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Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman. | Getty Images
Entering this final day of WNBA action before All-Star 2026, I imagined the league’s multiple, long winning streaks would be the topic of conversation.
The Golden State Valkyries could have been cruising into the break with 10-straight wins, with the Dallas Wings keeping pace with seven-straight victories. Full credit to the Washington Mystics and New York Liberty for disrupting those dreams, leaving the Minnesota Lynx as the league’s lone significant streakers.
Or, the lone significant winning streakers.
Wednesday presents an opportunity for teams mired in multiple losses to close out the unofficial first half of their season by snapping their slides.
Can the Los Angeles Sparks and/or Seattle Storm, losers of four and five games in a row, respectively, enter the break at least somewhat buoyed by a victory? And if they are to earn a much-needed wins over the Phoenix Mercury and Lynx, who will be player to step up and deliver the winning punch?
Here are my candidates to be the Spark for LA and cause a Storm for Seattle. In the comments, let us know who you think can be a difference maker for Los Angeles and Seattle, or if you expect their opponents to give them another L.
The Sparks need some Sweet Baby Rae
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Rae Burrell is fascinatingly frustrating. Or maybe she’s frustratingly fascinating.
Her pure athletic talent pops.
Sometimes, it does so in ways suggestive of surefire stardom. The smooth pull-up 3 swishes. The long-striding drive is finished with a flourish. The deflection turns defense into offensive. The recovery block swings the momentum. At other times, it’s a mess. The overly ambitions 3 is an airball. The drive to the hoop is an uncontrolled tangle of arms and legs. The defensive gamble result in an easy score for the opponent.
Overall, I believe in the better Burrell, where the game-changing plays outweigh the potentially detrimental ones.
And over the course of the 2026 season, the better Burrell has been there for the Sparks, despite the team’s overall struggles. As Edwin Garcia already outlined, she has a credible Sixth Player of the Year case, although she’s now started 17 games.
Burrell’s not only averaging career highs in minutes, points, field goal percentage and 3-point percentage, but she also keeps trending up. In the month of July, Sweet Baby Rae is scoring almost 15 points per game, shooting just under 50 percent from the field and nearly 48 percent from 3. Her assists and steals are also up.
The Sparks need the polished, impactful version of Burrell to snap their four-game losing streak against the Mercury (3 p.m. ET, WNBA League Pass).
Encouragingly, LA is 2-0 against Phoenix this season, with Burrell showing up in both victories. In late May, she drilled a pair of 3s on her way to an efficient 12 points. When the Sparks won again in mid-June, in a game defined by the duel between Kelsey Plum and Kahleah Copper, Burrell served as Plum’s co-star with 24 points.
Is it T’s time to shine vs. her former team?
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Almost one month ago, when the Storm scored two-straight inspiring wins over the Liberty and Atlanta Dream, I posited that Seattle would likely experience additional turbulence during this long season.
It didn’t take too long for it to arrive.
This turbulence is also quite torturous, as Seattle can see the smoother skies right there, but they just can’t experience them. The Storm have been on the cusp of a win on multiple occasions, where a few different bounces, decisions or whistles could have saved them from this five-game slide.
Their largest loss has been by 11 points, with two five-point and two three-point defeats.
Who can help Seattle tip the scales from a sixth-straight loss to a much-needed win on Wednesday? Could former Lynx Natisha Hiedeman, who had a 12-point and 10-assist double-double in Seattle’s near-win over Minnesota on Monday, lead her team to the revenge victory?
The expected 2026 season debut of Napheesa Collier is an extra obstacle for the Storm’s winning ambitions. While Phee’s return could complicate Minnesota’s masterful cohesion, the excitement around comeback could also increase Minnesota’s motivation, as, rather than suffering a letdown loss before the All-Star break, they’ll be focused on welcoming Phee back with a seventh-straight win.
While the Lynx’s Phee-less success has been a much-discussed development over the first of half of the season, Hiedeman’s post-Lynx success has probably been underrated.
When Seattle has experienced any progress and positivity, the instinct is to celebrate their young core of Dominique Malonga, Flau’jae Johnson and Awa Fam. Any wins achieved in the present are interpreted through the lens of what they foretell for the future.
However, even if the present-day Storm have only six wins, they’d be in a worse spot, and not have all those near-wins, without T. Overtaxed as a primary offensive creator, Hiedeman still has performed admirably. Even as she has occupied greater offensive usage and upped her self-created scoring, she’s maintained solid efficiency while averaging a career-high 15.7 points per game. She also hitting career bests with 4.6 assists and over a steal per game.
Although lacking the consistency requisite of a true star turn, Hiedeman repeatedly has shown that she is capable of authoring star-level performances, like her 31-point explosion in Seattle’s close loss to the Washington Mystics in DC. That’s one of eight games in which she’s registered 20 or more points.
The Lynx, however, have held T to two of her more inefficient games of the season, as she converted no better than 40 percent of her shots in the Storm’s two losses to the Lynx.
But maybe, instead of this third game being about Phee’s return, it will prove to be T’s turn.
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