Five Out: A Studbudz Takeover, The Art of Labor Negotiations and the WNBA's NBA Problem...

In a labor heavy column, we take a look at some of the good around All-Star weekend and the big CBA discussions that are coming out of it as we enter the second half of the WNBA regular season.

Whew, what a weekend. As many of you that follow No Cap Space know, we had Tyler and Chauny in Indianapolis providing Boots on the Ground coverage for All-Star. Tyler ended up having a nice cameo on the Studbudz stream and thankfully we didn’t have to issue a statement for it.

If you’re subscribed to the Ball-Knowers tier you’ve already gotten some exclusive content from Indy with a couple more pieces coming in the next few days. I just want to give a quick shoutout to our paid subscribers because that kind of travel doesn’t happen without you guys. So for all that watch, subscribe, share, like and more, we appreciate you immensely.

But now we have a second half of the WNBA season to get to and a whole lot more content on the way.

To the column…

1. Studbudz saved All Star Weekend and created some of the best athlete content in a decade

Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman are two of the newest media stars in the women’s basketball ecosystem with their Twitch channel, hilariously named Studbudz. They had made lofty promises leading into All-Star that they would be streaming for 72 hours straight, highlighting everything from IV’s in their hotel room after a night of partying to hijinks at the game and telling Diplo his music sucks (a highlight for me, personally). It was a total throwback, something pulled out of the early days of Twitter when the appeal of the app was celebrities being, well, normal.

What we got from the Studbudz this weekend was probably one of the most authentic peeks behind the curtain we’ve gotten of professional athletes in an extremely long time. Instead of players coming out after the fact and recounting stories on podcasts, we got to see it unfold by the minute, from parties to pregame tunnel walks to just hanging around in between events. What made it even better was that it wasn’t just Williams and Hiedeman. Nearly every player present at All-Star made an appearance including Caitlin Clark who was so enthralled watching the stream she had to come down and be a part of it. It allowed so many athletes, who have carefully curated their brands to be as non-controversial as possible, to let their guard down and just be themselves with those that they’re comfortable with. I’m sure managers and agents worried about what would happen on the stream and, to be clear, there were a couple moments early on that made you go “okay, maybe let’s cut the cameras for a second”, but generally it was just a fun way of bringing everyone into WNBA All-Star weekend.

I’d tell everyone to appreciate what we saw because we aren’t going to get it again. The likeliest situation going forward will be the corporate dollars roll in, make some demands about what should and shouldn’t be shown and we get a watered down but still enjoyable version of the show. Williams and Hiedeman are such a great tandem that there’s no way they’re going to become completely capital driven overnight. But seeing Cathy Engelbert getting down to Knuck If You Buck while Courtney Williams basically hard launches every Sapphic relationship in the league? Yeah, I’m not sure we’re ever getting that again.

So enjoy it while the clips are here. You’ve witnessed history. Be proud of that.

2. Indianapolis (and the W) appeared ready for the moment

Whatever you may think of the city, the fanbase or the Indiana Fever as an organization, Indianapolis threw one hell of an event this weekend.

I think there’s a fair argument to be made that the Studbudz actually helped juice some of the enthusiasm as it became clear rather quickly that they brought the party with them. But even the photos trickling out of the bars and clubs, the events that were put on during the day and the crowd during the skills challenge pointed to Indianapolis being ready for the moment. Notably, we had no issues reported of any types of fans being outwardly problematic towards players on or off the floor. A positive component of the ubiquity of the Studbudz stream was that if anyone was acting out of pocket in their vicinity, it would’ve been picked up live.

Generally, I think Indianapolis has gotten a really bad rap lately as a WNBA city. There is historical context and precedent about racist behavior in the stands (ask Knicks fans that were around for the Pacers rivalry in the 90’s) but generally, the atmosphere in Gainbridge hasn’t warranted the reputation it’s been saddled with the past two seasons. Are there individual bad actors in a sea of upwards of 20,000 screaming fans? I have no doubt. We’ve all seen the early season videos from outside the arena. But the idea that All-Star wouldn’t work in the city, should be boycotted by the players or even the fans was a ridiculous assertion on a multitude of levels. Curiously, I saw plenty of media folks that were soft-peddling that take for the last year or so enjoying themselves in Indy on social media. Funny how that works.

Beyond that though, the success of an All-Star weekend is whether or not the host, host city and the league are in lock step on how to keep fans involved every day. Look to how much the WNBA botched 2022 All-Star in Chicago for an idea of what bad can look like. In Indy, we saw cohesion. Players got up for the different camps and events around town, Unrivaled came in and brought their own announcements with them, we saw plenty of high level panel discussions and a packed house for the games themselves. While the game is hit-and-miss in terms of how hard people play (and this year was a bit of a tough watch, if we’re being honest), the weekend in its entirety is a barometer of how people feel about the league. As far as that component is concerned, Indy knocked it out of the park.

