Grading the Trade: Kelsey Plum goes to Phoenix

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After rumors all week that they were going to cash in on their star guard before Sunday’s trade deadline, the Los Angeles Sparks have reportedly pulled the trigger on a Kelsey Plum deal, sending her to Phoenix for Monique Akoa Makani, a 2027 first-round pick, and a 2028 second-round pick. It provides a return for a player on an expiring one-year contract, but signals the end of the Sparks trying to build a contender around Plum, who they traded for ahead of the 2025 season (most notably giving up the pick that became Dominique Malonga). Let’s take a look at the thought processes behind the trade, and whether any of this was a good idea.

In all honesty, I hate this for Phoenix. They didn’t give up any massive assets; but they gave up two good ones. Akoa Makani is a useful young guard, a decent defender and impressive outside shooter, who could also even prove to be a better distributor once she’s on a team that doesn’t have Alyssa Thomas dominating the ball. She’s also under cheap contract control for at least two more seasons. The 2027 first-round pick is probably going to be the No. 7 overall, because the Mercury have comfortably the best two-year combined record among current lottery teams. It has a small chance to become the No.1 or No. 2 via the lottery draw, or to become slightly worse if the Mercury somehow make a run and sneak into the playoffs. That’s rarely an immediate superstar, but it’s an area in the draft where you at least have a shot at a pretty good player. Or where some other team might decide they love somebody and want to trade significant value for the pick. The 2028 second-rounder is largely negligible, but is at least a trade chip that could’ve been used in some other deal down the line. All in all, this is real equity that the Mercury are giving up.

In return, Phoenix are getting a very good player (assuming Plum is healthy, having missed the last six weeks due to injury). She was playing at an all-star level before getting hurt, scoring efficiently while near the top of the league rankings in both points and assists. Despite that recent missed time, she’s also usually pretty reliably healthy. She’ll give the Mercury another ballhandler to take the pressure off Thomas, another creator and scoring threat from the perimeter, and the pace they’ll probably play at with Thomas, Plum and Kahleah Copper at the controls could make them a lot of fun to watch. However, it’s also worth mentioning that they’re likely to become an even worse defensive team than the 12th-ranked defense they’ve had so far this year, because while she’s improved from the early years of her career, defense is not exactly Plum’s forte.

What’s the purpose here for Phoenix? After Saturday’s loss to New York they’re six games out of the playoff spots, and would need to leapfrog four teams to make it in. They’ve also already lost the tiebreaker to the Liberty, currently the closest target to chase (although some might consider the Washington Mystics more catchable, especially as the Mercury still get to play them three times). There are only two defensible reasons I can see for making this deal, and one of them is believing they can still make a run, sneak into the playoffs, and be a dangerous postseason team. It just doesn’t look likely. The Mercury have 14 games left. Let’s be wildly positive and say they coalesce immediately, become dramatically better, and go 12-2. That would create a 23-21 finishing record. Considering 8 of 15 teams make the playoffs, in many years that just-above-.500 record would be enough to make the postseason. But the Mystics and Liberty are both four games above .500 right now, and would have to finish poorly to fall back that far. Maybe, if you go on a tear and win all three of those games against Washington, you have a shot. But it’s a longshot. And even then, you’re probably the 8th seed, playing someone like Minnesota in the first round of the playoffs without home-court advantage. Another longshot.

The other reason for making this deal is if you think it pushes you to the front of the queue to sign Plum in the offseason as part of your future core. It’s not legal for her to sign an extension right now, and the core designation can’t be used on her, so she will be an unrestricted free agent at the end of the year. Plenty of franchises like to bet on their environment and ‘culture’ to appeal to players - the idea that once you get them in the building, they won’t want to leave. Maybe that’s the case here, or maybe they’ve even already heard through the grapevine that Phoenix is somewhere Plum would like to be longterm. But in that case, back yourselves to get her in for a visit once free agency opens, and sign her for nothing. Then you’ve got Plum, Akoa Makani, and your first-round pick - or whatever else you might trade Akoa Makani and the pick for in alternative deals. The reverse scenario is that the trade and spending a couple of months in Arizona makes no real difference to Plum’s sentiments, and she walks away for nothing at the end of the season. Then you’ve paid a meaningful price for those 14 games. I just really struggle to see the value.

The Sparks didn’t want it to come to this. They were hoping to build a contender around Plum when they traded for her in 2025, with visions of her as the lead perimeter threat they needed to add to their interior core. It never really worked. They were inconsistent in 2025, with the defense never good enough to keep them afloat while Plum led a quick and high-scoring offense. They tried to retool and fix the defense for 2026, trading Rickea Jackson for Ariel Atkins and re-signing Nneka Ogwumike, but the defense stayed terrible.

Between general manager Raegan Pebley being fired several weeks ago and stories circulating about Plum not being expected to re-sign in LA when her contract expires at the end of this season, moving her before the deadline began to look more and more likely. Phoenix are obviously illustrating within this deal that there’s another theoretical path - doubling down and chasing the possibility of a late-season run - but it didn’t make much sense. Having traded Jackson away and built a veteran-laden core, the Sparks desperately needed to add some youth and potential for the future.

Considering Plum only has a couple of months left on her contract, this is a pretty solid return. While it obviously depends on your relative opinions on Akoa Makani and Cotie McMahon, it’s a better haul than the Plum deal I proposed in my article a few days ago, thanks to the first-round pick that’s included alongside the useful young player. There’s no guarantees with a No. 7 pick, but as the list below illustrates it sometimes works out pretty nicely:

There’s also that small chance (we don’t actually know how small yet, because the league haven’t released their odds for a seven-team lottery), that it jumps into the top-two. If giving up two months of Plum gets them Hannah Hidalgo, JuJu Watkins or Madison Booker, the Sparks will be doing cartwheels.

We don’t know what else was on offer from other teams, which is always a complicating factor in grading these deals, but I like that the Sparks were willing to swallow their medicine and make the trade. They didn’t cling on to that slim sliver of a chance that the Plum plan might still work out. That’s the right decision.

This is in the weeds a little, but if you’re a regular reader of my stuff that’s probably part of what you’re here for. The reason I had a doubling-down Mercury trade in my fake deals article (albeit a very different one), and always thought they might still be chasing a 2026 run, is that they’ve been hoarding their cash for a while. When Jovana Nogic left the team back in mid-June, she was temporarily suspended by the Mercury. Temp suspended players can count as one of the 12 rostered players if the team wants them to, but you can also fill that spot with a 13th player if you have the cap space to do so. Phoenix had $842,374 in space before this trade. They could easily have signed a free agent to deepen their roster at any point since Nogic left. But they didn’t. It was a sign that either the franchise was being a little cheap (which didn’t seem likely given how much Mat Ishbia has spent on the Suns and Mercury since buying the teams), or they were holding on to that space in hope of a future deal that would require it. And here we are. They can still use that Nogic roster spot to add someone, by the way.

For Plum personally, this deal doesn’t seem particularly good or bad. Based on the reports about her not being expected to re-sign in LA (despite it being her preferred destination just a couple of years ago), she probably won’t mind leaving a little early. It gives her a look at another franchise from the inside before she makes her free agency decision next year. Maybe it even gives her a chance to make a run towards the playoffs, although she’s actually going to a team with a worse current record than the Sparks. The disappointing element might be that there were rumors of interest from better teams than the Mercury. In Golden State or even Washington, there would’ve been a much more meaningful chance of chasing a ring.

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