls’s basketball match, which noticed six double-digit-seeded groups make it to the spherical of 16.
“You’ve received a number of the names you’d count on to see, however we’re seeing extra faculties with gamers that appear like robust draft prospects,” she mentioned. “That speaks to the rise of expertise we’re seeing throughout the nation of those nice girls basketball gamers.”
The W.N.B.A. season begins Could 6 with eight groups, together with the reigning champion Chicago Sky, in motion.
