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It’s November 28. The WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement expired at the end of October, but the deadline for it to actually end was pushed to November 30, a month later, to give the league and the players time to continue to bargain before the seemingly inevitable happens. We’re two days out from that date now, and things aren’t looking great as far as resolutions go.
The WNBA recently made a proposal that generated headlines, with a new maximum salary for players of $1.1 million. That might not sound like much, but remember that players in the W aren’t pulling in what their NBA counterparts are — a $1.1 million maximum salary is a massive jump from the current max of just under $250,000. The problem, as multiple outlets have brought up in the week-plus since this offer, is that the salary the WNBA is offering in this proposal isn’t actually for $1.1 million.
As Front Office Sports reported almost immediately, for instance, “Multiple sources familiar with the league’s labor negotiations said that the numbers are misleading. While salaries can reach a maximum of more than $1.1 million in the league’s offer, the base supermax contract would still pay between $800,000 and $850,000 annually—as was the case in early October. The $1.1 million figure represents combined earnings from a base salary and additional potential revenue sharing, the league sources said. Under the league’s offer, no player would sign a contract in 2026 with a base salary of $1.1 million.”
There’s also this enormous, distracting wrinkle to consider:
Potential earnings have been touted by the WNBA in recent years to promote the perception of higher salaries. In 2022, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert asserted under the league’s pay structure a top player could make up to $700,000 annually, more than triple the base supermax salary in the WNBA at the time. In order for those potential earnings to become a reality, though, a player would have to earn bonuses throughout the regular season and be signed to a player marketing agreement.
PMAs, which can earn players up to $250,000, began during the 2021–22 offseason. However, most star players opted not to sign PMA deals with the league because they found them to limit other potential earnings from their name, image, and likeness.
So it’s not actually “$1.1 million,” it’s the “Pell grant recipients can have student-loan debt relief” of salary structures, the kind of thing that looks good until someone thinks about it for a few seconds and goes, hey, hold on now.
Defector made another point worth noting, too, which is the timing of this: “Veteran observers of these sorts of negotiations would have arched an eyebrow at the framing and timing of this report. The current CBA is set to expire on Nov. 30, and league-friendly sources leaking a big, shiny number like $1.1 million as the deadline approaches is a tried and true method for setting the terms of debate heading into a work stoppage. We tried to make them all millionaires, and they walked away from the table.”
The issue is that the players want a greater share of the revenue from the league — it’s not that they are demanding to make, to the dollar, what their NBA player cousins do. It’s that they want the same kind of revenue-sharing arrangement, which is around 50 percent, as the NBA: instead, the WNBA has a 9.3 percent revenue-sharing setup, and the growth beyond that is entirely based on whether the league is able to surpass certain revenue targets, and then only a percentage of the additional revenue made on top of those targets is shared. It’s an absurd system that was designed to protect the WNBA when it was smaller, but the popularity — and revenue — of the league has exploded in recent years. There’s a reason the players opted out of the CBA early, because it serves a reality that no longer exists, on top of the fact that it turns out that the league was using complicated math to obscure how much revenue they wouldn’t have to share.
Given said exploding popularity and revenue, I’m with women’s basketball announcer Ryan Ruocco in believing that a lockout would be a massive “own goal” for the league. The problem seems to be that the league doesn’t want to admit that the grift is over. They know how popular the league is, but can’t seem to bring themselves to admit that said popularity of not just the league but the players — and now-widespread knowledge of how little they are compensated — means that they can no longer hoard the ever-growing pie for themselves.
At a certain level for players it’s tough to get fans on your side en masse because they see the salary numbers and lose all sense — yeah sure owners are worth billions and keep lining their pockets, but player salaries are the issue! — but it works the other way, too. A not insignificant problem for MLB with minor leaguers, prior to their unionization, was everyone realizing they make more money than an entire set of professional baseball players do. It’s easy, for some fans, to get mad at the guy making $35 million a year to strike out in a big moment and to feel like they’re a bum. The guy making $6,000 a year just trying to make it in the game, though? You’re a different kind of ass if you don’t feel for their situation.
The WNBA is paying more than MLB was (and is) for minor-league players, and in no way at all is this an implication that the WNBA and its players are minor-league, but it’s a similar setup in terms of people being surprised at how little those players are making, especially relative to league revenue, and how clearly, obviously the league itself is screwing the players in terms of who is actually making out alright here.
The WNBA doesn’t have a support base, is the thing: even fans who might think player demands in a vacuum are some bullshit don’t have a retort for “they only get 9 percent of the league’s revenue instead of half” once they realize the players aren’t asking for NBA-level contracts in terms of pure dollars. And the fact there is no deal here, and the W is still attempting to win the media battle shortly before the second deadline, should tell you all you need to know about their seriousness in addressing the actual issues. They very well might go to a lockout before actually solving a problem that everyone knows they need to solve.
SB Nation’s Swish Appeal had a breakdown of what’s at stake here just in terms of the offseason: 80 percent of the league are free agents, there are two expansion teams coming who do not yet have a date set for an expansion draft, and free agency can’t begin until the expansion draft occurs. It’s a mess, and it’s only going to get messier the longer the league continues to act as if they have a real chance at maintaining a status quo that the WNBA has outgrown.
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