The Trade That Sent Sophie Cunningham From Phoenix to Indiana

For six seasons Sophie Cunningham had one WNBA address. Phoenix drafted her in 2019 and she played every professional game of her career there. That ended on 2 February 2025, when Indiana acquired her.

The move was not a straight swap of one player for another. Indiana took Cunningham and the No. 19 pick in the 2025 draft; Phoenix took NaLyssa Smith and the No. 8 pick. Both halves belonged to a wider multi-team transaction, and the parts above are the ones that concerned her.

What Phoenix was ending

Phoenix took her 13th overall in the 2019 draft and used her carefully. Her rookie year was 12.2 minutes a game and 3.1 points; the following season, shortened and played in Florida, gave her 11 starts but still under 19 minutes. In 2021 she was a 17-minute reserve on a team that reached the WNBA Finals, shooting .410 from three across 30 games.

The role changed in 2022. She started 20 of 28 games, averaged 29.5 minutes and 12.6 points, and shot .400 from three — the best scoring season of her career. In 2023 she started all 31 games she played. In 2024, her last Phoenix season, she came off the bench in more than half of her 40 appearances and averaged 8.4 points.

Six seasons, 182 games, 92 of them as a starter, 7.7 points a game and .362 from three. That was the body of work the trade moved, and the season-by-season detail sits on the Phoenix page.

A different chapter

What changed for Cunningham was plain enough: after six years, a different city, a different squad and a different bench. She was 28, out of contract territory she knew, and joining a team in the middle of its own rebuild.

Her first Indiana season looked like the Phoenix seasons in shape rather than scale: 30 games, 13 of them as a starter, 25.2 minutes and 8.6 points a game. Her three-point shooting was the best of her career, .432, on the same volume of attempts she had taken in Phoenix.

What happened next

On 1 July 2025, five months after the trade, Indiana beat the Minnesota Lynx 74—59 in Minneapolis to win the Commissioner's Cup. It was the first professional trophy of her career.

Six weeks later the season stopped. She left the game at Connecticut on 17 August 2025 in the second quarter with a knee injury and did not return. On 19 August the club ruled her out for the rest of the year; reporting that day described a season-ending MCL tear in her right knee. Her first Indiana season finished at 30 games, and the injury and the road back to 9 May 2026 are followed separately.

Those are two very different halves of one year, and neither settles what the trade was worth. That is not a question this account tries to answer.

Indiana continued

She returned to Indiana for 2026 on a reported one-year deal worth $665,000. That season is still being played, so it has no totals yet and no verdict. What the February 2025 transaction established is simply this: the Indiana chapter that began with it is now in its second year, and the Indiana chronology continues there.