Napheesa Collier, Cathy Engelbert and the Battle For the Future of Women’s Basketball

The heavyweight labor clash between the WNBA and its players was always expected to come. But this battle has gone far beyond dollars and cents and into territory that could alter the league forever.

Napheesa Collier was eloquent and incisive. Her exit interview statement this week was no off-the-cuff frustration over an injury sustained during a physical playoff series. Nor was it a defeatist rant after a pair of seasons that felt incomplete. Instead, Collier’s searing assessment of WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert was so thorough that the league office couldn’t even outright deny some of the claims made by one of the games biggest stars .

The message was sent, received and broadcast all over the sports world: there is a trust that has been broken and a baseline level of respect that hasn’t been adhered to. With more deadlines looming between the WNBA and the player’s association, every option is now on the table in a way it hasn’t been before. Make no mistake, this is a major inflection point for the game. This may appear to be a war of words between the league commissioner and one of the best three women’s basketball players in the world. But beneath that, this is a battle of ideology powered by five decades of sacrifice in service of a greater good.

While it can be easy to assume that Cathy Engelbert is just an accounting suit with no knowledge or care of women’s basketball, the reality of her background makes everything about this a bit more complex. She was once a player herself, walking on to and eventually becoming a team captain at Lehigh under Muffet McGraw. This was in the 1980’s, when the sport was experiencing a period of astronomical growth. Title IX opened the door for women’s college basketball and, after a decade under the auspices of the AIAW, the NCAA took over governance of the game in 1982. What came next was a revolution that helped lay the groundwork for the WNBA.

Those that supported the move saw a chance to grow, albeit in a more limited capacity, via a sustainable financial floor that could help build a foundation for the sport. The NCAA offered institutional backing that the AIAW simply couldn’t at the time. In the near term, it resulted in a decade of modernization that helped jumpstart programs like USC, Auburn and Texas.

But it came at a cost.

Without the ability to govern themselves, women’s basketball became constricted. It took a 2021 gender equality review to prompt multiple changes involving the NCAA women’s basketball tournament. Individual schools didn’t even start receiving shares of the tourney’s broadcast revenue until 2025 and, even now, the rights for the event (estimated to be anywhere between $81 million and $112 million on its own, according to media consultants John Kosner and Ed Desser) are considered to be massively undervalued. Part of the reason is because the NCAA packages the women’s basketball tournament with multiple other sports, from baseball to gymnastics. Without the ability to send their biggest product to open market, women’s hoops lagged behind their male counterparts for decades.

But even knowing what we know now, the consensus among players and coaches of that era seems to be that the decision to go with the NCAA was the right one. There was no promise that the AIAW would have survived or gotten the needed revenue support from TV networks or sponsors. While the sport grew at the college level, professional women’s basketball leagues came and went. In those early days, pragmatism was the name of the game. The player’s leverage was limited, the financial safety nets weren’t established and the marketing of the product was hopelessly confused.

And yet, the three year period between 1995 and 1998 showed that public interest existed. On the heels of two major milestones in women’s basketball — UConn’s 35-0 perfect season and Team USA’s Olympic gold medal win in Atlanta — two separate professional women’s basketball leagues popped up. The American Basketball league, or ABL, was founded in 1995. In April of 1996, just months before the ABL’s first competitive season, NBA commissioner David Stern announced the founding of the WNBA.

The ABL played in the winter, competing with the NBA but offered higher salaries.

The WNBA season was in the summer, was bankrolled by a secure partner league and had a staunch ally in Stern, who genuinely seemed to want to see the the project succeed.

While both leagues initially competed with each other for players and resources, eventually the bill came due. Unable to compete with the WNBA’s financial power (in the form of the NBA’s backing and early subsidies), the ABL abruptly declared bankruptcy in 1998 and suspended operations. There’s no way of knowing what might have happened if the league that was independent of the NBA had been able to survive instead. Maybe the WNBA would’ve just bought or merged with the ABL anyway. For whatever it’s worth, wherever we are now, that the NBA’s early support of the W kept it from falling by the wayside as well.

