Stewie and Phee negotiating on behalf of the WNBAPA is an obvious Conflict of Interest

[hermes]

unrivaled can keep costs down a lot easier because there are a lot fewer players and its all in one spot for less time

on the possibility of a bubble: if the wnba believes that could be a serious possibility they really cut off their own nose to spite their face by announcing the 3 new teams. if you are adding teams as fast as you can, you probably aren't worried about decreasing interest. unless, i suppose, the fees are nonrefundable and you just want to get the money in the door while you can

[Billy Goat]

OK, so you're being obtuse.

Lashing out at the public is not how you win friends or influence people. I have yet to see one player call out an owner for underpaying them.

Yes, because making inflammatory public statements during a labor dispute negotiation is a common sense move.

Just say you don't think these women deserve to be paid fair wages and move on. No one is lashing out at the public.

Just say you resent and dislike the fans and move on.

[Billy Goat]

Crazy how dudes are pro labor until it comes time for women to get their fair share.

Not just women, anyone but them

Been decades worth of propagandizing the American worker (read; white American workers) to believe that they're not the problem, it's all those lazy moochers who are sucking up all the union benefits who don't deserve them, and that's who we're gonna get rid of benefits for, not you

Go back to the "welfare queens" with Reagan, or even further, the hardhat riot of the 70s, where conservatives began astroturfing unions into thinking they were on their side, funded by the rich who used the racism of the post-Civil Rights bill US to divide workers to stop them from organizing a united front

Sherman wasn't allowed to go far enough, and the effects of that can still be felt to this day.

If the women can negotiate more money then more power to them. It’d help their cause if they recognized they are negotiating with the owners of the team and not the general public. The players are directing their animosity towards the wrong people. I have yet to see one player make a statement towards ownership or the commissioner. In fact, they were out partying with the commission over the weekend! lol. The fans don’t have a say in this, but that woman sure does. The players and media blaming the fans is a terrible strategy. The more people who watch the more leverage you have. Resenting those that tune in or may tune in, well good luck with that.

[hermes]

this is such a weird hill to make your stand on

[MrDollarBills]

Can you provide context on this point?

* By this same token, it seems to me that Napheesa Collier is either the player that the rest of the players should choose to lead them going forward, or she (or her husband) is covering things up that are going to cause the players problems. So long as Unrivaled is financially legit and sustainable, Collier and her team have essentially already responded to the WNBA spending decades failing to figure out how to make the W "profitable" so as to begin the salary climb we see in majorly successful pro leagues, but just doing it on their own.

I haven't seen anything that leads me to believe that Unrivaled is some kind of scam?

[Doctor MJ]

Can you provide context on this point?

* By this same token, it seems to me that Napheesa Collier is either the player that the rest of the players should choose to lead them going forward, or she (or her husband) is covering things up that are going to cause the players problems. So long as Unrivaled is financially legit and sustainable, Collier and her team have essentially already responded to the WNBA spending decades failing to figure out how to make the W "profitable" so as to begin the salary climb we see in majorly successful pro leagues, but just doing it on their own.

I haven't seen anything that leads me to believe that Unrivaled is some kind of scam?

I have no reason to think they are, and I'm saying that if Unrivaled's foundation is legit, then Phee & her husband probably understand how to run a pro women's basketball league for profit better than the WNBA does, let alone the other players who are just out there doing their jobs.

But, let me also reply to your other post before you respond, because you bring something real up there.

[Doctor MJ]

unrivaled can keep costs down a lot easier because there are a lot fewer players and its all in one spot for less time

on the possibility of a bubble: if the wnba believes that could be a serious possibility they really cut off their own nose to spite their face by announcing the 3 new teams. if you are adding teams as fast as you can, you probably aren't worried about decreasing interest. unless, i suppose, the fees are nonrefundable and you just want to get the money in the door while you can

Oh, actually this was hermes' post, but key stuff here:

The fact that Unrivaled has lower costs is now the WNBA's problem.

I've long said that the idea that the goal of the WNBA was to make a profit is not quite the truth. If it were, then it would have made no sense to start the WNBA off at major arenas, as any independent league starting from scratch would be looking to only pay the costs of those arenas AFTER they were popular enough to profit from the endeavor.

I'm sure that some of the initial WNBA owners may have thought they could have a quick profitable growth as the world embraced women's pro ball, but the cold, calculated reason for the existence of the NBA was to control the domain of pro women's basketball in the US so that if it ever did become profitable, it would be the NBA umbrella who got the money. We should note that they didn't do this out of the blue, they were spurred on to do this specifically in the wake of the formation of an independent pro women's basketball league (ABL) starting up. The priority of the WNBA, from the NBA's perspective, was always to make sure that nothing like the ABL could ever threaten their control.

And I would say nothing did, until the phase transition in women's basketball popularity came, and allowed a league like Unrivaled to come in out of nowhere and pay more than the W, and so now they're in a point of crisis.

And yeah, while I'm not surprised whenever I hear some hardline owners are refusing whatever the players want, I am surprised that that seems to be happening while marketing is hyping a rapid expansion that will add 50% more teams to the league in a handful of years. The optics, as they say, look awful.

