When the news broke on Sunday that the WNBA and WNBPA had agreed on a new Jan. 9 Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) deadline, news of the WNBA’s latest offer was always going to be close behind. And on Tuesday morning, new reporting from Annie Costabile from Front Office Sports detailed the WNBA’s latest proposed changes — and they are not good.
Standing out in this new reported proposal are two transformational changes to the way the WNBA has previously operated: eliminating the WNBA’s responsibility to provide housing for players and moving the WNBA season up to start in mid-March. These two alleged proposals have little to do with each other on their faces, but each would be terrible for the league in its own way.
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The housing issue is a bit simpler. In the previous CBA, the WNBA gave players a choice to either stay in league-provided housing or receive a monthly stipend from the league to contribute to their housing. Per Costabile, that stipend changed in amount depending on which city you were in, given the varying cost of living prices in the various WNBA markets. Costabile noted that the lowest stipend was $1,777.00 USD in Las Vegas and the highest was $2,647.00 USD in New York.
Eliminating this deal causes more problems for younger players and players who bounce from team to team all year on temporary contracts. For rookies, they don’t know what team they will be playing for until the WNBA Draft, one week before training camp starts. To expect them to be able to find their housing in a week isn’t fair.
The big problem comes for “fringe” players, the players who aren’t necessarily guaranteed to make their rosters when the season starts, or who get bounced around on 10-day contracts all season, or who get waived midseason. A lot of these players are the ones who didn’t necessarily make a lot of NIL money in college, and don’t really have the funds to secure their own housing. Plus, what happens if they sign a lease, then get cut, and then re-sign somewhere else — are they responsible for paying for two leases?
Although the WNBA will be increasing salaries in this new CBA, that does not change the landscape for these players who bounce from contract to contract. That minimum $500K isn’t automatically given to every player when they step out onto a WNBA court. When you sign a 10-day contract or get cut from the league early in the season, you only get paid the daily rate for as many days as you were active. While those daily rates are still going to increase in the new CBA, it still doesn’t equal a full minimum salary. The proposal just doesn’t make sense for a league with so much turnover and uncertainty.
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The biggest problem with these new reported proposals, though, is that the league even has any desire to push the WNBA schedule up into mid-March. Obviously, right now, the WNBA’s schedule accommodates both the NCAA’s March Madness tournament and the schedules of overseas leagues in Europe, Australia and China, to name a few. Even as new leagues like Unrivaled and Project B have been introduced, they haven’t conflicted with the WNBA’s schedule.
This change would conflict with all of them.
Yet, as much as players might be annoyed with a mid-March start conflicting with Unrivaled or EuroLeague or Project B, the NCAA conflict is what we need to be worried about here. The women’s March Madness tournament ends during the first weekend of April every year, giving players about 8-9 days if they make it to the Final Four between those games and the WNBA Draft. Players who are draft eligible and still have NCAA eligibility left have 48 hours after their last game in those final rounds to decide if they will declare for the WNBA draft. That’s already a short window for players, and also for teams trying to figure out who is available to draft. After the draft, the players have a week until training camp starts, using that time to move out of their college accommodations and to their new WNBA market. It’s a fast turnaround.
Now imagine if training camp started in mid-March. Teams wouldn’t even know who they are getting in the draft, and therefore wouldn’t be able to fully prepare or train with their whole roster. On the players’ side, missing valuable WNBA training camp days as a rookie is detrimental to their integration into the team system, team-building, and acclimation.
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Even if the WNBA waited to officially start the season until after the final rounds of the tournament were over, you’d still have to hold a draft and then get those drafted players into the market. Meaning, they’d likely be dropping in after the season officially starts OR right before, meaning they get zero integration time. Forcing these WNBA rookies to play for a year straight in their final college year, immediately followed by their WNBA rookie year is already a big ask, but eliminating those two weeks off AND their two weeks of training camp to ease into it just doesn’t seem right.
There is also no justification for moving the draft up during the NCAA season and before this proposed mid-March start date for WNBA training camp. Players wouldn’t be able to come to their own draft, which would be cruel. More so, the dynamic of the draft order has the most potential to change in those two weeks of the tournament, and eliminating that would be unfair to players who could raise their stock in that time.
There’s also a whole other conversation around how much NCAA March Madness lends to WNBA marketing, and how messing with that would have business ramifications for the league itself. It was big March Madness moments that boosted players like Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers into the stardom they hold now. The WNBA gets to benefit from that stardom because the systems work together to seamlessly integrate players into the professional leagues. Changing this system would make it hard for fans to follow WNBA teams in training camp or buy tickets in advance, given their favorite college stars would not know which WNBA teams for certain until after the season starts. In turn, that lack of fan engagement would hurt the WNBA as well. Such a proposal is not just unnecessarily aggressive; it’s bad for all parties involved, including the one reportedly proposing it.
Now, we also need to keep in mind that we are mid-negotiations, and sometimes the things that appear in proposals aren’t necessarily what is going to happen. In labor negotiations, sides often propose really dramatic versions of the rules they actually want to go forward, to leave room for negotiating. These proposals could be the exaggerated versions of the real changes the WNBA wants to make, like reducing the housing program, for example.
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Yet, these two proposals in particular just seem cruel, even as exaggerated means to get to an end goal. The sides need to continue to negotiate in good faith to prevent the other side from cancelling the extension period (which is allowed as long as the other side is given 48 hours’ notice). If the WNBPA feels overly offended by these proposals, they could choose to cancel the extension and start discussing a strike. There needs to be strategy and nuance to these proposals, something that seems to be lacking in these latest reported offers.
These latest proposals from the league also don’t seem to be aligned with the growth of the league, something the players are adamant about. There has not been any public player reaction to these latest details yet, but stay tuned.
