WNBA Rumors: Moriah Jefferson to Sign Contract with Mercury to Join Brittney Griner

Veteran point guard Moriah Jefferson has agreed to a deal with the Phoenix Mercury, according to Bleacher Report's Chris Haynes.

Jefferson is coming off a bounce-back 2022 WNBA season. In 31 appearances with the Dallas Wings and Minnesota Lynx, she averaged 10.4 points and 4.7 assists and shot a career-high 47.4 percent from beyond the arc.

The Mercury are perhaps the biggest wild card in the league, and signing Jefferson only adds to the variability.

Skylar Diggins-Smith led the team in scoring (19.7 points) last year, but her status for the upcoming season is unclear after she announced in October she is pregnant. Diana Taurasi turns 41 in June. Brittney Griner is making her comeback after being wrongfully detained in Russia and missing the 2022 campaign.

The Mercury are signing a guard who has battled injuries throughout her career. After starting every game for the San Antonio Stars as a rookie in 2016, Jefferson played in 46 total games from 2017 to 2020 because of knee injuries.

"It's never easy to have injuries back-to-back," she told CT Insider's Maggie Vanoni last May. "It's an extremely hard thing to do and a lot of people don't see the nine to 12 months where you're in a gym by yourself doing rehab every day, making small goals just to be able to walk the right away and in those times you have to be able to lean on something and that's what I did."

Perhaps Jefferson has left her bad luck behind. She missed just three games in 2021 and started 30 contests after signing with the Lynx a season ago.

As long as they have Taurasi and Griner, the Mercury have to push all their chips in. With the uncertainty around Diggins-Smith, they needed another playmaker.

Jefferson was the best option on the board after Courtney Vandersloot signed with the New York Liberty and Marina Mabrey landed with the Chicago Sky in a sign-and-trade.