The 2025 season is in the books. A new champion has been crowned. But as the offseason starts, the focus shifts squarely back on collective bargaining negotiations.
The current collective bargaining agreement expires on Oct. 31. Both commissioner Cathy Engelbert and the WNBA Players Association (WNBPA) have said their goal is a “transformational” CBA, but the two sides reportedly remain far apart in negotiations on the biggest issues.
What are those priorities? What happens if a new CBA isn’t reached by the deadline? How realistic is a lockout? Here’s a run through everything to know.
Increased player salaries is a key issue, but the most important is revenue sharing: how it’s determined and whether the percentage will be allowed to grow during the course of the CBA instead of a fixed number for the duration of the deal.
“The players are still adamant that we get a percentage of revenue that grows with the business, which perhaps includes team revenue, and that’s just a part of the conversation,” WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike told ESPN in early August.
Phoenix Mercury forward Satou Sabally said a recent proposal from the WNBA makes the players feel as if “we’re not part of the growth of the league.”
“If we continued with this CBA, we would, percentage-wise, go down on our [compensation],” Sabally said last week during the WNBA Finals.
In the NBA, fans are used to salary caps for teams being set based on a percentage of what the CBA describes as “basketball-related income,” or BRI. By contrast, the WNBA’s current CBA defined the cap for each season ahead of time with modest 3% annual raises. A mechanism in the CBA that would increase the cap based on revenue was effectively invalidated by the timing of the deal.
Because the current CBA began in 2020 prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, revenue targets were set based on the previous campaign (2019) and made cumulative over the life of the deal. The league made no money off ticket sales during the abbreviated 2020 season, played in a bubble on the IMG Academy campus in Bradenton, Florida, and attendance was also limited in 2021 by local restrictions. That made it unrealistic for the targets to be met despite the league’s increased attendance over the past two seasons.
In August, Ogwumike said an offer from the WNBA dramatically increased the salary cap and maximum base salaries — the supermax is $249,244 — but followed the same model as the current CBA.
“It’s basically the same system that we exist in right now,” Ogwumike said. “They’re proposing a system that includes revenue that would grow with the business. When you approach it from the perspective of their response to our proposal, yes, money is more, but ultimately if you look at the growth of the business, the money relative to the percentage of everything is virtually staying the same.”
A report Friday from Front Office Sports cited sources estimating a supermax salary around $850,000, with the veteran minimum around $300,000.
The players see the astonishing leap in franchise valuations in the past couple of years and question if they are getting their proper share of that growth. The Las Vegas Aces, for example, were purchased for $2 million in 2021 but are now valued at $310 million, and the New York Liberty were purchased for between $10 million and $14 million after being for sale for more than a year and now have an estimated valuation of around $450 million.
On its face, that’s a reasonable thing to ask. But what about the NBA’s claims for years of subsidizing WNBA losses? Will the NBA say the new money is in part backfilling past deficits? Could it prove that?
One of the most difficult parts of following the WNBA’s labor negotiations all these years has been getting firm numbers from the league’s side of things. The players have said they don’t always feel like they get that. By the same token, the side we do hear much more from — during every CBA — is the players and their union. There has been dramatic change in the WNBA — and what that indicates for the future — in a short period of time after many years that seemed stagnant.
The popularity of 2024 No. 1 draft pick Caitlin Clark has been an enormous boost for a league that had clearly started to turn the corner toward real growth over the past five years. If that growth continues as expected, it’s understandable the players are concerned about how their part of the pie grows, too.
“We’re seeing expansion, and the players are just saying, ‘Hey, let us have our fair share of that,'” Ogwumike said. “Sometimes that means proposing something new that makes sense for the time. Not really new — new to us, not to other leagues.”
Prioritization is another issue that the players agreed to in the 2020 deal that they are expected to push back on more in these negotiations. Since the WNBA’s launch, players have been allowed to play in other leagues — mostly overseas — even if that meant missing training camp or a few early-season WNBA games. New rules were put in place in the last CBA that required players to prioritize the WNBA. While there are built-in exceptions for younger players and time spent with players’ national teams, prioritization has kept some players out of the WNBA for an entire season.
Sabally said that players are in so many different situations based on where they are in their careers, how much money they make and if they are returning from injuries that she doesn’t think it is beneficial to put restrictions on them playing in other leagues. But it seems unlikely the WNBA owners will completely back away from prioritization.
Sabally also said she has talked with athletes in other basketball leagues, in other sports and in other countries about their own labor negotiations.
“It’s interesting to hear about the flow of negotiations,” she said. “Sometimes you want results right away, but it does take time for both parties to come to the table and really agree on certain things.”
Last year, the league announced an 11-year deal — which begins in 2026 — with Disney, Amazon Prime Video and new rights holder NBCUniversal. The deal is valued at about $2.2 billion, a source told ESPN, but future agreements with additional partners could bring the league’s overall media deals closer to $3 billion. According to sources, the agreement can be revisited after three years.
The players see that money, along with the greatly increased expansion fees, and want to make sure they are getting what they think is a fair cut of it. Under the deal, Disney (using ABC and the ESPN networks) will telecast eight semifinals series and five Finals, while Prime and NBCU each will show seven semifinals and three Finals.
Engelbert was loudly booed by fans Friday in Phoenix when she presented the championship trophy to the Aces and the WNBA Finals MVP award to A’ja Wilson. Commissioners hearing fans’ wrath in these situations is not new in pro sports — the NHL’s Gary Bettman and MLB’s Rob Manfred have experienced the same treatment as recent examples — but it has raised the issue of how the fractured relationship between Engelbert and the players will affect CBA negotiations.
During a four-minute statement to open her exit interview on Sept. 30, Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier said the WNBA had the “worst leadership in the world,” accusing Engelbert of being “negligent” in her governance.
Collier said the league has failed to sufficiently address issues with officiating, compensation for players and the state of the overall product. She also alleged that Engelbert told her in a private conversation in February that Clark and other young standouts “should be on their knees” in gratitude for the platform the league has given them.
Three days later, the commissioner said there were “a lot of inaccuracies” in Collier’s statement and vehemently denied saying the remarks about Clark. “I did not make those comments,” Engelbert said Oct. 3 at her annual news conference ahead of Game 1 of the WNBA Finals on Friday.
Collier then canceled a meeting she and Engelbert had tentatively planned for the following week, sources told ESPN. Engelbert’s assertion that Collier’s depiction of the private conversation between them was filled with inaccuracies has “pretty much pushed the relationship beyond repair,” a source said.
On Oct. 6, as the Las Vegas Aces had taken a 2-0 lead over the Phoenix Mercury in the WNBA Finals, NBA commissioner Adam Silver said a new collective bargaining agreement with WNBA players will be reached but acknowledged relationship issues must be repaired following.
“There’s no question that the WNBA is going through growing pains, and it’s unfortunate that it’s coming just as their most important games and their Finals are on right now,” Silver said Monday. “We’ve had two fantastic games so far, and we want to celebrate the game at the moment, and then we’ve got to sit down with the players and negotiate a new collective bargaining agreement.”
Many WNBA players, including Ogwumike, have said they support Collier, but she didn’t inform Ogwumike or the union about her statement before making it. It came at a difficult time for Collier, after she had suffered a season-ending injury in Game 3 of the semifinals, followed by the top-seeded Lynx being upset in the series by Phoenix.
Whether the relationship between Engelbert and the players can be repaired would take a good faith effort from both sides, which might be even harder to make happen during CBA negotiations when tensions are always high.
Ultimately, the support of Silver and the owners that Engelbert is representing in CBA talks is of utmost importance for her to stay in her position.
This was incredibly useful and well written.