After one of the busiest free agency periods in league history and an eventful draft night, the WNBA regular season returns May 6 with a quadruple-header on opening night.

We have evaluated every team’s offseason moves and draft selections, and now we turn our attention to the competition ahead. Here is where each of the 12 teams stand entering the season in the Just Women’s Sports preseason power rankings.

1. Chicago Sky

The reigning WNBA champions sit atop our power rankings after retaining much of their veteran core from the 2021 season and adding All-Star-level talent to the roster. Alongside former MVP Candace Parker, Chicago re-signed Finals MVP Kahleah Copper, Courtney Vandersloot and Allie Quigley in free agency. When you swap out the losses of Diamond DeShields and Stefanie Dolson with 2019 Finals MVP Emma Meesseman and Julie Allemand, Chicago has a chance to be even better this season.

The Sky got to sit back and watch on draft night, with no picks on the board, but they have loaded up on potential pro-ready players through training camp contracts. After the Sky won it all as the 6-seed last season, the confidence and overall talent of their roster makes them the early-season title favorites.

2. Connecticut Sun

The Sun have been one of the most consistent WNBA franchises in recent years, and they went about their business in the offseason determined to see that vision through. They secured 2021 MVP Jonquel Jones to reunite a Big Three that also includes a healthy Alyssa Thomas and DeWanna Bonner. The loss of Briann January to Seattle hurts, but Connecticut addressed it by adding a familiar face and potent scoring option in Courtney Williams.

Nia Clouden, the Sun’s No. 12 pick in the draft, gives them a strong shooting option off the bench. But considering the team’s current cap situation — they have just under $200,000 in cap room — they will have some tough final roster decisions to make out of training camp.

The Sun have showcased just how dominant they can be in recent seasons, especially behind their suffocating defense, but they have not yet been able to sustain it through the playoffs for a WNBA title. If everyone can stay healthy, the Sun have all the tools to win their first championship this season.

3. Seattle Storm

With Sue Bird returning for what is likely her final WNBA season, a championship season for the Storm would be poetic and is not out of the question. Seattle also welcomes back Jewell Loyd on the franchise tag and a healthy Breanna Stewart on a one-year, supermax deal, solidifying the superstar core that won championships in 2018 and 2020.

In free agency, Seattle added forward Gabby Williams, a versatile weapon on both sides of the floor who can impact the game in ways the Storm didn’t have at their disposal before. Veteran guard Briann January replaces Jordin Canada in the backcourt. In the draft, Seattle added 6-foot-5 NC State center Elissa Cunane, who’s capable of stretching the floor and working in tandem with Stewart.

The Storm’s chances of winning a fifth career championship will likely come down to two factors: luck and the ability to remain healthy.

4. Minnesota Lynx

Minnesota was nowhere near 100 percent last season and still finished third in the league standings. Their biggest moves of the offseason were bringing back Sylvia Fowles for her final season and signing five-time WNBA All-Star Angel McCoughtry.

While Napheesa Collier is sidelined during her pregnancy, Minnesota will need breakout play from Jessica Shepard, Damiris Dantas and Aerial Powers to compete with the best in the league. If they can stay healthy, the depth of talent on the Lynx’s roster makes them worthy of legitimate championship consideration.

Due to their current cap space situation, the Lynx opted out of the earlier rounds of the 2022 draft through a trade with the Las Vegas Aces for 2023 picks. Their late picks included potential depth options Kayla Jones and Hannah Sjerven, and they set themselves up to add pro-ready, young talent next year.

5. Las Vegas Aces

The Aces organization has a new look in 2022 with Becky Hammon behind the bench, first-year general manager Natalie Williams leading the front office and Liz Cambage off in Los Angeles. Las Vegas enters the new era continuing to build through 2020 WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson. Kelsey Plum has also been playing the best basketball of her career, and Dearica Hamby remains a well-rounded staple of the franchise.

Looking to secure depth at the stretch four and wing positions, the Aces moved up in the draft to address those needs, selecting Mya Hollingshed and Kierstan Bell in the first round. They added depth at nearly every other position, too, with their selections of Khayla Pointer and Aisha Sheppard.