3. The Bad Faith arguments around CBA Negotiations are exhausting

Do you know how bad the discourse has to be for me and Dave Portnoy to agree on something? And no, under no circumstances do you gotta hand it to him but lord when the guy dressed in full Fever kit sitting courtside is the voice of reason then we may have lost the plot entirely.

Let’s start here: the problem with the WNBA’s CBA negotiations is that neither you nor I know the league’s actual financials.

Sure, Grok or the Google AI says the league is losing money, but they all refer to the same source: a years old statement from Adam Silver saying the league loses about $10 million on average. It says something about how vague the WNBA is about their money that more often than not, people are parroting a quote from seven years ago and taking it as fact.

“But Andrew, what about the New York Post article from 2024!?”

I’m glad you asked! Let’s talk about this 2024 “exclusive” Post story that claims, via an NBA executive source, that the WNBA was slated to lose roughly $40 million last season. For starters, one of the initial claims in the article is false. The NBA doesn’t own ‘nearly 60 percent’ of the WNBA. That number is actually 42.1 percent, an easily findable number if you don’t work for a Murdoch owner tabloid.

The piece then states that the league is on track to lose $40 million, a bit better than the $50 million that had been reported by Front Office Sports and the Washington Post earlier in the year.

But at the very bottom of the story, what appears to be the same anonymous NBA team executive crushing the WNBA in the Post gives away the game completely.

“They are consolidating it with NBA financials,” the team executive told the Post. “By consolidating numbers, you don’t have to break out any of them.”

Which means that as easily as the WNBA could be losing money, the NBA could also be hiding losses on the W’s balance sheet and claiming that it’s a women’s basketball problem instead. Without actually breaking them out, no one actually has a legitimate understanding of where the league’s money is coming in or going out.

So all that’s left is following the actual money we see and when you see skyrocketing expansion fees, massive capital injections in the form of sponsorships and investment, TV deals delivering orders of magnitude more profit in the years ahead, it makes you scratch your head a bit. All of that money has to go towards something, right?

The NBA employs substantially more people than the WNBA and Cathy Engelbert isn’t making more money than Adam Silver. So, again, what exactly is all the overhead that is draining all of the money that is coming into the W? Additionally, the source quoted in the post argued that NBA owners aren’t seeing any profit from the WNBA’s expansion fees. But I personally find that hard to square with Sportico’s reporting that expansion isn’t diluting the NBA’s 42.1% share of the league, instead cutting into WNBA owners slice. So on some level, yes, they are seeing that money. That’s before the TV deal kicks in, which effectively would wipe out the supposed ‘annual losses’ the league is currently seeing.

Ultimately, it’s an argument of fans wanting to see the NBA owners get paid back for helping to prop up the start of the WNBA. To which I’ll argue, who on earth cares? If a billionaire wanted to throw their money at something for awhile and is annoyed that they aren’t getting an instant return, why should I care? It isn’t my money. It isn’t yours either. They aren’t using that money to pay a higher tax share that can be advanced for the public good. They’re not even being the benevolent billionaires of the Gilded Age and building lasting pieces of public infrastructure that will allow their names to be remembered in the way we do Carnegie or Rockefeller. If your argument on why WNBA players shouldn’t be paid more is because you’re upset at someone else’s investment return, maybe it’s time to go outside and touch grass.

4. The WNBA is right where they should be and have a historical analog to play off of…

Let’s dive into a bit of labor history with the W’s partner league, the NBA.

Established in 1954 with Boston Celtics guard Bob Cousey leading the way, the National Basketball Players Association sought for some of the most basic worker rights associated with sports. It took them ten years to be officially recognized by the league.

The first major labor action was a wildcat strike organized by another Celtic legend, Tommy Heinsohn, in 1964, at the NBA All-Star game. It was one of the first major televised events in the league history and, without warning, players refused to come out of the locker room unless the league met their demands: pensions for players, athletic trainers for every team and the elimination of a Sunday matinee game that came directly after Saturday night matchups (what is now known as a back-to-back).

12 years later, Oscar Robertson took the NBA to court after filing an antitrust lawsuit, arguing that the league violated labor law by effectively disallowing free agency. Eventually, in 1976, both sides settled which effectively created free agency. Players would now have a right of first refusal to talk to any team and then present the offer to their old team, which would then get 15 days to match or improve the offer or let them walk.

