Following the 2022 WNBA season, the Seattle Storm lost Sue Bird to retirement and Breanna Stewart to the New York Liberty in free agency. While many may have concluded that the Storm were heading into a rebuild, they still had one mainstay on the roster, Jewell Loyd.
Despite the roster upheaval in Seattle, Jewell Loyd opted to sign a contract extension with the Storm near the end of the 2023 WNBA season. Her faith in the organization paid off as the Storm added a pair of star free agents in Nneka Ogwumike and Skylar Diggins-Smith.
The free agent moves have the Storm right back in the mix contending for a championship, a position that they’ve been accustomed to for a good part of the last decade. The Storm have four titles in franchise history in 2004, 2010, 2018 and 2020. They’ve never lost a WNBA Finals series.
While the Storm got off to a bit of an uneven start to the season, they’ve since hit their stride and look every bit the contender many thought they could be. According to Loyd, communication was the key factor in building chemistry amongst her new teammates.
“A lot of it was communication, getting to know one another, really just talking and saying ‘hey I like this side of the ball, I like this shot, I like this.’ It’s helped us elevate and speed up the process a little bit,” Loyd told ClutchPoints over All-Star Weekend. “When you playing with a lot of professional players, it makes it kind of easier sometimes to kind of adjust and understand the game of basketball.
“At the end of the day, we know how to play basketball. We kind of lean on that. For us we know the offense can take some time here and there, but we’ll give 100 percent on defense. That’s something that we know we can always control, our effort on defense, and we’ll allow that to push us through.”
Jewell Loyd has become the leader the Storm need
Following the departures of Stewart and Bird, the leadership role on the Storm kind of fell into Jewell Loyd’s hands. While Ogwumike and Diggins-Smith have both been leaders on their respective teams before joining the Storm, Loyd is one of the longest tenured players on the team.
She was drafted by the Storm with the No. 1 overall pick in the 2015 WNBA Draft. She won the 2025 WNBA Rookie of the Year Award and became a driving force behind the team’s 2018 and 2020 championship runs. Since then the key area of growth for Loyd has been her leadership. It’s involved having to change her mindset at times.
“It’s definitely been a different mindset for sure. I think for me, it’s just I really value my teammates. I get to know them a little bit, knowing how they understand information, receive information, give information,” Loyd said. “But also knowing that I don’t have to lead how Sue led or other leaders led, I just lead how I do. Find that good balance in between us helped and it’s been really good to see that growth.”
The 2018 season was the first year that Jewell Loyd was named an WNBA All-Star. That began a string of All-Star appearances that has culminated with her sixth selection this season. The only season during the stretch that Loyd was not named an All-Star was 2020 when the league did not hold an All-Star game amid the bubble season.
2023 though was when Loyd really exploded. Following the departures of Bird and Stewart, Loyd went on an offensive tear for the Storm averaging a career-high 24.7 points while shooting 35.6 percent from the three-point line. She finished seventh in the MVP voting and was named to the All-WNBA Second Team.
This season, Loyd is averaging 20.1 points, the second highest mark in her career along with a career-high 4.1 assists. At the end of the day, Loyd chalks it up to just having the utmost confidence in herself.
“I’ve just been more confident in myself, having a freedom, playing with this confidence and knowing what I can do,” Loyd said. “I think I’ve earned that in this league, and being able to elevate myself but also everyone else around me.”
Follow Us
Subscribe