The 2026 WNBA season is barely underway, but prediction market traders are already trading on who will walk away with the league's most prestigious defensive honor, being named the WNBA DPOY.
Polymarket opened its "WNBA: 2026 Defensive Player of the Year" market in late April, and the early odds tell an interesting story, one shaped by recent history, a blockbuster free agency signing, and the question of whether last year's co-winners can hold off a rising challenger.
Use the Polymarket invite code ACTION to get early access and bypass 1 million+ people on the waitlist. Our Polymarket invite code also unlocks a trading bonus: Deposit $20, Get $20 Bonus!
The Market at a Glance
With the market set to resolve on September 25, 2026, 11 players are listed as potential winners. Most are priced in the 91–98 cent range for "Yes" contracts, indicating that the market still views the race as genuinely wide open. Two names, however, have broken from the pack to generate real trading activity:
- Gabby Williams leads all comers in implied probability (though with minimal volume, reflecting early market uncertainty)
- Angel Reese and Napheesa Collier are the most actively traded
- The thin volumes here mean these odds shouldn't be read as definitive. But the direction is revealing.
The Backdrop: A Historic 2025 Finish
To understand 2026, you need to understand what happened in 2025. The WNBA made history last September when, for the first time in league history, the Defensive Player of the Year Award was shared by two players. Minnesota Lynx forward Alanna Smith and Las Vegas Aces superstar A'ja Wilson each received exactly 29 votes from the 72-member media panel, triggering an unprecedented co-award.
Smith had anchored Minnesota's best-in-league defense, posting 1.3 steals and 1.9 blocks per game, while the Lynx recorded the top defensive rating in the WNBA. Wilson, meanwhile, led the league in blocks (2.3 per game) and rebounds (10.2 per game), while simultaneously winning a record fourth MVP award. The tie was a statistical deadlock with no tiebreaker mechanism, a quirk the WNBA will likely address going forward.
Notably finishing third in that vote, with nine votes, was Williams, then of the Seattle Storm.
The Case for Gabby Williams
If there's a player who enters 2026 with the clearest DPOY narrative, it's Williams. In 2025, she led the entire WNBA with 2.3 steals per game and a staggering 99 total steals, 30 more than any other player. She played in all 44 regular-season games, earned her first career All-Star selection, and was named to the All-Defensive First Team. She joined an elite club: one of just six players in league history to average at least 10 points, four rebounds, four assists, and two steals in a season.
This offseason, she made a splashy move to the Golden State Valkyries, who specifically built their identity around elite perimeter defense. Paired with Veronica Burton, herself a 2025 All-Defensive Second Team honoree, Williams now anchors what could be the league's most lockdown backcourt and is a frontrunner in early WNBA MVP trading. The Valkyries enter the season as the only team with two All-Defensive team members from a year ago.
Williams finished third in 2025 DPOY voting and is viewed by many as the most natural frontrunner. Her high implied probability on Polymarket reflects that standing, though the negligible trading volume means that number is more of a consensus starting point than a market conviction.
The Collier Puzzle
Perhaps the most intriguing signal in the market is 2019 WNBA Rookie of the Year Napheesa Collier sitting at just 45%, a price that implies she's a slight underdog to not win the award she captured in 2024.
Collier won the 2024 DPOY convincingly, leading a historically dominant Lynx defense. She was second in steals, third in rebounds, and seventh in blocks, all at career-high rates, while holding opponents to the top field goal percentage in the league as the primary defender.
In 2025, though, she missed 10 games due to injury, slipping to just two votes in DPOY balloting despite still posting elite numbers when healthy.
The Polymarket odds suggest that traders see Collier's injury history and the stiff competition around her as meaningful obstacles. But if she stays healthy in 2026, she has one of the strongest DPOY profiles in the league: a 2024 winner who has never stopped being a premier defender.
Angel Reese: The Surprising Co-Leader
The most striking thing about the current market is that Angel Reese has generated the most trading volume and is treated as the most contested outcome.
Reese doesn't have a DPOY trophy, but she led the WNBA in rebounding as a rookie (2024) and put up strong defensive stats in 2025. The market's confidence in her stems partly from her raw statistical profile (back-to-back rebounding titles, 1.3 steals per game as a rookie), and partly from her storyline entering 2026 following her trade to the Atlanta Dream.
The caveat: Reese has never received more than a peripheral DPOY vote share. Polymarket traders may be pricing in upside rather than probability, a speculation play rather than a consensus view.
The Rest of the Field
Wilson and Smith remain on the board at nearly identical prices, suggesting the market gives them comparable, if secondary, chances of a repeat. Both are proven winners. Wilson's rim-protecting combination of blocks and steals remains unparalleled, while Smith has grown into one of the most versatile two-way players in the league, alongside Collier.
Other names listed, such as Cameron Brink, Aliyah Boston, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Brittney Griner, Ezi Magbegor, and Breanna Stewart, are priced in a way that leads us to believe the market considers them long shots but not impossibilities.
What This WNBA DPOY Market Is Really Telling Us
This is a genuinely open race. The Polymarket market, launched just weeks before the season tipped off, hasn't yet settled into a clear consensus because the season itself hasn't provided enough evidence.
Come September, when voters fill out their ballots, the question won't just be who was the best defender; it will be who made the most visible, measurable defensive impact on a winning team. In DPOY voting, context always matters.