By 1982 — 36 years after the creation of the NBA and 28 years after the formation of the Union —, the league was in a terrible financial situation. According to the Washington Post, just 7 out of 23 teams were profitable. The league was reportedly losing between 15 and 20 million dollars a year while teams had an average payroll of about $2,952,000. The average attendance was a shade over 10,000 people for 41 home games.

Aiming to try and rein in runaway salaries among the top players in the league and try to establish some type of player-owner partnership, the NBA reached a landmark agreement: a revenue sharing model, the first of its kind in American pro sports. The players would get 53% of all revenue in the league and established a salary cap.

So think about things in this respect…

There was once a league that was losing money, where over two thirds of the teams weren’t operating at a profit and four were in danger of folding or relocating but all the other financial indicators pointed to a league on the precipice of a breakthrough. Magic Johnson and Larry Bird were already four and five years into their careers, James Worthy was a rookie and Michael Jordan was two years away from being drafted.

And yet, the union and ownership agreed on a salary structure that simultaneously allowed the players to cash in on the growth of the game in a sustainable way. But if the argument in 1982 is “the league or teams aren’t making money, so why should they get 53% of the revenue share?”, we may not get the subsequent 40 years of basketball growth in this country.

Just some food for thought when you consider the W’s age relative to the NBA’s.

5. The league also has an NBA problem…

All that history is a necessary pretext to discuss the next wrinkle of this discourse. There’s far too many people treating the WNBA as if they should have similar financials to the NBA, NHL, NFL or MLB when the W has been operating for a quarter of the time. In reality, the only contemporary analogy is Major League Soccer while the best historical comparison is the one laid out above.

The reality of the situation is that as long as the NBA owns 42% of the WNBA, there is always going to be an issue of shady finances and creative accounting. Even if the W achieves financial solvency and manages to pay back everything that NBA owners put into the league in full, who is to say that it all goes back to normal from there?

I’ve always been of the mindset that, on some level, the WNBA is a bit of a shell game for its’ parent league. Cathy Engelbert, a former Deloitte executive, being the commissioner of the W feels a bit on the nose sometimes if the belief is that the NBA wants its sister league to be a place that operates with low overhead and high incomes. If you see the league through the prism of a bunch of billionaires wanting to park their bad money somewhere while still pulling nearly half of the profits associated with it, a lot of what’s happening inside seems to make a bit more sense.

WNBA owners, new ones with money to spend and an ambition to make the league something more, have either alluded to or outright stated that they feel there is a ceiling to how much they can do as long as the NBA’s Board of Governors looms like a shadow.

I’ll pull a quote from former Atlanta Dream co-owner Suzanne Abair, talking to David Berri for a Global Sports Matters piece…

“If the 12 WNBA owners say they want to do something and the NBA says no, the answer is no.”

Which is why I don’t blame WNBA owners, those not connected to the NBA at least, for feeling like they’re trying to succeed in a game where the rules are inherently flawed.

As it currently stands, six of the league’s 13 teams have ownership groups that also own NBA franchises. That number will bump to nine once Toronto (MLSE), Cleveland (Dan Gilbert) and Detroit (Gores family) inevitably enter the mix. The issue is that the more teams that enter the mix, the more diluted WNBA owners power is. According to reporting by Sportico, expansion doesn’t touch the NBA’s 42% ownership stake nor the 16% owned by outside private equity.

In essence, the WNBA is incentivized to give new expansion franchises to already established NBA owners to protect the potential dilution of WNBA owner power. On some level, having more NBA owners involved in the financial viability of the product is good for labor because it forces them to look at the investments as less a shell game and more an active property. But on the other end, it also surrenders more power to the NBA, who already has a league of their own to worry about and are, at the end of the day, still billionaires who want to make money with minimal labor interference.

In a perfect world, the WNBA would break away from the NBA , allowing the league to flourish on its own and court investors who believe in the long term viability of the product. It would also allow for higher probabilities of increased revenue sharing given there isn’t a cut that has to go to the partner league first. Unfortunately, given the trajectory of the W and how the partnership only appears to be deepening, I doubt we see that happen.

Which means the players and their union will have to fight an uphill battle against owners, private equity investors, the NBA Board of Governors and NBA fans all to willing to do the Board’s bidding of turning public opinion against labor advancements.

To wrap this up, I leave everyone with this. The players have never asked for nor have they advocated for a revenue split that is similar to the NBA, NFL or MLB. They’ve never advocated for league minimums or maximums on par with their male counterparts. It’s just about being asked to be paid fairly, what is owed for the work that has led to this astronomical growth in investment across the league. If you don’t believe in fairness in pay, maybe ask yourself this question — “why am I against women’s basketball players being paid more?” — and figure out why your answer is what it is.