Getting right down to it - the Naga are bad guys. We've seen them allied with Twilight's Hammer and the Faceless Ones, and they're totally fine with slavery and exploitation. Their leader, Azshara, teamed up with the Burning Legion during the War of the Ancients, and they aided Deathwing during the Cataclysm.
So how could they be heroic enough to be playable?
Well, first let's point something out - the player characters in WoW generally act as heroes - they're generally interested in saving the world, and most quests have you doing fairly altruistic things (albeit to attain money, gold, or pants.) At worst, a player character is an amoral mercenary.
But if we're talking about whether a group of people - a race, to be specific - can be too evil to act as a hero, well, let's look at the Undead. Especially post-Lich King, the Forsaken have been pretty monstrous (and they weren't exactly nice people before.) Garrosh, in one of his few moments of ethical clarity, called out Sylvanas for acting just like the Lich King when she began to raise the bodies of dead humans in Silverpine to serve her. The Naga have done some rotten stuff, and I wouldn't put necromancy past them, at least on moral grounds, but the point is that at least so far, they haven't really done anything worse than that.
But it seems to me that if we do get this Azshara-centric expansion, we'd need to find a way to break off the playable Naga from the rest of the Empire, allowing them to turn on their Queen. I remember being very frustrated that there wasn't really a clear point at which Blood Elf characters were supposed to realize Kael'thas had gone bad - even after arriving in Outland, there are still Blood Elves talking about how their Prince has led them to the promised land.
But Blizzard has gotten way better at telling a story through their game, so I'm not too worried. The question is what that story should be.
The Naga are descended from (or some of them are old enough to have been born as) the Highborne - the upper class of Night Elf society before the War of the Ancients. The Highborne split into several different groups during and following the war. Some rebelled against Azshara after discovering what she had done, and some of them followed Dath'remar Sunstrider east across the new ocean to found Quel'thalas and become the High Elves. Some traveled south to Eldre'thalas, aka Dire Maul, where they continued to practice Arcane magic, and eventually returned to serve Tyrande and Malfurion during the Cataclysm. Some were transformed into demonic satyrs by the Burning Legion during the war. Finally, the ones who sank into the ocean with Azshara were transformed into the Naga.
Now, during the war, some of the Night Elves, particularly among the Highborne, saw that Azshara's palace had been overrun by the demons. They assumed that their Queen had been taken hostage by the Legion, and actually charged in to rescue her, unaware that she was among her true allies.
This, to me, is the perfect "in" to explain good Naga.
Consider that Azshara has had a 10,000 year reign as an absolute monarch over her people - a traumatized group of people who had undergone a horrific transformation and lost the very world they knew. It's believable that Azshara would be able to write her own narrative of the War of the Ancients - one that made her out to be on the winning side.
We dry-landers know very well that Azshara was in cahoots with the Legion, but the Naga might not. As far as they know, Azshara was responsible for repelling the invasion and it was only through the grace of the Old Gods that they were not drowned for her sacrifice. And now, the land-dwellers would seek to destroy the Queen of Azeroth - the person who saved the world. They would dismiss any rumors of Azshara's demonic allegiance as propaganda and slander.
Azshara could have created a version of history where Malfurion and Tyrande had betrayed her, in which the world above had been corrupted by all these mongrel races - none of them paying proper respect to the true Queen and Savior.
So the way I see it - playable Naga would begin in service to the Empire. They would fight off the various enemies of the Naga, but in their adventures, they would discover the truth about Azshara - that she had been lying to them, and far from savior, she had been their slaver and tyrant. Thus, the Naga we play as are a small breakaway faction - those who are willing to face the truth and stand up against the woman who had lied to them for ten thousand years.
And now, as a small group of rebels against a vast empire, they are forced to treat with those "mongrel" races on the surface, and join up with the Alliance and the Horde to finally redeem their people.
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