Last October, the WNBA’s players opted out of their collective bargaining agreement. After very little news for months, stars like Napheesa Collier, Angel Reese, and DiJonai Carrington all indicated recently that the players will hold out if the WNBA doesn’t start paying the players better. The statements suggest a labor dispute might be coming to the WNBA. But who is actually participating in the dispute?
This may seem like an odd question to ask. In the NBA, any labor dispute is clearly between the NBA players and the owners of the NBA teams. That’s because the owners of the teams in the NBA also collectively own the league. The WNBA, by contrast, doesn’t quite work this way.
The WNBA was created by David Stern and the NBA in 1996. At the time, the American Basketball League existed and employed some of the major stars in women’s basketball. But by 1998, the WNBA had driven the ABL out of business and a monopoly in North American professional basketball was established. Until 2002, the NBA owned all the teams in this monopoly (i.e., every team in the NBA and WNBA).
After 2002, the NBA brought in some independent owners for the WNBA. If the WNBA functioned like the NBA, the owners of the teams would also own the league. But the WNBA is quite different. Today, the owners of the WNBA teams technically only own 42% of the league. The NBA itself owns another 42% while investors in a $75 million capital infusion in 2022 own the last 16%. Because six of the fourteen WNBA franchises are also owned by people who own NBA teams (and NBA owners also participated in the 2022 capital raise), the owners of the NBA still own more than 60% of the WNBA.
The reality of the NBA’s ownership of the WNBA was made clear by Suzanne Abair, CEO of the Atlanta Dream, in Slaying the Trolls: “If the (all the) WNBA owners say they want to do something and the NBA says no, the answer is no.” This means that the potential labor dispute in the WNBA is effectively between the WNBA players and the NBA owners. And because the NBA owners are making all the choices in professional basketball, the responsibility for the poor pay of WNBA players today lands squarely at the feet of the NBA owners who control professional basketball in North America.
Choosing to pay women less
A simple comparison illustrates how badly the NBA is paying the women it employs. In 1971, Walt Frazier signed a 5-year contract with the New York Knicks that was later revealed to be worth $300,000 per year. In 2024, the highest paid players in the WNBA were only paid $241,984. These numbers are not adjusted for inflation. Frazier actually saw more dollars five decades ago than WNBA players are seeing now. If you adjust for inflation, Frazier was paid nearly ten times more than a WNBA player was paid this last season.
If we look at league revenues, however, the NBA in the early 1970s and the WNBA today look quite similar. When the NBA was paying Walt Frazier $300,000 per year, the entire league had only about $30 million in revenue. If we adjust that figure for inflation, the NBA in the early 1970s reported about $200 million in revenue in today’s dollars. According to Bloomberg, in 2023 the WNBA reportedly earned about the same amount. But the WNBA is only paying about 10% of its revenues to its players (the “revenue share”). In contrast, the NBA in the early 1970s was likely paying a revenue share close to 50%.
The NBA has never paid the men it employs as badly as it is paying women today. Even in the 1950s, when the NBA only had about 10% of the revenues the WNBA reports today, NBA players were paid a revenue share of 40%. So WNBA players have every reason to be upset.
Choosing the revenues in professional basketball
Napheesa Collier made it clear what she wants the NBA to do to fix this problem:
We’re not asking for the same salaries as the men, we’re asking for the same revenue shares. That’s where the big difference is. We get such a small percentage of revenue share right now that affects our salary. We’re asking for a bigger cut of that, like more equitable to what the men’s revenue share is. It wouldn’t get us anywhere close to their salaries, we’re not asking for the same salaries, we’re asking for the same cut of the pie of what is made in our league.
This seems like a simple request. Unfortunately, the revenue picture in the WNBA going forward is hardly simple to understand.
This past summer the NBA signed a new 11-year media deal worth $76 billion. In announcing the deal, the NBA revealed that $2.2 billion of this money would go to the WNBA. Yet this amount was reportedly not determined by the free market. As Kurt Badenhausen reported at Sportico at the time: “the Washington Post reported that the new media deals would not assign a specific figure to the WNBA rights but would be determined by the NBA instead.”
At the time, Cheryl Miller questioned the value the NBA assigned to the WNBA:
I’m not great with numbers, low-ball (offer). That’s a low-ball. You’re saying how much? Not enough. Not even close. Now, I’m not trying to inflate it a whole lot — ($2 billion) is nice, ($8 billion) would be better.
It is important to emphasize, as Miller states, that the NBA is “saying” how much the deal is worth. And as Miller argues, what the NBA is choosing to give the WNBA seems very low. Indeed, my own analysis of television ratings indicates that maybe $10 billion is closer to the true value of the WNBA media rights.
If the NBA is low-balling the WNBA by $6 billion or even $8 billion across 11-years, then the WNBA is transferring at least $500 million per year to the NBA. And that means, part of the pool of revenue the WNBA players generate might be used to pay NBA players and NBA owners in the future.
This very much complicates the story. WNBA players can’t just ask for a higher percentage of revenues. They also need to ask how much of the revenues they are generating is being used to subsidize the NBA.
Forcing the NBA to make different choices
Of course, this is not the story the NBA tells. The story the NBA has often told is that it subsidizes the WNBA, and that the WNBA isn’t profitable.
For those who have studied the history of labor disputes in the NBA, this is a very familiar story. The NBA argued it wasn’t profitable when it campaigned for a merger with the ABA in the early 1970s. In 1983, the NBA argued it wasn’t profitable when they got the players to accept a cap on payrolls. And in 2011, the NBA returned to this argument when it got the players to accept a pay cut.
Given this history, it is not surprising that just three days before the WNBA players opted out of their collective bargaining agreement with the league, the New York Post reported that, according to NBA sources, the WNBA lost $40 million this past season. This was not the first time the NBA made such a claim. But in the past the claim was just that the WNBA lost $10 million per year.
Just as we saw throughout NBA history, these assertions of WNBA losses were not supported by any evidence. And such a claim in 2024 seems especially ridiculous. After all, the WNBA reported that the league achieved records with respect to television ratings, attendance, merchandise sales, and social media engagement. Given this growth, and given the players’ paltry salaries, one wouldn’t expect any losses. The NBA argued that not only were there losses, but the losses are four times higher than what the NBA asserted in the past.
Again, such assertions are not surprising. The NBA has used this strategy to take money from its players for decades. And traditional media outlets, like the New York Post and New York Times, seem quite happy to help the NBA spread its stories about financial losses.
But the WNBA players have something NBA players never had in the past. The WNBA players have access to social media. They can now speak directly to their fans and tell them that the NBA is choosing to pay women of the WNBA a lower wage than the NBA paid men fifty years ago, and a massively lower revenue share compared to the NBA today. And the players can also tell their fans that the NBA owners have chosen to have the WNBA subsidize the NBA in the future.
Will this lead the players to victory? Perhaps not. But if you’re a fan of the WNBA, it’s pretty clear which side you should support in this dispute. The NBA owners are exploiting players by claiming losses, just as they’ve done many times in the past. It is time to frame this labor dispute as just another choice made by the NBA.