With expansion diluting the WNBA talent pool, the defending champions picked the perfect time to try to go on a multi-year run.
The WNBA‘s expansion era is now in full swing, with the Golden State Valkyries playing as the league’s first new franchise since 2008, two more teams coming in next year in Toronto and Portland, and three additional franchises in Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia by 2030 to bring the total up to 18. Expansion thins and dilutes a league’s talent pool in every sport, which historically has been great news for the best teams in an expanding league.
Currently, that’s the New York Liberty, the defending WNBA champions with an 11-5 record as of Wednesday, who currently boast the best odds, +145, to win the 2025 title at FanDuel Sportsbook. Not only does New York get to play expansion teams like the surprisingly frisky Valkyries, which account for two of the Libs’ victories so far this season, but it gets to feast on rebuilding teams like the Connecticut Sun, Chicago Sky, Washington Mystics, Dallas Wings, and Los Angeles Sparks. Things will get even easier for the Liberty in 2026 when a majority of the 15 teams may not pose much of a challenge.
In short, the Liberty picked the perfect time to pursue a WNBA dynasty.
Remember the 1995-96 Chicago Bulls in Michael Jordan‘s first full season back from his first retirement? The NBA expanded that year to Vancouver and Toronto, helping the Bulls set a record at the time with 72 regular-season wins. (Although, one of those 10 losses did come to those expansion Raptors in front of more than 36,000 fans at the then SkyDome.) That expansion year was the first of three consecutive championships for the GOAT, a second three-peat, aided in small part due to expansion.
The last time Major League Baseball fielded expansion franchises was in 1998, when the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay Devil Rays entered the league. Tampa Bay was placed in the American League East, where it played in the same division as the New York Yankees. That season, the Yankees finished with a regular season record of 114-48, including 11-1 against their newly created division rivals. New York won the World Series that expansion year, led by Derek Jeter, the first of three straight championships for the Bronx Bombers that cemented their status as baseball’s greatest team of the 20th century.
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The precedent is there for the Liberty to cash in on an expansion era dynasty. The talent is also there, though New York needs to hold on to a core led by Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu, Jonquel Jones, and Natasha Cloud, who are all free agents after this season. More than half of the league will be free agents this winter as the league and the players’ association negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement that could potentially change the way the league operates to create more parity. Toronto and Portland may be able to spend the entirety of the next salary cap, which could mean those teams will possess more talent than the average expansion franchise.
While those are all hypothetical obstacles, the reality is that the Liberty have a great chance to repeat this year. And if they retain the team they have now, New York will be the favorite to win the title again next year, all while being helped by a diluted talent pool that aided legendary Bulls and Yankees teams.
While the Liberty may not have timed its ascent exactly to expansion, their timing could not have been any better.
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