CBA Negotiations thread

[hermes]

https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/46512482/wnba-cba-get-done-relationships-repaired

adam silver says they'll get it done, so no worries everyone

[hermes]

https://www.theringer.com/2025/10/14/wnba/wnba-cba-contract-cathy-engelbert-adam-silver-unrivaled
good summary of where things are right now

couple things that caught my eye:
- the league is creating a task force to look at refs
- last league offer to the players: $850k super max salaries and $300k vet minimum. big raise but not big enough and no revenue sharing
- wnba refs get paid chicken feed, so that needs to change as well - kind of a get what you pay for type situation
- i wonder what the dynamic is between the unrivaled players and those not in unrivaled
- this is the first i'm hearing of project B. seems surprising to me that female athletes would want to be involved with saudi arabia but hey, money talks. apparently they've signed some wnba players already and are 'negotiating' with some wnba stars

[Doctor MJ]

Good article.

Re: willing to playin Saudi Arabia.

So my first thought here is an old criticism I’d had for W players back when they were playing Russia:

You’re going to a regime that does not support you morally (Taurasi, Griner, and many others were lesbian, and the Russian state was anti-LGBTfor their own citizens) because they are paying you more money.

They aren’t paying you this money because you make them money, because there is no revenue stream supporting these salaries, but because they like to treat you like a pet.

You’re then acting self-righteous about this as if tbe W were anti-feminist for not paying as much as the Russian circus.

This then to say that now that the W sees how Russia eventually sought to treat Griner, I would hope that most W players will have learned a lesson of playing in countries that consider them immoral.

But as I say all of that, the essence of my criticism was that W players should t expect or seek to be paid more than what the economic model of the W can support… and that’s not the problem now.

Now the problem is literally the W trying to avoid paying their players a revenue-sharing based rate, and if the W won’t do that, then it will make sense for W players to seek different management above all.


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[Green Chile]

Good article.

Re: willing to playin Saudi Arabia.

So my first thought here is an old criticism I’d had for W players back when they were playing Russia:

You’re going to a regime that does not support you morally (Taurasi, Griner, and many others were lesbian, and the Russian state was anti-LGBTfor their own citizens) because they are paying you more money.

They aren’t paying you this money because you make them money, because there is no revenue stream supporting these salaries, but because they like to treat you like a pet.

You’re then acting self-righteous about this as if tbe W were anti-feminist for not paying as much as the Russian circus.

This then to say that now that the W sees how Russia eventually sought to treat Griner, I would hope that most W players will have learned a lesson of playing in countries that consider them immoral.

But as I say all of that, the essence of my criticism was that W players should t expect or seek to be paid more than what the economic model of the W can support… and that’s not the problem now.

Now the problem is literally the W trying to avoid paying their players a revenue-sharing based rate, and if the W won’t do that, then it will make sense for W players to seek different management above all.


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Agreed.
Hopefully, it would just be used as a bargaining chip, but you never know when there's enough money involved.
I would think it's a non-starter after Griner. But I could be wrong, and I'd be disappointed.

[hermes]

pro women’s 5-on-5 league that will feature six 11-player teams and will play seven two-week tournaments in major cities in Asia, Europe and the Americas.

i guess its a traveling league, so maybe they won't end up in saudi arabia or some other potentially undesirable place.
that might change the calculus for some people. would you take a million bucks to spend a few months touring the world?

[Green Chile]

pro women’s 5-on-5 league that will feature six 11-player teams and will play seven two-week tournaments in major cities in Asia, Europe and the Americas.

i guess its a traveling league, so maybe they won't end up in saudi arabia or some other potentially undesirable place.
that might change the calculus for some people. would you take a million bucks to spend a few months touring the world?

I think it does (change the calculus).

Looking a little more a Project B, it seems to be spear-headed by US businessmen. Grady Burnett (formerly with Google and Facebook) and and Skype founder Geoff Prentice.

Apparently, Alana Beard will be the chief basketball officer.
Got some connections to Candace Parker, Sloane Stephens, and Steve Young, for whatever that means.

At the very least, it seems like something quite different than traipsing through Russia playing for Oligarchs.

Backed by some money from unsavory places, but at this point, there seems to be very few big financial backers that aren't unsavory.

I despise the NBA's controlling/running of women's basketball in the US so much that I'm quite open to a Saudi-backed venture.

[hermes]

so are any meetings taking place? we've got 10 days before this expires, is there no news?

[Menace2Sobriety]

Seems Silver laid down the first salvo yesterday. I hope the players association hold their nerve and hold out for rev-share.

[hermes]

https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/46675137/wnba-players-expect-big-increase-salaries

big increase in salary but no revenue sharing. i suppose the league is trying to flash some cash in order to get players to bite
i'm moderately surprised the league's position is still where it is because i thought they'd move onto sharing but at a really low number like 15% or something way below 50%. and then the haggling is just over the percentage but the league doesn't want to go there

[ellobo]

https://www.espn.com/wnba/story/_/id/46675137/wnba-players-expect-big-increase-salaries

big increase in salary but no revenue sharing. i suppose the league is trying to flash some cash in order to get players to bite
i'm moderately surprised the league's position is still where it is because i thought they'd move onto sharing but at a really low number like 15% or something way below 50%. and then the haggling is just over the percentage but the league doesn't want to go there

My impression is that they don't want to be transparent about basketball-related income, which they would have to be in a percentage model, at least within any agreed upon definition in a new CBA. I also suspect two implications:
1. They are/will be making more money than they would like it to be known.
2. The 16%/$75 million cash raise was a badly undervalued mistake, and the team owners who did NOT buy in feel they left a lot of money on the table and are being extra hard line as a result. From what I can gather, owners of the Liberty, Mystics, Wings, Heat, and Bucks did invest in the capital raise.

