Seattle Storm 2025 Season Grades: Lexie Brown
The 2025 WNBA season is over. With a pending agreement on what will be a transformative collective bargaining agreement between the players and league, this offseason will bring sweeping change prior to the 2026 campaign.
But before all that, there’s still plenty to recap on last season.
The Seattle Storm finished the regular season with a 23-21 record and lost to the would-be WNBA champion Las Vegas Aces in the first round of the playoffs. Seattle has just four players under contract for next season, including rookie phenom Dominique Malonga.
With all that in mind, The Emerald City Spectrum will be dishing out grades for each player who stepped on the court for the Storm in 2025 on offense, defense and overall value.
Originally brought in to be a 3-point specialist for their backcourt, guard Lexie Brown had a minuscule role in her first season with the Storm. Though she’s still under contract for 2026, postseason comments may have Brown playing elsewhere next season.
Road to 2025 season
Brown battled through health issues in 2023 and 2024, forcing her to appear in just 28 total games across those two seasons. The Los Angeles Sparks traded Brown, along with a pick swap, to the Storm in February.
Offense
The Storm were worst in the league in 3-point percentage in 2024 (28.8 percent). Brown, who had shot near or above 40 percent from 3-point range in 2022 and 2023, was brought in to try and alleviate that. Unfortunately, she was never given much of a chance to be a difference maker.
Brown played in just 24 games, despite asserting in her exit interview that she was healthy for “40-ish” games this season. Even when she did play, Brown rarely got extensive minutes.
But she also wasn’t great when she was on the court. Brown converted 27 percent of her 3-point attempts, averaging 2.1 points and 1.0 assists in 9.5 minutes per game. Overall, she converted 35.4 percent of her shot attempts.
Similar to Tiffany Mitchell and Zia Cooke, there were few opportunities with former Storm head coach Noelle Quinn running a tight rotation after trading for Brittney Sykes. The backcourt minutes were occupied by Skylar Diggins, Erica Wheeler and Sykes, primarily.
Grade: C
Reasoning: Brown was a non-factor in most games. Her best game was a 12-point, two-assist performance against the Chicago Sky on July 24, during which she made all five of her field goal attempts. That was her lone double-digit scoring outing in 2025.
Indeed, Brown wasn’t given enough of a chance, but she also didn’t come through when given opportunities. Plus, the defensive side of the ball didn’t warrant giving her more minutes.
Defense
Brown had just nine steals and one block for the season, and she isn’t a quality perimeter defender. That’s why the Storm traded for Sykes in a pinch as they tried to salvage their season in early August.
She is an OK rebounder, but isn’t going to be the first one crashing the boards from the perimeter. That’s something Diggins and Wheeler did regularly, even though the Storm were the worst rebounding team in the WNBA. Brown wasn’t adding enough on the defensive side of the ball to offset her offensive deficiencies.
Brown would sometimes look lost on defense, and that likely played into her remaining on the bench.
Grade: D
Reasoning: There aren’t many positives to take away from Brown’s defensive performances this season, which leads to the poor grade. It’s one of her weaknesses, and she was underwhelming on both sides of the court in her first season in Seattle.
Overall value
The exit interview comments by Brown were telling, and she wasn’t the only one. Brown and Mitchell both voiced concerns about their experience with the former coaching staff.
“I just don’t think I was given the opportunity I deserved here, and I feel like I have so much basketball left to play,” Brown said. “If that’s here, if that’s somewhere else, I don’t know. But I just want to reiterate the fact that I’m healthy, and I hate the fact that so many people think I’m not and that I’m a liability and I can’t make it through a season, because I worked my ass off to get back to this level.”
As always, there are two sides to the situation. Brown wasn’t given enough of a chance to prove herself, but she also didn’t seem like a good fit for the scheme Quinn was trying to operate. Aware of that fact, the Storm brought in Sykes to be an offensive engine but also an elite perimeter defender. Brown wasn’t that, and thus she didn’t play much.
Still, especially since she’s under contract for 2026, there could be a role for her moving forward under a new coaching staff. If Brown is truly healthy, she could be a factor in the right situation next season.
Grade: D+
Reasoning: With all that taken into account, Brown simply wasn’t an important piece of the team in 2025. In the right role, she could be far more valuable than she was with the Storm.
