The WNBA Is at a Crossroads
The 2019 season marks the league’s last under its current CBA, and as tales have popped up over the past year—of players being poorly compensated, franchises being thrust out of their arenas, and teams not being treated with professionalism—the WNBPA’s upcoming fight could be its most important yet
On the eve of the 2019 WNBA season, the most important question facing the league is not how many bodies the Las Vegas Aces—coached by former Pistons great Bill Laimbeer and led by the frontcourt duo of Liz Cambage and A’ja Wilson—will leave in their wake (a lot, probably). Rather, the league’s most important action is set to happen off the court. The WNBA’s 23rd season looks like it will provide a watershed moment for the league, its players, and perhaps women’s sports as a whole.
Last November, the players’ labor union, the WNBPA, exercised its right to opt out of the collective bargaining agreement after this season rather than waiting until the deal expired in 2021. From now until Halloween, the new CBA deadline, the WNBA and its players will work to hammer out a new understanding of the league’s economic structure, and in the process present a referendum on the state of women’s professional sports in North America.
Professional is the operative word here. The WNBA is a professional basketball league, which is a jarringly obvious statement and at the same time the controversial crux of the league’s labor struggle. The WNBA’s players are paid, of course, but the past 12 months have produced one story after another that undermine the idea that they operate under what most male athletes would consider “professional” conditions.
Last year, the New York Liberty were moved from Madison Square Garden, where they’d played since the league’s inception in 1997, to the Westchester County Center in White Plains, 30 miles from Manhattan. Despite drawing nearly 10,000 fans a game at MSG, the Liberty were shuttled out to the suburbs to play in a 5,000-seat facility; as a result, their attendance dropped by 70 percent. (The Washington Mystics also moved last year from the 20,000-seat Capital One Arena to a 4,200-seat arena in Congress Heights.)
The Liberty’s move reportedly saved money in operating costs for then-owner James Dolan—who held the team in such contempt that in 2015 he handed the reins to Isiah Thomas, who was accused of sexually harassing an MSG employee in 2007, which led to an $11.6 million lawsuit against Dolan’s company. This in addition to Thomas’s abysmal decadeslong record as a basketball executive, in which he turned everything he touched from gold to shit—like the now-defunct Continental Basketball Association and the Knicks’ series of expensive failures in the mid-2000s. Dolan finally sold the Liberty to Nets minority owner Joseph Tsai this past winter, but the team will remain marooned in White Plains this season.
On August 3, 2018, the Las Vegas Aces had to forfeit a game after a series of canceled flights left them stranded on the road for more than 25 hours and got them to Washington, D.C., just a few hours before their scheduled tipoff against the Mystics. (Like all WNBA teams, the Aces fly commercial.) Despite the fact that this contest had an impact on the Aces’ playoff chances—the forfeit dropped them two and a half games out of the last playoff spot—all the league did was offer to move the game back an hour and briefly give the team permission to search for a charter flight (though none were available on such short notice).
This offseason, Mystics guard Kristi Toliver accepted an offer to work as an assistant coach for the Wizards. Both teams are owned by Ted Leonsis, which makes for an easy transition from playing women’s basketball to coaching men’s basketball under the same umbrella; this is how Becky Hammon first landed her assistant coaching gig with the San Antonio Spurs. And because blazing a trail matters more when others follow, the job offer for Toliver was a win for everyone involved.
Until it came down to pay. The league allows players to take offseason jobs, but there’s only a $50,000 total allowance per team if they work for the same corporate body that owns their WNBA club. So if Toliver wanted to be an NBA assistant coach for the Wizards—a position that typically comes with a six-figure salary—she’d have to take a salary of just $10,000, as much of the other $40,000 was already promised to her teammate, Elena Delle Donne, for other offseason work.
For this reason, players often spend their offseasons playing overseas, which brings in the potential for huge earnings but also a relentless travel grind and an increased risk of injury. For example: The reigning WNBA champion Seattle Storm will be without reigning league and finals MVP Breanna Stewart, who tore her Achilles tendon while playing for Dynamo Kursk in the Euroleague championship game this spring.
The day the WNBPA opted out of the existing CBA, union president Nneka Ogwumike, a forward for the Los Angeles Sparks, explained why in The Players’ Tribune: “In opting out of this CBA, our primary objective is full transparency,” Ogwumike wrote. “We just want information about where the league is as a business, so that we can come together and make sound decisions for the future of the game.”
