NBA Commissioner Adam Silver acknowledged on Tuesday that WNBA players are right to expect a big pay increase ahead of their next season.
The current collective bargaining agreement between the WNBA Players’ Union and the WNBA is set to expire on Oct. 31. Talks between the two parties over a new contract remain ongoing, and multiple WNBA players have been outspoken over the past year about their belief that they deserve a bigger piece of the pie moving forward.
The NBA owns 42% of the WNBA. However, while NBA players get an estimated 49-51% of their league’s basketball revenue, WNBA players receive only 9.3% of the league’s basketball-generated revenue, according to a report by MarketWatch.
In a “Today” interview with Craig Melvin, Silver acknowledged the WNBA players’ demands and said he expects them to receive a big pay increase at the end of this year’s contract negotiation cycle.
“I think ‘share’ isn’t the right way to look at it because there’s so much more revenue in the NBA. I think you should look at it in absolute numbers in terms of what they’re making, and they are going to bet a big increase in this cycle of collective bargaining, and they deserve it,” he said.
Silver’s comments come well over a year after widespread outrage online due to the news that Indiana Fever superstar Caitlin Clark, one of the world’s most popular athletes, was reported to make just $76,535 in her rookie season with the WNBA.
Silver, notably, does not serve as commissioner of both the NBA and WNBA. However, as the NBA owns such a large percentage of the latter league, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert does report to him.
Engelbert has come under heavy fire in recent weeks, following a season exit interview conducted by Minnesota Lynx superstar Napheesa Collier in which Collier said the WNBA had “the worst leadership in the world.”
The pro athlete also recounted several alleged conversations she had with Engelbert, one of which was purportedly punctuated by Engelbert’s assertion that league stars like Clark and Angel Reese should be “grateful” for the platform the league gives them and that they should be “on their knees thanking their lucky stars” for the media rights deal Engelbert secured for the WNBA. Other players then shared similar stories of their own.
Afterward, Engelbert publicly addressed Collier’s remarks, telling the media, “I was disheartened to hear that some players feel the league and me personally do not care about them or listen to them. And if the players in the W don’t feel appreciated and valued by the league, then we have to do better and I have to do better.”
Collier is not the only WNBA star who has called for better treatment and pay at a league level. In July, many of the league’s biggest players attended the WNBA All-Star Game in black shirts that sported the words “Pay Us What You Owe Us” on them.
While the WNBA is not, as Silver noted, as massive of a platform yet as the NBA, its popularity has been growing exponentially in recent years, thanks in part to the emergence of attention-grabbing young superstars like Clark, Reese and Paige Bueckers. Several WNBA stars have, meanwhile, made it clear that they do not believe they should be paid as much as their NBA counterparts but simply a similar share of their league’s income.
“A lot of times, the misinformation comes in where we’re asking to be paid what the men are being paid. That’s not true,” Los Angeles Sparks guard Kelsey Plum explained on the “All the Smoke” podcast in July. “We’re asking [for] just the same percentage of revenue or a similar percentage of revenue. And right now, that’s not the case. And so that’s what we’re fighting for.”