But while corporate dollars still appeared ambivalent about supporting women’s professional basketball, the public didn’t take as much convincing. From 1997-2002, the WNBA enjoyed smashing success on NBC. According to Sports Business Journal, the 1999 regular season cable ratings outpaced the NHL, who had just inked a 5 year/$600 million TV rights deal the year prior. The W averaged more than 10,000 fans per game, a mark that took the NBA 29 seasons to reach. Everything seemed set up for the nascent league to reap all the rewards of a wave of support for women’s sports, from soccer to basketball. The players earned a landmark victory with their 1999 CBA, taking home, among other things…

• A 75 percent minimum salary increase for rookies.

• A 100 percent minimum salary increase for veterans.

• Insurance and retirement plans

• A maternity policy

• Royalty percentages on player-identified licensed products

Much like 2025, it was a major inflection point for the players. The TV numbers exceeded all expectations, fans were packing arenas and the early stars of the WNBA were household names. With the league willing to grant so many baseline necessities in the first CBA, one would think the next chapter in this story is the WNBA reaping a major financial windfall in the form of a TV deal, right?

Wrong.

The NBA signed a $765 million a year television deal with ESPN/ABC. Not a single dollar was devoted towards rights fees for the WNBA in spite of ratings that were on par with another major male sports league.

It was during the life of this deal that professional women’s basketball had the misfortune of crossing paths with Mark Shapiro. An ESPN executive who was one of the decision makers on network programming, Shapiro couldn’t even hide his disdain for having to air women’s games and allegedly told David Stern to his face that, effectively, the league and sport sucked. What came next could be best described as malicious compliance, as Shapiro placed the league almost exclusively on ESPN2 and rarely, if ever, programmed women’s basketball to be shown on ESPN or ABC. The WNBA’s ratings cratered and the self-fulfilling prophecy of “the league doesn’t make any money” began to calcify in the minds of the average American sports fan.

For much of this period, it could be pretty easily argued that the league was tolerated, at best. At worst, it was deliberately given impossible challenges designed to make the WNBA flounder, fail and be the subject of ridicule. That instability forced players that wanted to play professionally in the United States to condition themselves to just be grateful for whatever they could get. Many players, especially those in the 2000’s and 2010’s grew up in an era before the WNBA and thus understood the idea that it could, on some level, all go away. Anytime players went to the negotiating table for collective bargaining, they were met with the same general response: “you don’t make money, you don’t have any other options and you probably aren’t all going to go to Europe. Take the deal we give you.”

While some players stood against that concept, many began to adopt pragmatism as a survival strategy. Every subsequent CBA involved the player’s association fighting with one hand tied around their back. While maybe not by design, the move to ESPN/ABC kneecapped the players labor power to such a degree it took them over 25 years to get back to a place of leverage similar to that of the 1999 CBA. But don’t just take my word for it, listen to those like Stanford legend Kate Starbird who actually played in the league at the time…

When Collier spoke on Tuesday, there was no cloud of insecurity hanging over her. She clearly and effectively staked a negotiating position and immediately received backup from other stars in the league. None of the biggest names in the WNBA seem afraid that a work stoppage could bring the sport to a cataclysmic halt, ending the massive progress of the last five plus years. In fact, many appeared to be empowered by one of their own taking such a clear and bold stance against one of the main authority figures in their league. If you were to read this week another way, you could perceive Collier’s statement as a message to the other stakeholders of the WNBA: We’ll negotiate with you, but Cathy needs to go,

Quite a fall from grace for a commissioner that seemed uniquely in tune with her players when she first got started.

