The WNBA is back for its biggest season yet — in the offseason, a new expansion team, the Golden State Valkyries, joined the ranks, and all regular season schedules will be 44 games long instead of the previous 40. The Seattle Storm opened the season on Saturday with an 81-59 loss to the Phoenix Mercury after making the playoffs as the fifth seed in 2024.
If Seattle wants to bounce back tonight against No. 1 overall pick Paige Bueckers and the Dallas Wings, it’ll need a little more from from 2016 MVP Nneka Ogwumike, who had a relatively quiet 12-point, seven-rebound performance in the first game of the season.
The Storm are three-point favorites at DraftKings Sportsbook, with the point total set for 166.5. Below, I’ve detailed my favorite prop bets centered around Ogwumike.
Best Nneka Ogwumike Prop Bets on DraftKings Sportsbook
Nneka Ogwumike 20+ Points (+130)
There’s a reason why Bueckers suits up for the Wings, and it’s not because they jumped massively in the lottery like their NBA counterparts, the Mavericks. Dallas was downright awful last season, going 9-31 and giving up 92.1 points per game, more than four points worse than any other team. The Wings did play at a faster rate than any other team, but their defensive rating was still more than four points worse per 100 possessions than the 11th-placed Indiana Fever. Dallas didn’t demonstrate a lot of progress in the first game of the Bueckers era, as they conceded 99 points to the Minnesota Lynx and allowed them to shoot 53.0% from the field.
Ogwumike had a quiet scoring outing in Game 1, but the Wings’ porous defense should give her a chance to bounce back. Since the team moved to Dallas prior to the 2015 season, no Wings player has ever made an All-Defense team, and in the first game, she was stifled somewhat by the Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas, a fellow Second Team All-Defense honoree in 2024. Dallas doesn’t have anyone strong point-of-attack defenders like Thomas, with Kaila Charles the team’s top-ranked defender, ranking just 38th in defensive win shares after one game. Charles is more suited to slow down Skylar Diggins-Smith than she is Ogwumike, given her size advantage over the former.