It’s too early to tell what this team will look like under Hammon’s guidance, but the Aces have a solid foundation of veteran and All-Star talent ready to take the next step and bring a championship home to Las Vegas.

6. Phoenix Mercury

The Mercury are in a unique situation as they load up for what could be one final championship run with Diana Taurasi, while also looking ahead to the future behind first-year head coach Vanessa Nygaard. Phoenix assembled a top-tier starting lineup this offseason, adding Tina Charles and Diamond DeShields to their core of Taurasi, Skylar Diggins-Smith and Brittney Griner, whose status for the season is uncertain after she was detained in Russia on drug charges in late February.

While the Mercury hope for Griner’s safe return home and honor the seven-time All-Star by carrying out her Heart and Sole Shoe Drive this season, they also game-plan for various scenarios. Preparing for her likely absence this season, Phoenix drafted late-round post options in Maya Dodson and Macee Williams, before waiving Williams last Friday.

The Mercury have the talent to thrive under Nygaard’s direction, but they start the season in the middle of the pack due to the amount of questions surrounding their current situation.

7. Washington Mystics

A healthy Elena Delle Donne and Alysha Clark immediately change the trajectory of the Mystics in 2022. With Natasha Cloud running the show, Ariel Atkins on the wing and Myisha Hines-Allen returning in free agency on a three-year deal, the Mystics have the veteran players with championship experience to compete for their second trophy in four seasons.

The Mystics added two top-level prospects in the draft in 6-5 Shakira Austin and guard Christyn Williams, but took a hit when Williams went down with a season-ending injury during the first week of preseason. International signings Lee Seul Kang and Rui Machida, Japan’s hero during the Tokyo Olympics last summer, provide intriguing depth options.

8. Los Angeles Sparks

The Sparks completely retooled their roster in the offseason, addressing their biggest need — offense — with a host of big-name talents: Liz Cambage, Chennedy Carter, Jordin Canada and Katie Lou Samuelson. Los Angeles also had a successful draft night with the additions of Rae Burrell, Kianna Smith, Olivia Nelson-Ododa and Amy Atwell. If Burrell and 2021 first-round pick Jasmine Walker can get fully healthy, they give this Sparks offense elements it’s lacked in recent seasons.

How quickly the newcomers can integrate with the Sparks’ core of Nneka Ogwumike, Chiney Ogwumike and Kristi Toliver will go a long way toward determining their success this season. The Sparks’ chemistry on offense will be key to their ability to go head-to-head with the consistently good teams in this league.

9. Dallas Wings

In rebuilding mode the past few years, the Wings appear to be on the precipice of breaking out in 2022. Last year, Dallas could play like a playoff team one night and a league bottom-dweller the next. The Wings did not make any major changes in the offseason outside of trading for Teaira McCowan, the 6-7 center who can help free up Arike Ogunbowale, Marina Mabrey and Allisha Gray for shots along the perimeter.

No. 7 draft pick Veronica Burton has the potential to make an immediate impact as an aggressive guard on both offense and defense. As the Wings’ young players build chemistry together and understand the process of what it takes to win in this league, this is a team that can beat anyone on any given night.

10. New York Liberty

The Liberty hit a rough patch in the second half of last season and still appear to be a couple of years away from championship contention. With the additions they made in the offseason, including hiring head coach Sandy Brondello from the Mercury, New York could take its biggest jump yet during these rebuilding years.

Stefanie Dolson joins the Liberty fresh off of winning a championship with the Sky, and Rebecca Allen returns after the best season of her career in New York. If Natasha Howard and Sabrina Ionescu can stay healthy, and Betnijah Laney and reigning Rookie of the Year Michaela Onyenwere maintain their level of play, this team is capable of getting back to the playoffs and doing more damage this season.

The Liberty will miss draft picks Nyara Sabally and Sika Kone, as they won’t be available this season, but second-rounder Lorela Cubaj could provide valuable minutes as one of the steals of the draft. New York has the talent to exceed expectations if the team can gel faster than expected, but there are still too many unknowns from a consistency standpoint to rank them any higher.

