Los Angeles Sparks

The Los Angeles Sparks were supposed to be the franchise that proved women's basketball could be glamorous. Founded in 1997 as one of the WNBA's original eight teams, the Sparks staked their claim to the entertainment capital of the world and then backed it up with a star who could carry that weight. Lisa Leslie became the face of the franchise and, for a time, the face of the entire league—the first woman to dunk in a WNBA game, a player whose combination of athleticism, charisma, and competitive fire made the Sparks appointment television. The back-to-back championships in 2001 and 2002 cemented the Sparks as the WNBA's first Hollywood franchise, a team that proved a women's professional basketball team could thrive in a market saturated with Lakers and Clippers and Dodgers.

A generation later, Candace Parker reconnected the franchise to its championship lineage, leading the Sparks to their third title in 2016. That victory felt like a promise that the Sparks would always find a way to reinvent themselves, that the pipeline of talent flowing through Crypto.com Arena would never dry up. It was a promise the franchise has not kept.

The 2025 season represented the Sparks' fifth consecutive year missing the playoffs—the longest active drought in the WNBA. A 21-23 record was not catastrophic on its own, but for a franchise with three championship banners and the legacy of Leslie and Parker, it amounted to something worse than losing: irrelevance. The Sparks remain one of the most historically significant franchises in women's basketball, a team whose championship pedigree and Los Angeles address should make them a perennial contender. That the gap between what the Sparks were and what they are has grown this wide is one of the more troubling stories in the league.