All of the indignities WNBA players suffer—from a salary cap that limits individual players to a base salary of $117,500 a season and handcuffs their ability to pursue offseason jobs at a fair wage, to the Aces’ travel snafu, to the Liberty being punted out of New York City by absentee ownership—stem from the idea that women’s professional basketball is a money pit, and costs need to be reduced to keep the league viable.
Only nobody knows this for sure. The reason Ogwumike and her fellow players want transparency is that the NBA, the WNBA’s parent league, won’t open its books. So when NBA commissioner Adam Silver says the WNBA lost $12 million last year, we have no idea whether that’s the truth, the product of creative bookkeeping, or a total fabrication. And organized labor is certainly under no obligation to take management at its word. Asking the players and the public to accept that $12 million figure at face value is insulting enough, and the idea that a league that cleared $8 billion—billion, with a “b”—in revenue last year is fretting over less money than Mason Plumlee made this season is even worse.
Even that comparison is fraught, as WNBPA members have made a point to avoid measuring their salaries against those of NBA players. Last summer, a series of fabricated quotes made the rounds on the internet, in which WNBA All-Stars like Brittney Griner and Skylar Diggins-Smith supposedly bemoaned their lack of pay equity with NBA role players. Griner and Diggins-Smith said nothing of the sort, and in her Players’ Tribune article, Ogwumike rejected that idea out of hand: “Does this mean we’re all walking up to the league office tomorrow, arm in arm, and demanding some LeBron Money?” she wrote. “You have got to stop it with these wild comparisons, I swear. Get your money, LeBron, we appreciate you.”
What the players are after is a share of WNBA revenue commensurate with the share of NBA revenue NBA players make—about 50 percent. Last year, Forbes contributor David Berri quoted a source who said a conservative estimate of the WNBA’s revenue would be $60 million, of which the 137 players with available financial data (out of 144 total) take home just $12.3 million total, or 20.4 percent. “It’s about future generations who want to play the game at the highest level and want respect while doing so,” WNBPA executive director Terri Jackson told Katie Strang of The Athletic. “There’s opportunity in negotiating and writing a new CBA.” The members of the WNBPA aren’t just asking for more money, they’re asking to be treated like professionals.
Now, the WNBA has to decide what it is. As it currently operates, and to the detriment of its players and fans, it’s a fig leaf of feminism, a head fake in the direction of social progress that’s run like a charity trying to keep its losses down—not a professional sports league deserving of the short-term investment necessary to cultivate long-term success. If it wants to be the latter, clubs shouldn’t be chasing away 70 percent of their fans to save on electricity, missing games because of travel mishaps, or cultivating a salary structure in which players have to take offseason jobs.
The WNBPA has tried and failed to win this battle in the past, but women athletes are on the offensive now. There are still revanchist voices in the sports world who would rather women athletes just be quietly grateful for the limited opportunities they’re given, or better yet, stay out of sports altogether. But those voices don’t represent the prevailing trends in women’s sports.
The WNBPA’s struggle for recognition mirrors the ongoing battle women’s hockey players are waging against the male-dominated establishment. In 2017, the U.S. women’s national team staged an overwhelmingly successful boycott before the World Championship and won substantial concessions from USA Hockey. This year, when one of the two women’s pro hockey leagues in North America folded, more than 200 players came together to announce they would not play in the remaining league, the NWHL, until they were able to earn a living wage, among other demands. The motivation behind the boycott, and even the verbiage, mirrors what WNBPA leaders have said about respect and professionalism in the WNBA. Meanwhile, the U.S. women’s national soccer team will participate in the World Cup in France this summer, even as several of its players are suing the U.S. Soccer Federation for gender discrimination.
These are all related, necessary struggles, and they will remain so until immensely profitable corporate entities like the NBA don’t have to be shamed and browbeaten into scrounging around in the couch cushions for the meager sums required to provide a professional-quality environment for their professional athletes. Wilson and Cambage can’t pile up opponents’ corpses if their flight won’t get them to the arena on time, and if only 3,000 fans can make it out to a suburban field house to see it, it’s almost like it didn’t happen. If the NBA wants to be praised for subsidizing a professional women’s basketball league, the league ought to at least have professional-quality resources.
This piece has been updated with additional information after publication.