A Mid-Spring Night’s Dream: How Rhyne Howard Went No. 1 at the WNBA Draft

Atlanta’s newest player had to keep her buckets to a minimum growing up in rec league. She won’t have that problem in the W.

NEW YORK — As Rhyne Howard waited for the 2022 WNBA draft to commence, her stomach started to hurt. She said as much to her mother, RJ Avery, who told her daughter to grab her hand and start taking deep breaths. “In and out,” Avery repeated.

The exercise did little to quell Howard’s nerves.

At 7:12 p.m. ET, surrounded by Avery, her brother RaShawn and Kentucky coach Kyra Elzy, Howard learned she would be the No. 1 pick in the draft, belonging to the Dream. She approached the stage and posed for a picture with WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert. And then she began to sway, doing so, Howard says, “so you couldn’t see how much I was actually shaking.”

Her first test as a WNBA player came minutes later as she walked down 32 stairs in three-inch heels to begin a post-draft circuit that consisted of countless interviews, photoshoots and even a game of arcade basketball. (She scored 83 points. In that particular endeavor, she would not end the night No. 1.)

Howard is the Dream’s newest building block :: Erick W. Rasco/Sports Illustrated

“It’s still surreal. I still can’t believe it,” Howard said 100 minutes after hearing her name called—sitting for an extended period for the first time since her selection. “Can you add a dramatic sigh in there, a dramatic pause? A sigh of relief. Shock. Gratefulness. Really a little bit of everything.”

As a kid, Howard wrote in an essay that she had a goal to one day play in the WNBA. Never, though, did she dream she would be the first pick. While with the Wildcats, the star guard who is part of a generation that could change women’s basketball took the program to three NCAA tournaments and helped the school claim its first SEC championship in 40 years.

“I stepped up to that [rebuilding] challenge,” she says. “Seeing that it’s now the next level I believe that I can step up to that challenge, too.”

There was a rule in Howard’s first rec league that if a player scored around 12 points, they would have to sit out for the rest of the game, no matter how much time remained on the clock. Avery says that after the fifth time such a policy was enforced on the future No. 1 pick, Howard started to better recognize its consequence, and thus, she steered clear of it. On at least one occasion, Avery recalls Howard, then just 7 years old, forcing a steal, pushing the ball up the floor and dishing it off to a teammate by the basket.

“Are you O.K.?” Avery remembers asking her afterward.

“If I have to shoot it then I might have to sit down and I just want to be on the court playing,” she recalls her daughter responding.

Through that experience Howard also learned other lessons. “I think that’s where she gets her teamwork from,” Avery says.

Had such a scoring limitation been put on Howard in college, there would have been numerous instances in which she would have been relegated to the bench. In her first season with the Wildcats, she averaged 16.4 points per game and took home National Freshman of the Year honors. As a sophomore, she upped her scoring to 23.4 points per contest, making the first of her eventual three first-team AP All-American team appearances. While her scoring dipped slightly—to 20.7 and 20.5 points, respectively—in each of the past two years, she remained among the sport’s most dynamic offensive players. Howard’s fluidity on that end is central to why the Dream keyed in on her.

“The thing that impresses us the most is her size and her ability to score the ball,” coach Tanisha Wright says. “She makes it look very, very easy to do. But the potential of who she can be in our league is super, super special.”

In December 2019, Wright was an assistant coach at UNC-Charlotte when she was tasked with coming up with the scout for an early-season matchup against Howard and the Wildcats. Wright remembers telling her players that Howard was going to be the No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft one day. “In that moment, they’re listening to you, but you don’t quite understand it until you play against a talent like that,” Wright says.

Howard scored 29 points and hauled in seven rebounds in her team’s 86–39 win. Says Howard when informed of her coach’s prophecy: “That’s crazy.”

Wright hopes that the team’s newest foundational star will be able to make an instant impact. Atlanta has won only 23 games over the past three seasons and is looking to return to the postseason for the first time in four years, doing so with largely new leadership.

In September, months after Larry Gottesdiener, Suzanne Abair, former player Renee Montgomery and others took control of the organization, Atlanta hired Morgan Shaw Parker, a former senior executive at Arthur M. Blank Sports & Entertainment (AMBSE) as its team president and COO. Then, a few weeks later, it brought in Wright from the Aces as its next coach and Dan Padover, a two-time reigning Executive of the Year, as its general manager. Howard will also join a retooled roster, one that swapped 2020 No. 4 pick Chennedy Carter for ’19 All-Star Erica Wheeler in an offseason trade and saw last year’s leading scorer, Courtney Williams, depart via free agency.

“We have to have a footprint in the city of Atlanta. We have to be connected in the city of Atlanta, and I think she’ll take on that challenge,” Wright says of Howard.

Ben Pickman/Sports Illustrated

But before Howard could think about a move to her new home city, she basked in the euphoria that comes with nights like Monday. As she encountered other draft attendees in the Spring Studios elevators, she was greeted to a flood of congratulations. When she saw Ole Miss’s Shakira Austin shortly after Austin was selected No. 3 to the Mystics, the two hugged. “Shakira, I love you,” Howard told her former SEC foe.

When Howard, sans phone, was told that Naz Hillmon, a Michigan star, was heading to the Dream after being taken No. 15, Howard said, “Yes, I love that.” Howard told Hillmon in the leadup to the draft that she wanted the two of them to play together. When the two crossed paths 10 minutes after Howard learned of the selection, they shared a joyous embrace. Even Suns star and fellow Kentucky product Devin Booker left a surprise congratulatory voicemail for the Dream’s top pick.

Monday marked the first in-person WNBA draft since 2019. In recent days, the 12 invitees took part in a number of orientation meetings for incoming rookies as well as in lighter off-court programming, like a bus tour that brought them to different parts of New York. Late Sunday afternoon Howard fired up three-pointers and half-court shorts amid a crowd of people playing at the Stanton Street Court in lower Manhattan. Hours later, she went bowling with some in her immediate circle. Avery makes sure to add, “I kicked her butt.”

Avery says that she always knew that Howard would be in a position to hear her name called at the draft, though never did she imagine her daughter going first. RaShawn expressed his sense of pride following the draft as he reflected on his sister’s billing.

While the Dream guard lounged on draft night, ever so briefly, she too started to reflect on how much had changed in such a brief period of time. Voicing an eagerness, though, to begin her next chapter, she spoke of setting records and winning Rookie of the Year. And of course, of winning a championship with her newest team.

“It hasn’t sunk in yet,” Howard says. “Maybe in training camp it will.”