Flau’jae Johnson’s LSU career came to an abrupt, unceremonious conclusion, and she didn’t have much time to sit with the disappointment of that Sweet 16 loss to Duke.
Things move quickly for players in her position. The ones who wrap up their senior seasons, then quickly turn their focus to the WNBA draft process. Johnson was only a week into it when she received a key to the city of Baton Rouge in a ceremony outside City Hall. That morning, the draft was only nine days away, and she was trying to keep up.
“This whole process is crazy,” Johnson said. “It’s like, you’re right into it. I’m doing a lot of workouts, training, trying to get ready for training camp, but I’m excited though.”
Johnson is widely expected to be a first-round pick in the 2026 WNBA draft, which will begin at 6 p.m. Monday in New York City (ESPN). ESPN’s latest mock draft has the Chicago Sky choosing her with the fifth overall selection, and The Athletic’s latest forecast has the Washington Mystics scooping her up with the No. 9 overall pick.
LSU has produced top-10 picks in each of the past two years. Both Angel Reese and Aneesah Morrow were chosen seventh overall in their respective drafts.
If Johnson is taken with one of the first 15 choices on Monday, then the Tigers can say they’ve turned out first-round picks in three consecutive WNBA drafts for the first time in the program’s history.
Johnson was eligible to declare for last year’s draft, but because she decided instead to return for her senior season at LSU, she’ll now be part of the first rookie class that plays under the league’s new collective bargaining agreement (CBA), which was ratified on March 24.
Under the old CBA, rookies earned modest five-figure salaries.
Now, Johnson — and any other player chosen in the draft — will each pocket at least $270,000 annually.
The LSU star said on March 19 that she was “very excited” that the league and its players hammered out the terms of a “transformational deal” only a few weeks before she begins her professional career. Because they did, she now has significantly more earning potential.
“I’ve been watching it all day on ESPN,” Johnson said. “It’s so dope. Salaries going from 60K to 300K is a crazy leap. I’m ready to hear about the things they have on housing and traveling and all of that, but this is generational.”
Whichever team chooses Johnson will land a long, athletic three-level scorer who has shown she can defend multiple perimeter positions. Her senior year was an uneven one, but she still drained a career-high 39% of her 3-pointers and turned the ball over a career-low 1.7 times per game.
Johnson is at her best in transition, but because she’s an efficient outside shooter and a disruptive perimeter defender, she can fit on just about any team in the WNBA.
The league may pick apart some of Johnson’s inconsistencies. This past season, for example, she scored 20 or more points about as many times (seven) as she finished with fewer than 10 (eight).
But Johnson spent three years as one of the top scoring threats on one of the best programs in the country, and she consistently elevated her play in some of the biggest games of her career.
Johnson scored 15.4 points per game on 47% shooting in the regular-season matchups she played across the past three years of her career. But in those seasons’ NCAA Tournament contests, she scored 18.6 ppg on 54% shooting.
Only five players have ever scored more points in an LSU uniform than Johnson did. Two of them were first-round WNBA draft choices — Seimone Augustus (2006) and Sylvia Fowles (2008). LSU has produced nine of those players since the league was founded in 1997.
Johnson should become the 10th on Monday, not even three weeks after Duke ended her hopes of leading LSU back to the Final Four.
“I don’t have any expectations,” Johnson said. “I’m just like, wherever I go, I’m gonna kill.”