It feels far off now, but Engelbert’s early tenure as WNBA commissioner was generally successful. She was instrumental in closing strategic partnerships with Google, AT&T, Nike and Deloitte. The WNBA also worked with Dick’s Sporting Goods in a merchandising deal that put the league’s gear in their stores for the first time ever. Players seemed to get along well with her and, in 2020, Engelbert played a consequential role in one of the largest and most successful political athlete movements in American sports history.

Even Terri Jackson, the Executive Director of the WNBA player’s union, lauded the WNBA commissioner for how she navigated the COVID pandemic, the ‘Wubble’ and the summer of activism stemming from the murder of George Floyd.

“She was very determined,” Jackson told ESPN in 2021, “Without Cathy’s resolve, I really don’t know if we would have had a season.”

“It’s been inspiring to work with Cathy,” said Nneka Ogwumike that same year, “Especially in times that have historically driven players and leagues apart.”

Yes, this is the same Cathy Engelbert you’ve been reading about in the news all week.

When Georgia Senator Kelly Loeffler, who was a minority owner of the Atlanta Dream at the time, wrote a public letter objecting to players wearing shirts that said “Black Lives Matter” and “Say Her Name” (referencing the murder of Breonna Taylor in Louisville), it triggered widespread condemnation from almost everyone in the WNBA. After the shooting of Jacob Blake in late August of 2020, the commissioner stood behind her players as they went on strike for two days.

While Engelbert didn’t try to force a sale of Loeffler’s stake in the Dream, she didn’t try to silence her players voices as previous commissioner’s had tried to do.

“ I’m committed to making sure that the players’ platform -- to vigorously advocate for social justice -- is what we’re dedicating this season to,” Engelbert told CNN in 2020. Again, this is a woman who four years later sat on CNBC and effectively welcomed the racist undertones of a burgeoning rivalry between Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.

Players openly campaigned for Loeffler’s congressional opponent as the 2020 postseason tipped off while pressuring her to divest from the W. Not only did Loeffler eventually sell her stake in the team, the mobilization of WNBA players is widely credited for her electoral loss to Reverend Raphael Warnock.

It’s hard to think that the Cathy Engelbert that is mispronouncing names of league award winners, wearing a New York skyline printed dress to a Finals elimination game that included the Liberty and openly welcomed a racial culture war in order to position a WNBA “Magic vs. Bird” moment is the same person that stood firmly with her players against an owner.

But around 2022, Engelbert’s tone towards her league started to change.

“In the collective bargaining agreement that I was part of when I came in, we tripled the pay of the top players in the WNBA,” Engelbert told TIME Magazine that year. “With bonuses, players can now make $650,000. For four-and-a-half months of work, that isn’t bad. I wish my daughter who graduated from college four years ago would have that opportunity, but she doesn’t, right? We’re making enormous progress.”

Keep in mind, in this same interview the Commissioner highlighted the WNBA’s investment inequity, citing that the league’s viewership was on par with the NHL, NASCAR and MLS but the media rights payments for those leagues was orders of magnitude larger than the W’s.

What happened in the last couple of years? It’s important to note that Engelbert serves at the behest of a consortium of interests. There’s the NBA as an entity, which owns 42 percent of the WNBA. 16 percent belongs to a group of investors that were part of a 2022 capital raise. The remainder is technically owned by the WNBA owners but some also have NBA ownership stakes while a mix of owners were involved in the capital raise. That’s a long way of saying that there’s a lot of interests, financial power players and egos that are demanding a lot of different things from the commissioner. But are they okay with how Engelbert has handled this process? And, if they are, is this even who players want to be in business with?

The most charitable interpretation would be that Engelbert is operating at the behest of the NBA and its ownership, private equity stakeholders *and* independent WNBA governors. It’s entirely plausible that the differing agendas between each faction has created a muddled and incoherent message from the commissioner. If you wanted to extend more grace to Engelbert, you could make a reasonable argument that a woman that grew up in the sport and has shown immense care for it in the past is trying to maintain some semblance of stability and security in a world where it feels as though women’s rights are being legislatively chipped away. As our friend Seerat Sohi of The Ringer wrote this week, the pitfall with that type of mindset is that it’s “designed to engender self-doubt”. On the one end, you have a league office that seems to believe in incrementalism because of the inherent safety it can provide and on the other, a union of players looking at the numbers and realizing that they do, in fact, have options.

