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The WNBA regular-season and playoff schedules will both see changes in 2025, per commissioner Cathy Engelbert to reporters in a press conference Thursday prior to the start of the WNBA Finals between the New York Liberty and Minnesota Lynx.
The regular season will expand from 40 to 44 games next year, when the Golden State Valkyries join the WNBA as its 13th franchise.
The playoffs will still see an eight-team field in a three-round format.
However, the best-of-three first round will now feature the higher-seeded team in each matchup hosting Game 1 followed by the lower-seeded team hosting Game 2. The higher-seeded team will then host Game 3 if necessary.
That’s a change from the current playoff format, which featured the higher-seeded team hosting Games 1 and 2. The lower-seeded team then would host Game 3 if needed.
Game 3 wasn’t needed this year, though, with all four first-round matchups ending in two-game sweeps, leaving the lower-seeded team out of hosting a game.
Nothing will change for the best-of-five semifinals, which has a 2-2-1 format. However, the WNBA Finals will now be best-of-seven, with a 2-2-1-1-1 structure.
The playoff format changes bring obvious upsides.
As noted, the lower-seeded team was never guaranteed a home game. However, a lower-seeded team also had the benefit of closing the series at home, which seemed like an unfair disadvantage. Ideally, the higher-seeded team, by virtue of a better record, would get that right. That’s ultimately the case in the semifinals and finals.
The new playoff format wipes away those problems, though. In addition, the WNBA Finals being best-of-seven now is a good move, allowing the league’s top two teams more matchups to decide the champion. This marks the first time in league history that any playoff round has gone best-of-seven, the standard in the NBA.
Meanwhile, the WNBA’s regular-season game rise continues to go up, from 32 in 2021 to 36 in 2022 to 40 in 2023 and 2024. Now the league moves to 44.
More previously announced changes will go down later in the 2020s as well, with Toronto and Portland, Oregon entering the league as the 14th and 15th teams in 2026.
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