Which WNBA rookie could edge out Paige Bueckers for Rookie of the Year?

The media sometimes has a weird way of pigeon-holing a conversation, and that seems especially prevalent in women’s basketball.

They see a marketable star and cling to them and the sad reality is that the other people in the conversation fade into the shadows. This happened a little bit with the 2025 WNBA Draft as people started to describe it as a 1-player draft.

Paige Bueckers was the undisputed No. 1 overall prospect (which was warranted, of course), but after that, players did not get much love. But as we get deeper into the season, it’s becoming more obvious that this draft, especially the first round, was way more stacked than the media made it out to be.

Bueckers is a generational basketball talent, and the opposite is not the argument here. Dallas drafting her first overall was the right move. Yet, it’s becoming clear that the picks afterward — Dominique Malonga, Sonia Citron and Kiki Iriafen, in particular — were almost slept on pre-draft.

It’s clear now that the Rookie of the Year race surely is not a 1-player conversation. Bueckers has had a great start to her season personally, despite the Wings’ inability to win a basketball game so far, and she’s in the mix, of course.

Yet, the duo of Citron and Iriafen in Washington is shocking the WNBA world, or at least those who had never tapped into either of their games before. There is also the potential of Malonga, who isn’t getting as much playing time in Seattle as the prior three players, but could very well be in the mix if she were.

One obvious sentiment as we head into the second full week of the WNBA regular season is that Chicago trading the No. 3 pick was... a mistake. That pick would eventually turn into Citron, of course, and the way she is playing for the Mystics as a rookie should make any Sky fan shake their fist at the literal sky.

The Mystics started their season 2-0, but have since lost three (close) games. The Sky, on the other hand, are winless like Dallas and Connecticut and truly look discombobulated. Instead of putting together this mix of young players (Angel Reese, Kamilla Cardoso, and Hailey Van Lith) and veterans (Courtney Vandersloot, Ariel Atkins, Bec Allen and more) in an attempt (?) to contend, they instead blew the chance to develop a future core of Reese, Cardoso, Van Lith and Citron.

The worst part? The Minnesota Lynx now own the Sky’s first-round pick in the 2026 WNBA Draft. So even if the Sky end up being bad enough to get a lottery pick... Minnesota gets it. You could have had Citron!!!

I can’t...

Anyway, the real point here is that Sonia Citron is good. Really good. She may not be the flashiest, but she is tough, consistent and leaves fingerprints all over the game. Mix that with the amount of playing time she is getting with the Mystics this year and she seems like a lock for the All-Rookie team. In the future, she has the potential to be a solid Big-3 type player that teams can depend on every night.

The situation is the same for Iriafen in Washington when it comes to playing time. She is another league-ready rookie — unafraid of the physicality of the WNBA, with footwork well beyond her years of experience, and the ability to defend. Like any rookie post-player, she’s learning how to balance the amount of fouls she is getting, but she has a lot of time on the court to figure that out. Plus, playing these rookies is making Washington even better than expected — no harm in playing them more.

It’s way too early to make a sweeping assumption about who will be the Rookie of the Year, but it’s not a 1-player race. It would not be shocking if all three players ended up getting votes at the end of the season. Regardless, a lot of this rookie class has the potential to be long-standing WNBA talent for years to come.