Imagine being on a ten-hour flight without WiFi when you’re traded. That’s what happened for Karlie Samuelson on draft day.
On April 13, the Lynx traded their 2026 first-round draft pick to the Washington Mystics in exchange for Samuelson. This was a continuation of an April 13 trade that sent the Lynx’s 11th overall pick in 2025 to Chicago to obtain the rights to Chicago’s 2026 pick outright. Before the trade, the Lynx owned Chicago’s pick in a swap (freeing up their own 2026 pick to be used in the trade).
It left Minnesota without a first-round pick, which meant a less exciting draft night. Still, the Lynx shook up the roster by trading for Samuelson and drafting three players. The three players they drafted will join the training camp roster and compete for a roster spot. They took Anastasiia Kosu 15th overall, Dalayah Daniels 24th, and Aubrey Griffin 37th.
The Lynx hope Samuelson replaces some of the scoring and shooting the roster lost when the Golden State Valkyries took Cecilia Zandalasini in the expansion draft. After playing last season with the Mystics, Samuelson will enter her seventh season in the WNBA.
She has earned a reputation as an exceptional three-point shooter, hitting 39.8% of her threes last season, good for 18th in the WNBA. However, she only recently earned a consistent rotation spot. Before 2023, she had only played 42 games in her first four seasons, logging 384 minutes. She has dwarfed that number over the past two seasons, logging 1599 minutes between her time with the Sparks in 2023 and the Mystics last year.
Outside of her shooting, Samuelson is a bit of an unknown. She has missed at least six games due to injury in her six professional seasons. Her 0.1 net rating from 2024 reflects that Samuelson didn’t drive winning but wasn’t a detriment. However, she seems to be the type of player the Lynx prioritize.
Samuelson proved that she can avoid mistakes, evidenced by a 2.48 assist-to-turnover ratio, significantly higher than the Lynx’s 1.62 ratio as a team in 2024. Samuelson also had a 98.3 defensive rating compared to the Mystics’ 101.7 team rating. That suggests that although Samuelson isn’t a lockdown defender, she was a net positive for a team that was poor defensively.
Ideally, Samuelson should be able to fit in well with the defensive culture and offensive system the Lynx have established.
“Karlie will be on the roster, not competing for a spot,” Reeve clarified regarding the trade. “We just felt like for 2025, the team that we want on the floor is putting our best foot forward to get back to the finals.
“[We’re] really, really high on her.”
In Kosu, the Lynx did what most contending teams do and drafted a developmental player. Kosu is 19, 6’1”, and plays overseas in Russia for UNMC Ekaterinburg. The expectation is that Kosu will likely season her game more by playing overseas before transitioning to WNBA competition.
She has an impressive track record at her age. At 14, Kosu averaged 18.0 points and 15.0 rebounds in the FIBA U16 tournament, helping the Russian team win gold in 2019. Since then, she has played basketball professionally in the Euro League from 2020 to 2022 for Kursk and from 2022 to currently with Ekaterinburg in the Russian league. In 2024, she scored 9.5 points and 5.1 rebounds while logging 18.7 minutes off the bench.
“This is somebody that’s really hungry to play in the WNBA,” Reeve said on Kosu after the draft. “[She has] no European obligations right now… she became a WNBA fan at a young age.”
“We’re very enthused by her desire to be here.”
Daniels is a more well-known commodity. A three-year starter at the University of Washington, Daniels is a solid forward. In four of her five years at Washington, she averaged 11 or more points per game and more than 6.7 rebounds. Daniels has scored well at the rim, especially in 2024, shooting 57.5% from the field on 9.5 attempts per game. She also averaged 1.5 blocks and 1.5 steals last season.
Unfortunately, she turns the ball over frequently, coughing up the ball 2.9 times per game. Her 21.6% turnover percentage means that just over one of five possessions she ends results in a turnover. Daniels is expected to compete for a roster spot in training camp, where the Lynx lack size.
Minnesota’s final pick was Griffin, who won the national championship with UConn just over a week ago. However, she has been injury-plagued, playing just 30 games over her past two seasons with Connecticut. The 6’1” forward had her best season in 2022-23, where she started 30 of 35 games.
Griffin averaged 11.3 points and 4.2 rebounds that season. She shot 53.5% from the field and 29.1% from distance. However, midway through the following season, Griffin tore her left ACL, causing her to miss 381 days of basketball. Like Daniels, she will now have a chance to prove herself in training camp.
The Lynx may not have had picks that made headlines like in years past. Still, they traded for a solid player in Samuelson, who joins a roster with championship ambition. They also drafted Kosu, a draft-and-stash player to develop overseas, and added more competition to the training camp roster. The Lynx will be out for revenge this season, and their draft suggests it is championship or bust.