However you want to view Cathy Engelbert, either as a positive-but-complicated force or atrophying symbol of a bygone era, there is no debate that she massively miscalculated.

Collier stood up in front of the press on Tuesday and excoriated the commissioner, alleging that Engelbert not only didn’t reach out after the Lynx superstar’s injury but that she disparaged the WNBA biggest rising phenom, Caitlin Clark, in a separate conversation.

“I also asked how she planned to fix the fact that players like Caitlin [Clark], Angel [Reese] and Paige [Bueckers], who are clearly driving massive revenue for the league, are making so little for their first four years,” said Collier. “Her response was, ‘Caitlin should be grateful. She makes 16 million off the court because without the platform that the WNBA gives her, she wouldn’t make anything.’ In that same conversation, she told me, ‘Players should be on their knees, thanking their lucky stars for the media rights deal that I got them.’ That’s the mentality driving our league from the top.”

Regardless of whatever Engelbert believes, that comment is egregious on a number of levels. It’s insulting, short sighted, strategically disastrous and socially inept. Clark has indicated in the past that she has an interest in leveraging her individual power for the good of the league. Former Fever President Allison Barber revealed in September of 2024 that the rookie superstar tried to negotiate spot bonuses for away teams that moved into larger arenas for their games. Even if she isn’t as outspoken as some veterans in the league, most reporting indicates Clark understands her individual power and is curious about how to use it. Her professional foil, Angel Reese, possesses that same understanding but instead communicates her advocacy in a very different way.

“I need to be in the [CBA] meetings because I’m hearing that if [the league] don’t give us what we want, we’re sitting out,” Reese said in a March episode of her podcast Unapologetically Angel.

Even A’ja Wilson, who initially appeared cool on the concept of a work stoppage back in March, seems to have swung completely in light of Collier’s statements.

“I was honestly disgusted by the comments that [Engelbert] made,” said Wilson on Thursday. “But at the same time, I’m very appreciative that we have people like [Collier] in our committee of our player’s association representing us, because that’s what we’re going to [need] to continue to make the push to stand on what we believe in.”

From a business perspective, this is a nightmare for the WNBA as well as the NBA. If the player’s association wanted to consider the nuclear option — disbanding their union in order to bring forth an antitrust lawsuit as the NBPA did in 2011 — it’s a tool available to them. It only bolsters a case that Engelbert is already in the middle of a firestorm surrounding the Connecticut Sun and the league’s treatment of the Mohegan Tribe’s attempt to sell the franchise. There’s not many professional sports commissioners that are on the receiving end of a letter from a U.S. Senator threatening an antitrust investigation.

Unlike past CBA fights, there are plenty of alternative league available to players. Playing abroad is always an option while Unrivaled is adding more names and traveling to new cities in year two. Additionally, four other five-on-five leagues — Athlete’s Unlimited, Upshot, Exalt and the WPBA — are either already in operation or preparing for their inaugural seasons and I’m sure they’d be happy to be a home for any WNBA player looking for one,

Some have expressed concern over Collier’s attachment to Unrivaled and the potential conflict of interest it could create with regard to a WNBA labor fight but that’s dependent on perspective. While Unrivaled clearly was built as a league that could exist with long term sustainability and self sufficiency in mind, Collier’s Tuesday statement seems to be rooted in a care for the WNBA that goes beyond a business transaction.

