September 3, 2026
September 3, 2026
Sparks’ 2025 Season: A Rebuild Reborn
The Sparks’ 2025 season opened in the rubble of an 8-32 collapse. It closed one agonizing win short of the playoffs. Somehow both facts belong to the same team. Los Angeles doubled its win total. It imported a two-time champion. It watched a former lottery pick claw back from more than a year on the sideline, all while chasing a postseason bid that slipped away only in the season’s final week. None of it came easily. Almost none of it was forgettable.
Everything traced back to a single hire. On November 19, 2024, the Sparks turned to Lynne Roberts, plucking the architect of Utah’s rise from the college ranks to lead a franchise desperate for direction in its 29th season. Roberts brought an up-tempo philosophy and a staff built for player development, adding assistants Zak Buncik, Mike Neighbors, and Danielle Robinson alongside Director of Player Development Sed Everett. The bet was simple: pace and structure could do what raw talent alone had not. By the fall, the numbers backed her up. Los Angeles finished with the highest offensive rating in franchise history and led the entire league in pace. That identity did not arrive by accident. Roberts installed it from day one, and the roster chased it all year.
A new coach needed new pieces. The front office delivered them fast.
The trade landed like a thunderclap. On February 1, 2025, the Sparks seized the centerpiece of their rebuild, acquiring three-time All-Star Kelsey Plum from the Las Vegas Aces. The three-team deal sent Jewell Loyd to Las Vegas and shipped the Sparks’ No. 2 pick and the returning rights to Li Yueru to Seattle. Los Angeles then flipped Lexie Brown to the Storm for a pair of second-round picks, tidying up the fallout of the bigger swap. Plum arrived with something to prove after leaving Las Vegas. The locker room badly needed her scoring gravity and her championship pedigree.
The draft added complementary pieces rather than another headline. Alabama guard Sarah Ashlee Barker went ninth. South Carolina’s Sania Feagin followed at 21, and Notre Dame’s Liatu King closed the class at 28. Veteran guard Odyssey Sims signed for stability, and big Mercedes Russell added frontcourt depth. None of it looked flashy in April. By August, the depth mattered.
Some comebacks arrive quietly. This one did not. Brink had barely established herself as the No. 2 overall pick out of Stanford in 2024 before a torn ACL ended her rookie season. What followed was a rehabilitation clock that stretched across thirteen months. She worked through it largely out of view. On July 29, 2025, she finally walked back onto a WNBA court against the Las Vegas Aces, cleared for a return that teammates and fans had circled on calendars for months. Her presence changed what Los Angeles could do defensively and on the glass. The timing lined up with the best stretch of the team’s season. The story did not get a clean ending, though. In a cruel piece of symmetry, Brink went down again in the regular-season finale against the very same Aces, suffering a bloody injury that closed her year on a stretcher’s worth of worry rather than a highlight reel. Her return had proven what the Sparks could be with her on the floor. Her exit was a reminder of how thin that margin still was.
Judged only by its first ten weeks, the Sparks’ 2025 season looked like another lost year. Judged by everything after, it looked like the start of something real.
Los Angeles stumbled out of the gate at 6-14. The warning signs were familiar: turnovers piling up, rotations still settling, veterans relearning habits inside a new system. Plum was scoring, but wins were not following at the rate the front office hoped. Patience, not panic, was the word around the practice facility. Roberts kept preaching pace even as the record lagged behind the process.
Then the switch flipped. Beginning in July, the Sparks caught fire and refused to cool off. They ripped off a 15-9 stretch that made them, by win percentage, the hottest team in the league over that span. They scored 100 or more points in three consecutive games, becoming just the third team in WNBA history to do it. They topped the century mark in five of six games, a feat no franchise had ever managed. During one five-game winning streak, Los Angeles scored 90 or more in every contest, a new franchise record. The Sparks were not sneaking up on anyone anymore. They were running teams off the floor.
Some seasons live in win totals. This one will live in moments. Rickea Jackson delivered the signature one, burying a stunning buzzer-beater against the Liberty that stretched a winning streak to five games. Los Angeles survived a double-overtime marathon in Seattle. It held its nerve to an 8-2 mark in games decided by three points or fewer. It won twelve games on the road, eight of them against eventual playoff teams. Julie Allemand supplied the season’s most improbable line, recording a triple-double against Connecticut to become the fifth Spark and the 22nd player in WNBA history to do it. She led the league in assist-to-turnover ratio along the way. No single night defined the season. Stacked together, they explained why Los Angeles refused to fade.
Plum carried the offense the way the Sparks had hoped when they traded for her. She closed the year at 19.5 points and 5.7 assists per game, setting single-season franchise records for points, assists, made three-pointers, and free throws. She earned a WNBA All-Star Reserve nod and All-WNBA Second Team recognition, proof the trade delivered the star the front office promised. Dearica Hamby made herself indispensable in a different way, leading the team in made field goals and offensive rebounds while posting her highest Win Shares total since 2017. She claimed Western Conference Player of the Week honors as the surge gathered steam. Azurá Stevens anchored the boards at 8.0 rebounds per game. Together, the group gave Los Angeles three players among the league’s top fifteen in efficiency.
Two games. That margin separated a Sparks’ 2025 season worth celebrating from one that ended in the lottery instead of the postseason. Seattle clinched the conference’s final playoff berth by finishing 23-21, edging a Los Angeles club that closed at 21-23 after climbing as high as it had all year. The Sparks had clawed back from 6-14 to make the race matter in the season’s last week. Then they watched the Storm close it out first. Missing the field stretched the franchise’s playoff drought to five seasons, the longest active drought in the league and the longest in franchise history. Nobody in the building wanted that distinction attached to a season this encouraging. The fine print compounded the frustration. The Sparks’ 2026 first-round pick, owed to Seattle as part of the Plum trade, became a lottery selection rather than a mid-round asset. Progress and disappointment arrived in the same envelope.
General manager Raegan Pebley refused to let the missed postseason define the year. Her framing captured what the locker room already believed. “There’s times when you plant and there’s times when you harvest, and for sure, planting has occurred,” she said after the finale, adding that “it’s really easy to get caught up in a win-loss, or playoffs or not playoffs, and decide that success is binary. That’s not the case.” A thirteen-win improvement, the second-largest jump in the league, does not erase a five-year drought. It does rewrite the trajectory attached to it. Plum proved she could anchor a franchise. Hamby and Allemand proved the supporting cast could win games on its own. Brink proved, in her brief window, what a healthy version of her game could mean for this roster. The Sparks’ 2025 season did not end with a banner or even a playoff game. It ended with a foundation, and for a franchise that spent 2024 searching for one, that foundation was the entire point.
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