Three decades ago, one of America’s preeminent sports leagues was in a period of rapid expansion. The National Hockey League added two new teams in 1991, marking its first expansion in 12 years. Four more franchises were added the following two years, creating a new footprint in South Florida and bringing the league total to 26 teams.
Hockey was hip. In June 1994, Sports Illustrated’s cover had the tagline, “Why the NHL’s Hot and the NBA’s Not.” Basketball’s image had cooled, argued E.M. Swift, the cover story’s author. Instead, Swift wrote, the NHL was “the place to be,” a league “where the landscape appears to be one endless possibility.”
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The WNBA now finds itself in a strikingly similar situation to the NHL of the early 1990s. Its explosive popularity has made it more mainstream than ever. The WNBA is expanding — currently 13 teams, rising to 15 in 2026 and 18 by 2030 — and they all have increasing commercial opportunities. Ratings continue to surge. The league set an attendance record in August.
But there is another similarity with the NHL of the previous era, as well. In 1994, hockey found itself in a tense labor negotiation. Its salary system was a key point of contention.
That is also where the WNBA finds itself as the 2025 finals begin on Friday. The league’s current collective bargaining agreement is set to expire on Oct. 31. Questions loom about what might be next for the WNBA and tensions seem to be rising after Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier recently blasted the league’s leadership with a chorus of other players supporting her comments. Revenue sharing and player salaries have been hang-ups in negotiations. NHL owners locked the players out for 103 days during the 1994-95 season, and the league missed 468 games.
“There was incredible momentum,” said Ian Pulver, an NHL agent who worked as a labor attorney for the NHLPA for 15 years, including during the ′94 talks. “I think the momentum fizzled after that. I think it took years for the NHL to catch up again.”
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That is a fear in the WNBA. Could a potential work stoppage halt momentum and stunt what has been the most prosperous time in the league’s history? It’s a question both sides — the Women’s National Basketball Players Association and the league’s representatives — must consider.
“The league and the teams look to be trying to play the only card they have, and that is running out the clock,” WNBPA executive director Terri Jackson said. “If that’s what they’re doing, we will need to be prepared.”
In a statement to The Athletic, a WNBA spokesperson said that characterization is “not accurate.”
“We continue to negotiate in good faith and remain focused on delivering significant increases to salaries and benefits for players while building a league that can thrive for decades for the benefit of all,” the spokesperson said. “We already have several meetings scheduled with the WNBPA to move this forward and get it done in as timely a manner as the Players Association wishes.” WNBA commissioner Cathy Englebert has previously said the league wants to balance increasing player salaries and benefits with the “ability to have a path to profitability.”
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Players have said they are prepared for the possibility of a work stoppage, and they have been vocal and visible in their demands for higher salaries — a new maximum could potentially reach seven figures, up from around $250,000 in 2025 — including wearing T-shirts calling for higher pay at July’s All-Star Game. They are also seeking a revenue-sharing system that does not have a fixed component, arguing that as the WNBA business continues to grow, they don’t want to cap the player revenue share.
Because of the league’s record popularity, both sides can assert they have more leverage than ever. But cautionary tales are plentiful throughout American sports about missteps that cost leagues, players and fans during labor disputes. Major League Baseball’s 1994-95 strike, which involved the cancellation of a World Series, is still regarded as a significant setback that took years to recover. And when the NHL returned in 1995, attendance dipped, resentment remained between the league and players, and the sport entered into the Dead Puck Era — a period of offensive decline — all leading to a lost season in 2004-05 because of another labor dispute.
The WNBA and WNBPA confronted a possible work stoppage just over 20 years ago. In 2002, after the league’s sixth season of existence, the average WNBA player salary was $55,000. And while Coquese Washington, the founding president of the WNBPA, said neither the league nor its players wanted the league to falter as the parties negotiated their second CBA, players wanted to ensure a future agreement would help them create a more professional experience.
Yet the talks were so contentious that then-NBA commissioner David Stern set a deadline for April 18, 2003, and threatened to cancel the 2003 season around a month before its start date if a deal was not reached by then. Stern, at least publicly, was adamant that the existence of the league was at stake.
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“Now we want to roll up our sleeves with the players and make this a permanent landmark on the American sports scene,” he said. “We’ll see whether the players want to do it with us or not.”
A new CBA was eventually agreed upon, and the 2003 season started in late May.
Deadlines often force action, and both the league and WNBPA say they want to reach an eventual agreement. Engelbert said she hopes the deal is “transformational,” and she acknowledged during All-Star weekend the possibility of an extension beyond the October deadline. An extension is largely a public signaling of movement, indicating to stakeholders that the sides are actively working toward a new deal. But both parties still seem to be far apart.“It feels almost the more that we have presented, the further away we are,” said Kelsey Plum, the WNBPA’s first vice president and a guard for the Los Angeles Sparks.
Among more than 10 people interviewed by The Athletic, including players, executives and sources in and around the sport, none believes the WNBA would cease to exist should games be missed. The WNBA is too established to fold. Still, missed games could have long-term consequences, such as fan interest waning, local economies suffering, and tensions between the players and league remaining high — dampening the momentum of this moment.
