Ring the bells. Release the doves. Set the orange smoke and call Shams Charania, apparently.
The WNBA has a new collective bargaining agreement in place, at least verbally, between the league and its labor union. After a months long standoff that now feels reminiscent of a high school group project that was assigned in August and completed on the penultimate eve of the semester, the stakeholders got in a room and figured it out. We still don’t have all the details of the agreement as of this writing. There may be provisions or pieces of the CBA that won’t be applied until a year or two or three from now. What matters right now is one simple fact: we’re going to be watching professional women’s basketball this summer.
That is a win on its own.
Front Office Sports’ Annie Costabile, part of a contingent of four reporters that tirelessly staked out the various hotels where the PA and league were negotiating, reported on Wednesday that the term sheet will now go to the players and WNBA Board of Governors for a vote on ratification.
Now let’s talk about all the other stuff…
From a detail standpoint, here’s what we know so far…
The salary cap will raise from $1.5 million to $7 million. The supermax contract jumps from $250,000 to over $1.4 million starting next year. Callie Fin of the Las Vegas Review-Journal is already reporting that the Las Vegas Aces are set to offer the new supermax to A’ja Wilson as soon as possible. I suspect the big spenders of the league are going to follow suit.
Regardless of revenue share, be it net or gross or some weird amalgamation of the two, it’s a milestone that we are going to have WNBA players making that kind of money. Thankfully, it isn’t just the top-end of players either. ESPN’s Shams Charania, who had all this information almost immediately after news of the agreement broke, added that the minimum salary will bump from around $66,000 to around $300,000.
That kind of thing is what allows players to not have to go abroad in the offseason, take extra jobs coaching or find some way to supplement their income (particularly in more expensive cities like New York, Los Angeles or San Francisco). It makes the WNBA, and women’s basketball in general, a career instead of a passion.
According to Tom Friend of Sports Business Journal , who quietly broke some big stories down the stretch, the W’s ‘core’ designation will persist. It appears there will be some tweaks; franchises can use it on players with less than six years of service.
The WNBA season will run on time with the following calendar…
April 6th: Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo expansion drafts.
April 7-11th: Free agents can negotiate with teams
April 12-18th: Free agents can sign with teams
April 13th: WNBA Draft
April 19th: Training camp starts
May 8th: Regular season begins
Needless to say, no one in women’s basketball media will be sleeping much until we get rolling this spring. March Madness happens, the expansion draft is happening right in the middle of Final Four weekend and then free agency immediately begins.
Marisa Ingemi, formerly of the San Francisco Chronicle but one of the best writers in WNBA world, confirmed via her own league sources that the revenue share is a gross figure.
While the long term goal, for the union, should be a split that more closely resembles the NBA (or any other men’s league for that matter), the actual share number was immaterial this time around. In the last collective bargaining agreement, the league had to hit a specific revenue threshold before triggering a revenue share for the players. That it only hit for the first time this past year was evidence of two things, at least to me: that the benchmark was quite high, and that the league made a lot of money thanks to ‘The Young and Turnt’ generation that’s taken the game by storm.
By forcing the revenue sharing model to a percentage of gross instead of a net or one with strings attached, one of the most contentious labor points in the sport is officially off the table. While there will be subsequent, muddy, brutal, knock-down-drag-out fights over percentages, there will never be another fight like this one. That, in itself, is a transformational labor win that has several positive reverberations for every generation of women’s basketball players that come next.
There’s still several other questions that need to be answered. Did the union trade player housing for a gross revenue share? What became of discussions around pensions for players and when retirement benefits kick in? And what becomes of Unrivaled, Athletes Unlimited or any of the other leagues that were subject to the W’s prioritization rules?
There’s even nuances that are worthy of follow ups as well. Did it really need to come to this, for instance? Would the players be walking away with more if their internal and external communications were better aligned, as I wrote about a few weeks ago? And what was Sue Bird’s role in all of this? Given her dual role and positioning as something of a liaison between players and owners, I’m curious where she factored in and when, considering the fact that she also possesses a rather large media megaphone.
Whatever your answers are to these questions, and which ones even interest you, I’d like to believe that the pursuit of truth is in service to the game. Some people believed that the players should’ve caved earlier and were asking too much. Others, including myself, felt that the structure of the WNBA (ownership splits 42% to the WNBA owners, 42% to the NBA and 16% to various private equity) is a cataclysm waiting to happen and it may be more beneficial to address it now than when “too big to fail” money starts coming in.
Sure, there are those that are simply ideologically opposed to the league itself. They farm engagement and make money off framing everything the players do as wrong, self-serving, and idiotic. Others that wanted to see an agreement, no matter what the parameters were, seemed to do so because, on some level, self-preservation kicked in. If you’re only covering the WNBA, it’s in your best interest to want a season. Otherwise, your livelihood is at risk. I get that.
But beyond the cynics and the scaremongers, I would like to think most fans wanted to see the players get what was theirs. Given the moment and times we’re currently living in, it’s understandable for some transference to have occurred here. The WNBPA didn’t just represent the interests of its players. Whether they knew it, know it, or not, their situation wasn’t all that dissimilar to every day people.
Think of it this way: according to U.S. census data from 2024, the average female householder’s median income was $60,440.
WNBA players on a rookie pay scale were, by the very definition, salary everywomen. Their fight over labor equity was real because women (and men, for that matter) working in media, in administration, in STEM, or any other profession have experienced something similar. What has driven me a bit nuts about the PA’s media strategy throughout the CBA negotiation has been an inability to connect the two things. This isn’t male athletes advocating for percentages on hundred million dollar contracts. It was way more recognizable to a non-insignificant chunk of people in the American workforce.
The circumstances of this particular CBA negotiation were unique, but the long war between the WNBPA and WNBA is anything but.
A win — for a union, for women, for women of color, for women’s athletes — is a win for broader labor in this country. During a time when wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated among a small consortium of oligarchs, worker power is dwindling and unions have never felt more powerless and tribal, the WNBPA managed to navigate tricky waters and scored a landmark win on revenue share.
It may not feel like something big now, but symbolically bringing the WNBA into an equitable place with men’s sports is a victory that matters and should be celebrated. The next battle is out there and it’s got a good shot to be even more acrimonious than this one was. But in the larger war, this was a key win.
This was a chance for labor to be paid something commensurate to what they bring to a company. It’s a rare moment of concession from billionaires during a period in which it feels like a select few are carving up the world for their own fiefdoms. Labor wins are built on the backs of many, and those willing to sacrifice. But the victories, as we’ve sadly learned this week, are not and should not be distilled down to singular figures. Extracting a gross revenue share from the WNBA is a win for the PA but it belongs to everyone and by democratizing its value, you ensure that the idea can never be killed.
So celebrate the joy, that Christmas morning feel of knowing that there will be a WNBA season without delay this summer. And, if you’re an advocate of these players and labor in general, start sharpening your tools and get to fabricating. We’ll see you at the cage match in six years.