Finally, we get Clark getting that "pay us what you ow us" t-shirt. The W might have been able to survive by letting the key Unrivaled people go if Clark took a pro-WNBA anti-Unrivaled stand (which some in the political outrage department would have loved), but she just placed herself with the players, and I just can't imagine the players caving out of fear now that both Clark and the Unrivaled folks are in the labor tent. They're going to feel like the WNBA needs them more than they need the WNBA... and taken as a group, this is absolutely true now.

Worth noting that this is absolutely true for the NBA players as well, and it was true their first.

I see the NBA's formation and continuation of the WNBA through tough times as something they thought a negligible price to pay (compared to what they make with the NBA) to gain monopoly on women's pro ball when it eventually turned the corner... but it feels right now like they just kind of assumed that that moment of corner-turning wasn't a moment of danger for them.

It's literally within the realm of possibility - though very, very low odds in my assessment - that the WNBA will lose control of women's basketball right when when they no longer had to run a deficit to maintain control. Kind of a Xerox PARC situation with Apple & Microsoft, except instead of corporate espionage, were this to happen with the WNBA, it would be done basically all right out in the open leading into negotiations of continued partnership by the players, and the WNBA would ruin it by insisting that the players cave, at a time when players share an extreme optimism for what they can do with or without the NBA's help.

Here's hoping nothing like that happens.

[hermes]

i wonder what, if any, middle ground the players might accept. normally one side will come in high and the other low and they'll meet in the middle somewhere. for this the players will come in at 50% and the owners will probably counter with like 15%. are the players going to go 50% or bust or might they be ok with settling for 35-40% (which is still a huge increase from where they are at)?

i could see the owners saying "ok we'll give you 50% but you aren't getting what you want on retirement, healthcare, maternity leave, etc
it will be interesting to what the player priorities all are, and how they balance the top line pay number with the other benefits being negotiated

do the players deserve all they are asking for, yes but the owners still don't want to give it to them

[Doctor MJ]

i wonder what, if any, middle ground the players might accept. normally one side will come in high and the other low and they'll meet in the middle somewhere. for this the players will come in at 50% and the owners will probably counter with like 15%. are the players going to go 50% or bust or might they be ok with settling for 35-40% (which is still a huge increase from where they are at)?

i could see the owners saying "ok we'll give you 50% but you aren't getting what you want on retirement, healthcare, maternity leave, etc
it will be interesting to what the player priorities all are, and how they balance the top line pay number with the other benefits being negotiated

do the players deserve all they are asking for, yes but the owners still don't want to give it to them

So, my feeling on this is that if there's any difference in revenue percentage going to WNBA players compared to NBA players needs to be specifically explained and justified, because the nature of the percentage is that it's not going to lead to WNBA players making anywhere near NBA salaries unless the WNBA comes to rival the NBA generally. As in, of course WNBA players should make less than NBA players, but the percentage takes care of that implicitly.

I'm no expert on those justifications would be, but from a perspective of benefits, I could see a situation where if health care for NBA players was never thought through all that well in recent decades because the costs were negligible compared to salaries. If the NBA has effectively been just eating that cost with NBA players, then eating that cost for WNBA players would presumably seem considerably less negligible given the lower league revenue and salaries.

In other words: If the NBA really has all their ducks in a row laying out all costs relating to players rationally, it seems like anything truly analogous in the WNBA should be able to follow that template - and could have followed that template a while ago. However, if the NBA didn't actually have those ducks in a row, but instead just agreed to the top line revenue split factoring in whatever they needed to factor in to make it work, it's easy to see why the WNBA would be set up for issues.

Now there are differences between women and men of course, and the women's pro basketball landscape and the men's.

The reality that female healthcare a) costs more than male, and b) can result in entire missed seasons based on normal reproductive behavior, are things that should be considered rationally, for example. Yes employers of women should be obligated to take of needs that all women have, but if the negotiations they did when considering male players allowed for a skew that wouldn't have happened in a co-ed work force, it's reasonable that the WNBA would need to have those differences factor in somehow. (Note: I'm skeptical that the healthcare cost difference between men & women is that significant compared the revenue footprint involved, but it could be.)

Beyond that, there's the trickiness of the WNBA traditionally not having a monopoly on their own players year-round employment. The WNBA was surely always hoping that they could get to a strength where they could demand that WNBA players only played in the WNBA, and the death of Russian women's basketball as a place for top American players at the hands of Putin gave the perfect opportunity for this that they clearly have now been trying to take advantage of... but as they were systematically looking to take complete control over the careers of those who play in the WNBA, the rise of popularity of the sport for reasons totally unrelated to pro ball shifted the balance of power to the players themselves between the previous CBA, and the one they are now going to have to negotiate. Thus the delicate situation where if the WNBA doesn't recognize the full reality of what shifts mean, they run a serious risk of betting everything on the players' union caving at a time where it makes no sense for them to cave.

I'm not sure how all of that should be negotiated in the CBA, but will acknowledge it's a challenge that the NBA hasn't been dealing with.