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“Everybody tends to be hurt by (missed games),” said Martin Edel, the co-chair of Goulston & Storrs Sports Law Practice and a professor of sports law at Columbia Law School.
The 1994-95 MLB strike lasted 232 days, and included the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. President Bill Clinton and Sonia Sotomayor, then a federal district judge and now a U.S. Supreme Court justice, were part of the messy drama that unfolded and upset fans.
“Because this had all played out so publicly, we had really alienated the people who come to the game,” said Lauren Rich, an attorney who worked for the MLBPA on their various 1980s and 1990s CBA discussions.
In 1995, MLB attendance fell 20 percent. A 20 percent drop in WNBA attendance could wipe out at least a full year’s worth of progress, as league attendance rose to more than 3 million this season, up from around 2.3 million in 2024.
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“I do not believe that a brief confrontation will have an adverse effect on the fans (of the WNBA), but a protracted one will,” Rich said.
Evolution of the WNBPA is impacting the talks. Just over a decade ago, there was “apathy around the league for engagement” in the players’ association, according to Layshia Clarendon, a recently retired 12-year WNBA veteran and former WNBPA vice president. But more than 40 players – a record — attended a CBA meeting held days before the players sported the “Pay Us What You Owe US” All-Star shirts.
“The players know their power now, and they know that it’s time (for owners) to pay up. It is time. Players are fed up,” Clarendon said.
“I think it’s time that people know what is happening, the way that the league is not valuing us the way that we need to be valued,” Collier said in a prepared statement she read to reporters earlier this week.
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While Engelbert has acknowledged a desire to increase salaries (supermax salaries are shy of $250,000), players also are looking to re-work the league’s revenue-sharing system. Unlike in the NBA, the WNBA does not explicitly use basketball-related income to determine its salary cap. Instead, the current agreement sets the cap for each year, with players, as a result, arguing they haven’t benefitted financially from the WNBA’s explosive growth as much as they could have under a different framework.
The league has a counterpoint, of course. The Athletic previously reported that the league and teams combined have never been profitable in the WNBA’s nearly 30 years. Still, a record $250 million in expansion fees this summer, five times what the Golden State Valkyries paid in September 2023, signals the league’s financial health and positive trajectory. The New York Liberty raised capital this summer at a profedssional women’s sports franchise record $450 million valuation, another marker of strong financial health. A new 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal will go into effect next season.
The return from that deal could be impacted depending on how these talks progress.
“The media has contracted with the league so that people can watch these games and advertisers therefore can advertise on these broadcasts, so there’s a lot of money to be made,” Edel said.
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Or lost.
Several paths forward could be considered if no agreement is met by Oct. 31. The two sides could agree to extend the deadline into the winter or even spring. That was the case in the 2019-20 talks, when a deal was reached in mid-January.
The league could eventually try to implement a last-best offer, which could either push the players to vote to strike, and/or lead to the players to begin the 2026 season under an expired contract while continuing to negotiate a new deal. Owners could vote to lock the players out, prohibiting them from taking part in team activities or signing contracts. Unfair labor practice lawsuits could be filed.
It is also possible that WNBA players take the same approach as the NBPA in its 2011 CBA negotiations. In November 2011, after four and a half months of negotiations, NBA players voted to dissolve their union in order to file two antitrust lawsuits against league owners. Labor law presides when a union is in place, but eliminating the union opens the door to antitrust law and a different negotiating tactic that can put pressure on the league.
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Twelve days after the NBPA’s legal measure, and following a number of concessions by league owners, the NBA and its players entered into a new deal and the majority of the league’s season occurred.
“In that specific case, you saw the players get a better deal than what they were offered in the owner’s last-best offer before the union dissolved,” said Nathaniel Grow, a professor of business law and ethics at Indiana University.
Still, the six-year agreement reduced the players’ share of basketball-related income from 57 percent to between 49-51 percent.
The next WNBA season is scheduled to tip off in May 2026. Until then, players will prepare for the months ahead. Some will play in Unrivaled, the high-paying winter 3×3 league that begins in early January; Athletes Unlimited, another alternative winter pro league; or overseas clubs.
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As the deadline approaches, the Washington Mystics’ Alysha Clark, a WNBPA vice president, said players have talked through the importance of saving money and planning for additional revenue-generating opportunities — whether playing or marketing-related.
Players seem committed to their asks, Clark said, “because collectively we all understand just how important not only this league is, but how important we are to the continuation of the growth of this league and the success of this league.”
But how much the league continues to soar may be dependent on the progress made in subsequent months.
“I would imagine that the owners of the WNBA and the commissioner want this momentum to continue,” said Pulver, the former NHLPA lawyer. “And that’s the biggest lesson I would say right now: They’re buzzing, and they want to continue to buzz, and they should all be smart about it.”
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(Illustration: Kelsea Petersen / The Athletic; Photo by: Mitchell Leff / Getty)
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
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