11. Atlanta Dream

The Dream’s offseason goal was to overhaul the organization, from the new ownership team all the way down to the rookies. In addition to the promising additions of No. 1 draft pick Rhyne Howard and No. 15 pick Naz Hillmon, Atlanta brought back Aari McDonald, Monique Billings and Tiffany Hayes, and added Nia Coffey, Kia Vaughn and Erica Wheeler in free agency.

Atlanta now has a solid foundation entering the regular season, but this season is still an early step in the process of rebuilding the Dream into a playoff team.

12. Indiana Fever

The Fever’s offseason demolition included naming interim general manager Linn Dunn, cutting ties with Jantel Lavender and Julie Allemand, and adding first-round picks NaLyssa Smith, Emily Engstler, Lexie Hull and Destanni Henderson in the draft. While the franchise has made significant strides toward snapping their five-year playoff drought, they still have a lot of work to do, most notably molding the current roster and attracting top free-agent talent down the road.

It will take at least a few more years for Indiana to return to championship contention. Beyond veterans Kelsey Mitchell and Bria Hartley, the young players will need time to develop.

Rachel Galligan is a basketball analyst at Just Women’s Sports. A former professional basketball player and collegiate coach, she also contributes to Winsidr. Follow Rachel on Twitter @RachGall.

Seven-time Olympic gold medalist Katie Ledecky will receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, at a White House ceremony this afternoon. 

The Team USA standout is the most decorated women’s swimmer in the sport’s history. In addition to her seven Olympic golds, she’s also won a total of 21 gold medals at the World Championships, the most of any swimmer regardless of gender. 

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Just Women’s Sports (@justwomenssports)

The esteemed award recognizes those who have "made exemplary contributions to the prosperity, values, or security of the United States, world peace, or other significant societal, public or private endeavors," according to a White House press briefing. 

Ledecky is one of 19 medal recipients chosen by the Biden administration this year. She joins a class that spans the worlds of politics, sports, film, human rights, religion, and science. Her fellow 2024 awardees include Everything Everywhere All at Once actress Michelle Yeoh, pioneering Hispanic astronaut Dr. Ellen Ochoa, and former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, plus posthumous winners Jim Thorpe, the first Native American to win an Olympic gold medal for the US, and assassinated civil rights leader Medgar Evers. 

Olympic gymnast Simone Biles and USWNT legend Megan Rapinoe were among 2022’s class of Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients. Biles and Rapinoe were the fifth and sixth women athletes to be given the honor, making Ledecky the seventh.

After an illustrious career for both club and country, Gotham FC and U.S. Women’s National Team defender Kelley O’Hara announced today via Kelley on the Street that she will be retiring from professional soccer at the end of this year, making the 2024 NWSL season her last.

"I have always said I would play under two conditions: that I still love playing soccer, and if my body would let me do it the way I wanted to," O’Hara told Just Women’s Sports in the lead-up to her retirement announcement. "I realized a while back that I was always going to love it, so it was the physical piece that was going to be the deciding factor."

The 35-year-old will retire as a two-time World Cup champion, an Olympic gold medalist, and at least a two-time NWSL champion, depending on where Gotham finishes this season. Her legacy as a player is hard to fully encapsulate, and will forever run through some of the biggest snapshots in USWNT and NWSL history. 

In 2012, O’Hara played every minute of the USWNT’s Olympic gold medal run, after having recently converted into a defender. Her soaring goal off the bench in the 2015 World Cup semifinal is the stuff of legend. And her return from lingering injury to play in every knockout match of the national team’s 2019 World Cup win cemented a storybook international career. 

It was O’Hara who scored the overtime goal in 2021 to earn the Washington Spirit their first-ever NWSL championship, and O’Hara who returned to help see Gotham earn a title in 2023 after years spent in the trenches with the club’s previous iteration, Sky Blue. Her 15-year career spanned two professional women’s soccer leagues in the U.S. (she earned her first professional title in 2010 with WPS’s FC Gold Pride), as well as sweeping changes to the sport both on and off the pitch.

