Houston Comets Guaranteed Top-3 WNBA Draft Pick Despite Tied Odds With Toronto Tempo

Houston can come out of Sunday’s WNBA draft lottery with the first pick, the second pick or the third pick. Toronto, despite sharing the best odds with the Comets, still has a chance of falling to fourth.

The difference comes from the last season the Comets played as the Connecticut Sun. Toronto won two of their three meetings, giving Connecticut the losing record in the matchup and, for lottery purposes, the advantage.

Before Connecticut’s 95-81 win over Toronto in the Sept. 24 finale, Sun coach Rachid Meziane told his team that the time to say goodbye was after the game, The Associated Press reported.

“People will never forget this franchise, never forget the name on the jersey,” Meziane said after the game.

There is no extra chance at No. 1 attached to that advantage. Houston and Toronto each have 329 combinations in the drawing, or 32.9%, according to the AP. ESPN will carry the lottery Sunday at 7:30 p.m. ET, following UConn-Louisville.

Connecticut finished 11-33 in each of its last two seasons before the move. Toronto also went 11-33 in its debut season, which is the only year available for a lottery normally calculated over two.

The two clubs split 658 combinations down the middle. That left no odd combination for the tiebreaker to settle, as CBS Sports explained in its lottery breakdown.

After the first two names are drawn, the rest of the order is filled out using the teams’ records. Houston gets priority over Toronto there because Connecticut lost the season series, 1-2. The Comets cannot fall behind the Tempo in that part of the process.

The league has Ernst & Young supervise the drawing. Two teams will get their picks that way; the other five will be placed in record order.

“In the drawing, 14 balls numbered 1-14 will be placed in a lottery machine and mixed,” the league said. “Four balls will be drawn to determine a four-digit combination. The team assigned that four-ball combination will receive the No. 1 pick. The four balls will then be placed back into the machine and the process will be repeated to determine the second pick.”

“Of the five Lottery teams not selected in the drawings, the team with the worst cumulative winning percentage shall select third,” the league continued. “The team with the next worst records will, in order, select fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh.”

The Mystics are next in line at 16.1%, and the record behind that number is Chicago’s. Washington holds the Sky’s pick from a swap. Seattle has 9.3%. Portland, which also has only one season on the books, has 5.2%.

Los Angeles gets two tickets. Its own carries a 2.4% chance. The other, at 1.2%, is Phoenix’s, the 2027 first-rounder the Mercury sent to Los Angeles with Monique Akoa Makani and a 2028 second-rounder in the deadline trade for Kelsey Plum.

ESPN put JuJu Watkins first in its Oct. 27 mock draft. Hannah Hidalgo and Madison Booker were up there, too. But none of the three has declared, so a team winning Sunday still has to wait to see who is actually available.

Candace Parker has talked about how much the destination mattered to her. On Post Moves, she said she would have gone back to Tennessee for her remaining year of eligibility if the 2008 lottery had not worked out as she wanted. Los Angeles won, and Parker became a Spark.

“I would have stayed at Tennessee so quick because I had one more year of eligibility,” Parker said. “I would have been like, yeah, I’m cool. I’m okay, thank you. I’m not coming out.”

Houston kept Meziane and general manager Morgan Tuck for the move, back to the city where the original Comets won the league’s first four championships, from 1997 to 2000.

Sunday sets the order. The teams will make their selections April 12, once they know which players have entered the draft.