It’s that care, inherent in every WNBA player whether they know it or not, that is so revolted by Engelbert’s general attitude towards the players and league as a whole lately. It may be behavior coming from the commissioner but it tugs at a deeper nerve near the heart of this labor fight,

For over a century, women’s basketball has fought for recognition. From Senda Berenson Abbott to the ladies of Nashville Business College, the Flying Queens of Wayland Baptist to the Mighty Macs of Immaculata, every generation in the sport has stood on the shoulders of a prior generation. To simply be a women’s athlete in that era was a cultural statement, even if that wasn’t the intent of each player that stepped on the court. It required fight to play pickup, to demand respect of the sports world and to persist in spite of the inequities that linger even today.

What the WNBA, NBA, league owners, private equity and Engelbert don’t seem to understand is that this current generations have the same fight as their Title IX forebears with none of the fear about scarcity. Keep in mind, Collier was born in 1996. At no point in the Lynx superstar’s life has she known a world without professional basketball. The illusion of insecurity doesn’t work on people like her, A’ja Wilson, Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Paige Bueckers or anyone on the way up. They aren’t necessarily entitled to a professional sports league but they all seem to be secure in the idea that they are deserving of one. When you factor in that every business metric indicates a major appetite for the game in any format, Engelbert and the league’s condescending position looks more and more incomprehensible.

While the WNBA commissioner disagreed with Collier’s characterization of their conversations, including the one regarding Clark, Engelbert didn’t explicitly deny that she said what she said.

So what comes next?

As far as I’m concerned, Collier fired the opening salvo this week. Ahead of the WNBA Finals, the commissioner’s annual pre-series press conference is scheduled as usual. It will be the most important one of Engelbert’s career as rumors swirl of her possible departure from her role next year.

Ink is rightly and understandably being spilled over the comments made about Clark and the sheer preposterousness of the league’s power broker speaking that way about the W’s biggest lottery ticket, publicly or privately. But this labor fight is about more than Caitlin Clark.

This is the culmination of a fight that’s been happening for decades. It’s the most consequential labor fight in the history of women’s basketball. Players haven’t had this much leverage since 1999 with regards to performance metrics like average attendance and TV ratings. Every single star appears aligned in their understanding that this is *the* moment to exercise their collective power. Popular opinion has swung against a league commissioner whose heel turn against her own players is as strange and is it is illogical. Unrivaled proved that TV networks, in dire need of live sports to bolster streaming services and linear programming blocks, don’t seem super concerned about whether or not a league has the backing of the NBA.

Would a work stoppage impact the WNBA the same way it did the NHL or MLB? Perhaps. Investors could be scared away by the instability and the public could turn against a labor movement to the point that long term growth is impacted. But, even anecdotally, diehard fans of the WNBA generally appear to be more supportive of individual players over a team or organization. If you were to use Instagram followers as a proxy for popularity, no team in the league had a bigger presence on the platform than their own most followed player, according to a 2025 Sportico report. There is a groundswell here that is unique in sports labor negotiations.

Standing against seemingly every metric imaginable, the WNBA and NBA will try to paint a picture of a league on the brink. An overly physical, poorly officiated product that is too terminally online and still not seeing acceptable profits. It will be ego battling merit. The worst part of Engelbert’s alleged disrespect to Caitlin Clark wasn’t that it was about Caitlin Clark but that anyone should be grateful for accepting less in spite of delivering more. That’s a feeling many Americans, from WNBA players to any other industry across the country, have probably had at one point or another in their professional careers. All week, support for Collier and the players has come in from nearly every corner of the ideological spectrum.

If the coalition is big enough, some things can really change. What should hearten the people that believe that WNBA players should be paid what they are worth is that the players seem completely in control.

Napheesa Collier’s statement was calm, collected and precise. Much like her performance on the court, there were few, if any, wasted movements. Everything felt surgical, planned out and done with a plan already in mind for whatever came next. While Phoenix and Las Vegas prepared for the Finals tonight, players around the league have heard the call for another game and responded in kind.

They’re locked in. And they believe they can win.