On the field, O’Hara has always been known for a motor that never quits, making the right flank her domain in attacking possession and defensive transition. In recent years, she’s also been celebrated for a competitive fire that raises the level of her teammates, whether she’s in the starting XI or supporting from the bench.

But injuries take a toll, a reality not always seen by the fans watching from home. "I've never taken anything for granted, and I feel like I've never coasted either," O’Hara said of her late-career success in the NWSL despite battling injuries. "I've always been like, 'I gotta put my best foot forward every single day I step on this field' — which is honestly probably half the reason why I'm having to retire now as opposed to getting a couple more years out of it. I've just grinded hard."

Recently, O’Hara has been sidelined at Gotham with ankle and knee injuries, and the situation motivated her to really prioritize listening to her body. "To get injured and come back, and get injured and come back, and just keep doing it, it really takes a toll on you.

"People don't see the doubt that's associated with injury,” she continued. "As athletes we feel a certain way, we perform a certain way, our body feels a certain way, we're very in tune with our bodies. And there's always so much doubt surrounding injury. It’s like, 'Can I feel the way I felt before?' The reality is sometimes you don't."

O’Hara didn’t arrive at the decision to move on from her playing career lightly. But once she began seriously considering making 2024 her final year during the last NWSL offseason, it felt right. "Once I was like, 'Alright, you know what, this will be my last year,' I have had a lot of peace with it," she said. "Truly the only thing I felt was gratitude for everything that my career has been, all the things I've been able to do and the people I've been able to do it with."

She said she’ll miss daily interactions with her teammates and all the amazing memories they’ve created, though she feels lucky to have formed relationships that go beyond sharing a locker room. "You're basically getting to hang out and just shoot the shit with your best friends every day," she reflected. "Which is so unheard of, and I just feel very lucky to do it for so long."

The Stanford graduate also mentioned that the NWSL’s suspension of regular season play in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic made her realize how much playing allowed her the space to simply be creative every day. The tactical elements of soccer provided O’Hara an outlet for problem solving and made use of her naturally competitive edge.

She’s now gearing up to channel her on-field intensity into her post-playing career full time, which is a new chapter she’s excited to begin. "I don't know if the world's ready for it, like the fact that I'm not going to be putting all of my energy into football all the time," she said with a laugh. 

O’Hara said she would like to stay connected to the game in some fashion, whether it be as an owner, coach, or member of a front office. She’s also interested in the growing media space surrounding women’s sports, having provided on-camera analysis for broadcasters like CBS Sports in addition to starting a production company with her fiancée.

"I just feel like I have a lot of passions, and things that excite me," she says. "And I do want to stay as close as I can to the game, because I feel a responsibility — and I'm not sure in what capacity — to continue to grow it."

A sense of responsibility to grow the game has been a consistent refrain for the USWNT and NWSL players of O’Hara’s era, who ushered in a new age of equal pay for the national team and collectively bargained protections for those in the league. The landscape for new players looks different than it did 14 years ago, in large part due to this pivotal generation.

"I feel an immense sense of pride around that, because I don't know if any of us knew that was gonna happen," she said. "We kind of, as things unfolded, took the next step towards changing what women's football looks like in this country and around the world.

"I'm really grateful to have been part of this era with the players that I was [with], not backing down and pushing and knowing that was the right thing to do."

Whatever the future holds, O’Hara is going ahead full throttle. It’s a piece of advice she’d also give to the next generation of professionals looking to make their own impact.

"Whatever you do in life, do it because you love it, and the chips will fall in place," she said. "If you love something, you're willing to do what it takes. You're willing to make the sacrifices, you're willing to handle the roller coaster.

"To me, it's simple. Don't do it for any other reason but that, and I think you'll be alright."

The Phoenix Mercury center spoke with Robin Roberts about her 10-month incarceration, reflecting on her poor living conditions and shaky mental state ahead of her May 7th memoir.

