I think that I am like a lot of other people where I kind of rolled my eyes when the WNBA players were complaining that they need to get paid more money when it is pretty common knowledge that the league has never turned a profit and is supplemented, for the most part, by the NBA, a league that actually does make money. Lots of it actually.
The WNBA players or at least some of them and their lawyers who will almost certainly make most of the money off of it as lawyers tend to, were threatening to hold the season hostage and refuse to play in a league where there only just started to be some level of interest on the part of sports fans.
The things that annoyed me about all of this wasn't some sort of sexism or misogyny on my part but alas, even suggesting that these women were asking for something unreasonable would invoke exactly those sorts of accusations. When my post was put up on Reddit it got absolutely attacked with such claims even though all I did was present statistics about how almost all of the WNBA teams LOSE MONEY every single year.
Mush of the now existing WNBA fandom started when Caitlin Clark came to the league 2 years ago. That was when I started tuning in and actually enjoying the game. While Indiana enjoyed great rises in their attendance, viewership, and merchandise sales, the same couldn't be said for the other teams.
I think a big part of the reason why the CBA renegotiations ever happened in the first place was because of jealousy. While most of the WNBA players didn't really make a lot of money, Caitlin got an 8-figure deal with Nike that made her the highest paid WNBA player of all time straight away. The other players were jealous and therefore they wanted a "piece of the pie." What people didn't like to talk about was the fact that Caitlin herself had a WNBA salary of less than $100,000 per year.
I guess you could say that the WNBA players chose a really good time to have issues with the CBA because for the first time ever, the WNBA was actually starting to see a great deal of interest on the part of the public. It wasn't JUST Caitlin of course, but people who kept trying to suggest that the game had changed and it was more exciting now because of factors not related to CC, were totally delusional. While people may have started enjoying the games more after bothering to tune in, there is no denying that Clark was almost always the main reason why anyone bothered to tune in. How else can you explain that when the Fever had road games that the home team moved their games to larger stadiums to accommodate the increased demand but as soon as the next week's game came along that Caitlin didn't play in, they returned to their 2000 person capacity stadium?
Paige Bueckers (which I recently found out is pronounced "Beckers") is another big draw in the sport even though she played last season for a truly awful team in Dallas.
Any suggestion that Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers were the main reason that anyone was watching would immediately bring about accusations of racism of course. I shrugged these accusations off because there is statistical and undeniable data that this is exactly the case and furthermore, who cares if the people are watching primarily because of two white women? They are watching, aren't they?
Here are the changes with the new Collective Bargaining Agreement or at least the important ones.
- The new salary cap is moving from 1.5 million to 7 million
- The new minimum salary is around $300,000
- Revenue sharing moves from 9.3% to 20%
- Each team must have at least 12 players including 2 players who are not subjected to the salary rules with the intention being developmental talent
Great!
The only big issue that I can see here is that if there is no money to begin with, how are people going to manage to pay more? I understand that there is probably a great deal of "creative accounting" going on in the WNBA ranks and that a lot of the financial data that we receive is likely doctored because that is what ultra-wealthy people do.
I am trying to remain hopeful that this can work out because well, there must be something to it since there are 2 additional teams, Portland and Toronto, that are being added to the league this year.
Now things get dicey because the formation of these teams was put on hold while waiting for the CBA to finalize. Now they only have about 40 days to form a team from scratch. It will be interesting to see how these two expansion teams manage to perform with such a small window of opportunity to build.
I guess I am happy they came to an agreement but in the end I am a bit worried that the league doesn't actually generate enough revenue to cover these increased expenses and things could get really bad, really fast. I suppose we will find out in this upcoming season which begins on May 8th.