The WNBA 3-way split ownership structure is really a mess. David Berri, did a recent economic analysis in the New York Times of WNBA salaries and revenue that got a lot of attention (he estimates that the players' share of BRI was 7% last season, down from 11% four years ago). He also wrote a recent blog post provocatively titled "Maybe the NBA Want to Pay the WNBA Players Nothing." His explanation is that the WNBA owners only own 42% of the league, and under the current proposal by the league, the players would receive in the ballpark of half of the WNBA owners' 42% share of income. In other words, if the NBA owners and the capital raise investors take 58% of income off the top and leave just the WNBA owners to split the rest with the players, you would have something like the current proposal, and this would amount to the NBA owners and the investors not being responsible for paying the players anything.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/03/opinion/wnba-pay.html?unlocked_article_code=1.vU8.KUZQ.vi-4NgFoK6jd&smid=url-share

https://wagesofwins.substack.com/p/maybe-the-nba-wants-to-pay-the-wnba

[hermes]

if the owners don't like the $75m cash raise, why did cathy do it? or why did they let her do it? aren't they her boss? did cathy go rogue and just raise money without asking?

if the last one is true, why didn't they kick her to the curb long before this?

[ellobo]

if the owners don't like the $75m cash raise, why did cathy do it? or why did they let her do it? aren't they her boss? did cathy go rogue and just raise money without asking?

if the last one is true, why didn't they kick her to the curb long before this?

I think they wanted it at the time. Otherwise, as you say, why do it? And I can't imagine Cathy doing it on her own initiative. More likely she was following orders.

My guess is that they just made a big mistake in their valuation and/or didn't anticipate a big increase in popularity and revenue. In the capital raise, most owners were sellers, but a few were also buyers. So most of them thought the cash was more valuable than the equity, and only a few were willing to buy equity at that price.

[Menace2Sobriety]

Thank you for sharing. Fascinating

The fact I’m not their target audience (male mid 50s) and I’m posting on a WNBA forum demonstrates the growth in interest.

[Doctor MJ]

if the owners don't like the $75m cash raise, why did cathy do it? or why did they let her do it? aren't they her boss? did cathy go rogue and just raise money without asking?

if the last one is true, why didn't they kick her to the curb long before this?

So my understanding was that this push to spend more money to be able to promote the W was something Engelbert brought in with her in taking the role, and this is where I think it's important to realize:

Engelbert isn't someone who got into the NBA by going to law school and joining the front office as a wet-behind-the-years 30 year old with connections to the NBA Commish like Adam Silver did.

Engelbert was CEO of Deloitte which is a much bigger entity than the NBA. She absolutely was slumming it by taking the WNBA position, and so here being able to twist the NBA's arm to actually give the WNBA a budget to run itself was almost certainly tied to a general recognition that everything the NBA had tried to do to make the WNBA popular had failed, and they needed to try something new.

This doesn't mean that Silver & the owners aren't her bosses now, or that she's just speaking for herself on all this stuff - she is serving multiple masters here - but I think it makes sense to start off understanding that she's smarter and more accomplished that quite possibly everyone who actually works for the NBA including Silver.

I say all of this while also saying that I think she's screwed in the role after Phee saying she said the WNBA players should be on their knees thanking the WNBA organization. She says she didn't say it, and if she didn't, that's just brutal. It implies that she let herself be alone in the room with a player which then meant that any allegations from that conversation would devolve into she-said-she-said, and that was taking a risk that assumed she could trust the player...all while telling the player at the very least, bad news.

My guess is that Engelbert became overconfident in her time as Commish on a number of levels because of the rapid rise in WNBA popularity happening during her reign - she thought she was safe because of the success, and she didn't protect herself like she could have.

I would also guess that Engelbert said something quite close to what Phee said she said, but didn't mean what Phee took it to mean. An "one their knees" comment like that was surely not intended to be an official position, so it probably slipped out in the conversation, quite possibly springing to her mind because she heard Silver or others use the expression. It's the time of phrase that if she's talking to a teammate maybe doesn't hit the way it did, but she was talking to Phee, who aside from being a leader among WNBA players, had literally just started a rival league that bypassed many of the issues that the NBA/WNBA seems to view as intractable.

In the end when we look back on Engelbert's tenure for the policies she spearheaded X years in the future, I think it will be clear she did a lot of good stuff that helped the WNBA move forward while also placating the men she worked for.

But, she also honestly mistook these positive things as being the primary force behind the spike of popularity surrounding Clark, and she clearly had developed a way of corporate politicking that didn't shy away from talking in the first person when talking about organizational successes. This led WNBA players to question whether she really appreciated their role in what was happening, which still wouldn't have been that big of a deal if the finances of the WNBA were all neatly aligned ahead of time and they could just pay the WNBA players more automatically with the new revenue coming in...

Instead, it's clear that the NBA created the financial infrastructure of the WNBA with all sorts of Byzantine absurdity which made the transition from "start-up league losing money" to "money maker" a moment when basically everything cries out for re-organization... and the NBA/WNBA owners didn't respond to this adroitly, in part because they felt the players "owed" them for the money they lost in the past.

TL; DR: Engelbert was always going to have it tough in this critical moment, and then she made some interpersonal errors along the way with the players that she might not have if she hadn't assumed that her female status would ensure the players saw her as one of them.

[hermes]

what kind of input do portland and toronto have in the negotiations? are they officially part of the league yet?