How Brittney Sykes bolsters Seattle’s championship chances

Sykes is enjoying one of the best offensive seasons of her nine-year WNBA career. The guard is averaging 15.4 points per game, the second-highest average of her career, and a career-best 4.3 assists per game.

“She’s not a just a player. She’s an All-Star. She’s a high-level player,” head coach Noelle Quinn said of Sykes ahead of her team’s game against Minnesota on Tuesday. “I think at this juncture in this season, adding some more guard depth was important, some physicality, some athleticism on the wing. Just certain matchups in the league have been difficult for us from that particular area of the floor. Again, an All-Star, you know, she’s playing the best basketball of her career. …

“[Sykes also adds] some extra scoring punch. We talk about sometimes Sky[lar Diggins] and Nneka [Ogwumike] getting a ton of attention. I think it’s good to have another playmaker on the floor who can create for herself and for others”

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Quinn also hopes that Sykes will help her team get to the free-throw line, one of their major deficiencies this season. The Storm are last in the WNBA with 15.9 free-throw attempts per game, and Sykes is second in the league individually, averaging 6.3 per game.

The Storm roster already boasts some of the league’s best individual defenders in Gabby Williams, Skylar Diggins and Ezi Magbegor and one of the best overall team defenses in the league. Adding Sykes, a four-time WNBA All-Defensive team member from 2020-2023, makes Seattle’s backcourt and perimeter defense one of the most fearsome in the league.

“We’re top in the league in defense right now, but she kind of contributes to that with what she can do on the ball, off the ball, guarding multiple positions,” Quinn said.

The Storm have no practices scheduled for this week to help Sykes acclimate with her new team on the court but Quinn does have a general plan to try and keep things simple for Sykes.

“With a situation like this in the middle of the season, the best we can do is keep it simple, incorporate the details of our systems in the most simplistic way, and you know, let them hoop together,” Quinn said. “At the end of the day, if we play solid defensively, and we can get into transition, you don’t have to teach a lot in that area of the floor, in that area of the game, just spacing principles and things like that.”

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In terms of minutes played, Seattle is not losing a ton with the departures of Clark and Cooke. Cooke was barely in the rotation and Clark’s playing got more inconsistent as the season went on, resulting in a DNP-CD (Did not play – coach’s decision) in a double overtime loss to Los Angeles on Friday. Both players had joined Seattle in the offseason as free agents.

Cooke, a third-year player out of South Carolina, was averaging 3.3 points per game in 10.4 minutes and shooting her best pro career percentage from three at 38.2%. Clark was averaging 3.5 points per game in 18 minutes while shooting her second-worst percentage from three at 29.1%.

Cooke was presumably involved in the trade to make space for Sykes’s salary, as she was waived by the Mystics shortly after the trade was completed. Seattle had almost no additional cap room, and needed to account for the $10,000 difference between Sykes’ $195,000 salary and Clark’s $185,000. Quinn lamented losing “that kind of young fireball” who was “just willing to really work hard.”

Clark’s return to Seattle was exciting to fans as she rejoined the franchise where she spent her first nine seasons in the WNBA and won her first two WNBA Championships in 2018 and 2020. She won another Championship in Las Vegas in 2023, where she played an integral role after a two-year stint in Washington from 2021-2022. Though she didn’t play in 2021 due to injury, she started 29 games for the Mystics in 2022. This season however, the 38-year-old had been averaging just 18 minutes per game off the bench, her fewest since 2014. The biggest loss for Seattle in sending Clark to Washington is her veteran presence in the locker room.

“AC is a vet. She’s a champion,” Quinn said. “That’s what we’ll miss — her veteran leadership, the way she’s able to see the game, read the game, communicate that to her teammates. … With AC, the veteran leadership in the position that she had, hopefully we can continue to kind of lead on with that with the vets that we do have in the locker room.”

Still, Seattle is adding a new veteran. One of the most experienced players on a rookie-heavy Washington Mystics team, Sykes grew into the leadership role the team needed her to fill this season.

Overall, the trade is a big win for the Storm, who hope Sykes can quickly and seamlessly integrate with her new team to get Seattle its first playoff victory since 2022 and ideally all the way to a WNBA Championship.

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