"The mattress had a huge blood stain on it. I had no soap, no toilet paper," Griner told the ABC News anchor in last night’s 20/20 special. "That was the moment where I just felt less than a human." 

She also detailed some of her lowest moments during that time, saying with tears in her eyes that she went so far as to consider taking her own life on more than one occasion. However, the thought of Russian officials not releasing her body back to her family made her reconsider.

"I just didn't think I could get through what I needed to get through," said Griner.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Just Women’s Sports (@justwomenssports)

In February 2022, Griner was arrested and charged with drug possession and smuggling by a Russian court after Sheremetyevo International Airport police found vape cartridges containing hashish oil in her luggage. The cartridges were prescribed by Griner’s doctor for chronic pain back in Arizona, where medical marijuana is legal. In the interview, the two-time Olympic gold medalist said she had a "mental lapse" while packing, and never intended to bring the cannabis products with her when she returned to play for UMMC Ekaterinburg.

"It's just so easy to have a mental lapse," Griner said. "Granted, my mental lapse was on a more grand scale. But it doesn't take away from how that can happen." 

She was later sentenced to nine years behind bars after her Russian attorneys advised her to plead guilty the following July. Griner was then sent to a remote penal colony where she was forced to spend her days cutting cloth to make military uniforms. From there, it only got worse.

"Honestly, it just had to happen," she said when asked about her decision to cut off her signature long locks. "We had spiders above my bed making nests.

"My dreads started to freeze," she added. "They would just stay wet and cold and I was getting sick. You've gotta do what you've gotta do to survive."

Shortly after Griner’s initial arrest, the U.S. State Department classified her case as wrongfully detained, escalating its urgency within the government and calling even more attention to the situation. On December 8th, she was freed in a prisoner exchange negotiated by the Biden administration.

While she told Roberts she was "thrilled" when she got the news, she was also very upset about having to leave fellow wrongful detainee Paul Whelan behind. She also continues to carry guilt about her arrest, saying "At the end of the day, it's my fault. And I let everybody down."

Griner’s memoir, Coming Home, hits shelves on May 7th.

"Coming Home begins in a land where my roots developed and is the diary of my heartaches and regrets," Griner told ABC News in an exclusive statement. "But, ultimately, the book is also a story of how my family, my faith, and the support of millions who rallied for my rescue helped me endure a nightmare."

Longtime USWNT fixture Carli Lloyd took to Instagram Wednesday morning to announce that she’s pregnant with her first child. 

"Baby Hollins coming in October 2024!" she wrote. The caption framed a collaged image of baby clothes, an ultrasound photo, and syringes indicating what she described as a "rollercoaster" fertility journey.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Just Women’s Sports (@justwomenssports)

In a Women’s Health story published in tandem with Lloyd’s post, the Fox Sports analyst and correspondent opened up about her struggles with infertility and the lengthy IVF treatments she kept hidden from the public eye.

"Soccer taught me how to work hard, persevere, be resilient, and never give up. I would do whatever it took to prepare, and usually when I prepared, I got results," Lloyd told Women’s Health’s Amanda Lucci. "But I found out that I didn’t know much about this world. I was very naive to think that we wouldn’t have any issues getting pregnant. And so it began."

Lloyd went on to discuss her road to pregnancy in great detail, sharing the highs and lows of the process and expressing gratitude for the care and support her family and medical team provided along the way. She rounded out the piece with a nod toward others navigating the same challenges, encouraging people to share their own pregnancy journeys, painful as they may be.

"My story is currently a happy one, but I know there are other women who are facing challenges in their pregnancy journey. I see you and I understand your pain," she said. "My hope is that more and more women will speak up about this topic, because their stories helped me. I also wish for more resources, funding, and education around fertility treatments. There is much to be done, and I hope I can play a role in helping."

The 41-year-old New Jersey native retired from professional soccer in 2021, closing out her decorated career with 316 international appearances, the second-most in USWNT history, in addition to 134 international goals. A legend on the field, Lloyd walked away from the game with two World Cups, two Olympic gold medals, and two FIFA Player of the Year awards.