It’s March, and that means madness.

I just didn’t realize that it would apply to the WNBA in addition to women’s college basketball.

And yet, here we are. Less than a week away from the March 10th deadline that will, more or less, define whether or not the 2026 WNBA season starts on time. Everything that’s leaked out into the press in the last six or so days indicates that we are headed for a conclusion, one way or another. Some players — on the higher end of the potential salary spectrum, it should be noted — began to position the WNBA’s latest offer as a winner and something that could end the stalemate between the league and union at last. Others — particularly those in rotational roles and playing in Athletes Unlimited specifically — adopted a posture that welcomed a work stoppage in order to accomplish the goals of the PA.

None of it gives the impression of a union in lockstep headed into the arguable climax of this negotiation. The 2025 All-Star game, in which players all wore shirts with ‘Pay us what you owe us’ emblazoned on the front, feels like a lifetime ago. Somehow, Napheesa Collier’s verbal dissection of WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert feels even further away despite happening more recently.

In the last week, WNBA agents of all stripes and representing roughly one-half to two-thirds of the league, sent a letter to the PA requesting better communication and information to discuss with their players. I spoke to one of the signatories late last week and they explained some of their frustration with the framing of the reporting. In essence, the issue wasn’t one of agents trying to flex their muscle to get a deal done.

Instead, my read on the situation appears to be that once league revenue targets were met, triggering revenue sharing with the players for the first time ever, the dam of solidarity broke. Players started to call their agents to figure out what that meant for them, and agents didn’t know. The PA, for their part, didn’t appear to prime anyone for that possibility well and now there’s open concern about whether or not revenue from the league’s marketing agreements will be disbursed to the players or if it is being held as something of a makeshift strike fund.

Just a few days after that letter made the media rounds, another bomb dropped which deepened the perceived fractures within the union. Stars like Kelsey Plum and Breanna Stewart started to strike a more conciliatory tone with the league’s offer, despite it not changing much over the last few weeks. Their remarks were punctuated by last night’s bombshell reporting that a letter, sent by Plum and Stewart, was sent to PA head Terri Jackson expressing, more or less, a lack of confidence in the unions communications with the players.

Now, with mere days until that March 10th deadline, it appears that the league is resolute in their offer and the PA doesn’t seem to know which way is up. That’s not a great dynamic to have if you’re a labor advocate.

Let me be clear and set the tone for the rest of this column: whatever the players decide here doesn’t need to be supported by WNBA fans but it must be accepted. At the end of the day, it’s easy to sit on the sideline and demand that people you don’t know lay their financial futures and wellbeing on the line while you risk nothing.

But it is okay to be disappointed. For the players, for American labor in the current cultural moment, and for the idea that collective action is better than going it alone.

The WNBA is likely to win this fight on their terms and while their offer represents an a compensation and quality-of-life increase for players the likes of which they’ve never seen before, it still falls short of the equity of the spoils of success the union and their advocates hoped for.

Much like the 2021 CBA, we’re likely to hear about how marginal increases are actually bigger wins and how the players are, to borrow a line from the ineffectual corporate class of political leaders in this country, ‘keeping their powder dry’ for the supposed real fight to come. Maybe they’re right and we are wrong. Maybe it was just too early and another three to four years of sustained success will make the battle against the league easier.

But given what I’ve watched transpire over the last few days, I don’t foresee a lot of labor wins for the WNBPA until some things seriously change. Whether that means Terri Jackson no longer is running the union or the current executive leadership, from three-term President Nneka Ogwumike to first-time Vice President Kelsey Plum, is voted out, there has to be a degree of accountability that has to come out of this.

Ultimately, the frustration fans are feeling this morning is a pretty simple feeling:

They cannot want it more than you do.

Scarcity mindset has infected the mind of the American worker for decades at this point while the crabs-in-a-barrel concept of rugged individualism has kneecapped labor movements over and over and over again. While WNBA fans on the side of the owners here seem to feel that the hold-up is being caused by older players aiming for one last payday, the reality emerging here is that of stars on the higher-end of the salary spectrum willing to sell out the rotational players for a few extra bucks and, in the younger superstars case, a faster path to max contracts.

Agents, reporters and larger institutional media outlets know that a strike would be a brutal hit to them and their livelihoods so naturally there’s reticence. Those that believed Unrivaled, and its player-owners at the top of the pyramid, were intentionally stalling these negotiations in order to make themselves the alternative league-of-choice have some egg on their face. But even for the nascent 3×3 league, it isn’t a good look when your two main owners, Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart, appear to be diametrically opposed to one another.

So what lessons can be learned here for the players?

In short, welcome to the big leagues of labor negotiation. The idea that WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, NBA commissioner Adam Silver and the rest of their cohort would act in good faith and truly reward their success was a myth from the jump. The outside observers like myself can be wrong, but it’s hard to shake the belief that there was some naïveté at play along with a fixation on aesthetic statements over real under-the-hood work.

Whether the union, and the players by extension, believe this next lesson or not is not up to me but it’s the truth: the media still plays a pretty integral role in how this stuff plays out. Unrivaled has this same problem too. Sure, players have their own audiences and, to some degree, don’t need us to be the ones telling their stories. But this offseason should be a real lesson for all the major stakeholders that players are busy people. Their job is not to be marketers or media people. They have teams for that. Whatever their opinions of us may be, there’s still utility in what we do and how we do it. Just ask WNBA/NBA leadership and the owners, who seem to have benefitted greatly from utilizing the more newsy reporters to get their message out.

Frankie De La Cretaz, friend of of NCS and publisher of the great newsletter Out of Your League, has pointed out numerous times that it doesn’t appear the PA has an internal or external communications role within the organization. In short, there’s no one handling the messaging to the players and to the public. The next time they come to the table for a CBA negotiation, there is simply no excuse to not have both of those positions staffed and filled.

The good news is that many of these issues that arose in this labor negotiation, however much longer it takes and however it ends, are fixable for the next one. But as we begin to inch closer to a conclusion here, it‘s okay for fans to be frustrated with how the final stretch is going down. At the end of the day, people want to see the players get what they’re owed because they know the sacrifices that have been made to even get the WNBA started.

That’s not to say this CBA process has been a failure for the union by any means. But the reality is that this has become, from the players side, a debacle in rather short order. Solidarity wins. Take a page out of the owners book. And even if you lose this battle, it’s important to remember that labor advocacy is a never-ending war. In a few years, the sticks will be sharpened and the time will come to meet at a negotiating table once more.

I just hope that next time, the union will have the right weapons at their disposal.