2021 WNBA draft

The lottery selection to determine the order of the top four picks in the 2021 draft took place during halftime of the DePaul Blue Demons game against the Louisville Cardinals on December 4, 2020, and was televised on ESPN in the United States and across the TSN Network in Canada. The same four non-playoff teams in 2020 qualified for the lottery drawing: Indiana Fever, Dallas Wings, New York Liberty, and Atlanta Dream.[1]

Under the current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the WNBA and its players union, draft eligibility for players not defined as "international" requires the following to be true:[4]

• The player's 22nd birthday falls during the calendar year of the draft. For this draft, the cutoff birth date is December 31, 1999.
• She has either:
  • completed her college eligibility;
  • received a bachelor's degree, or is scheduled to receive such in the 3 months following the draft; or
  • is at least 4 years removed from high school graduation.

A player who is scheduled to receive her bachelor's degree within 3 months of the draft date, and is younger than the cutoff age, is only eligible if the calendar year of the draft is no earlier than the fourth after her high school graduation.

Players with remaining college eligibility who meet the cutoff age must notify the WNBA headquarters of their intent to enter the draft no later than 10 days before the draft date, and must renounce any remaining college eligibility to do so. A separate notification timetable is provided for players involved in postseason tournaments (most notably the NCAA Division I tournament); those players (normally) must declare for the draft within 24 hours of their final game.

"International players" are defined as those for whom all of the following is true:

• Born and currently residing outside the U.S.
• Never "exercised intercollegiate basketball eligibility" in the U.S.

For "international players", the eligibility age is 20, also measured on December 31 of the year of the draft.

For the 2021 draft only, the WNBA and its players union agreed to a modification of the normal eligibility rules. The most significant change is that all otherwise eligible college players who wished to enter the draft, including seniors in 2020–21, had to declare for draft entry. Due to an NCAA ruling that the 2020–21 season, dramatically affected by COVID-19, would not be counted against the college eligibility of any basketball player, every college senior in the 2020–21 season had remaining eligibility. Players who wished to be drafted had to notify the league by email no later than April 1, except for those involved in the 2021 Final Four, who had a 48-hour opt-in window after the completion of their last game instead of the normal 24 hours.[5] Players who had opted in had until midnight on April 10 (0400 UTC, April 11) to opt out.[6] This is similar to special 2021 draft declaration rules announced by the NBA, which also required seniors to opt into the draft.[7]

On April 3, the WNBA announced that 52 college players had opted into the draft. This did not include players from the Final Four teams (Arizona, South Carolina, Stanford, UConn); South Carolina and UConn lost in the semifinals on April 2, while Stanford defeated Arizona in the championship game on April 4.[8] On April 7, the WNBA announced that one of the original 52 players had withdrawn from consideration, and that six additional players had opted into the draft.[9] Four players from the initial list of 52 would opt out by the final deadline of April 11.[6]

• List of first overall WNBA draft picks