Caitlin Clark took a pay cut to turn professional.
That's not a metaphor. That's not a rhetorical device to make a point about fairness. In 2024, one of the most-watched basketball players in the country — college or pro, men's or women's — signed her WNBA rookie contract for $78,000 a year. Whatever she made at Iowa, whatever endorsement infrastructure she was already building while still in school, the moment she entered the league her base salary dropped. Ben Pickman, who covers the WNBA for The Athletic, came on the show to break down the CBA negotiations that are supposed to fix that. And what he laid out is more complicated than the $78,000 number suggests — because the players aren't just fighting over what they get paid today. They're fighting over who gets to decide what they get paid for the next decade.
That's the argument. The salary is the symptom. The system is the disease.
Two numbers on the same whiteboard that don't talk to each other
The WNBA's current collective bargaining agreement sets a salary cap for each year of the deal — fixed increases of 3% annually, with a revenue-sharing mechanism attached if certain cumulative targets are hit. Those targets have never been hit. The pandemic bubble season knocked the math out of sequence in 2020 and it never recovered. So the revenue-sharing mechanism that was written into the deal has functionally never existed.
Meanwhile, the business has exploded. The New York Liberty sold a minority share this year at a $450 million valuation. Teams that sold for two or five million dollars a decade ago are now trading at three and four hundred million. And starting next season, the WNBA enters an 11-year, $2.2 billion media rights deal — a number that dwarfs anything the league has seen before.
So you have a cap structure tied to 3% annual increases, and you have a business that has grown not 3% but by an order of magnitude. Those two things don't belong on the same spreadsheet. The players see the $2.2 billion media deal and the $250 million expansion fees — three new teams entering the league next year paid $250 million each just for the right to participate — and they're asking the obvious question: if the business is this strong, why is our compensation tied to a fixed schedule written in 2020?
The owners' answer, stated charitably, is: yes, salaries will go up significantly — think 3x, 4x, maybe 5x the current max. The current max is around $250,000. Call it a million, a million and a half. Big increases are coming. What the owners haven't moved on is changing the system itself — moving from a fixed-cap structure to a BRI model, where players take a percentage of basketball-related income the way NBA players do. The players don't just want more money. They want a salary that grows with the business, automatically, without having to renegotiate every six years from zero.
That distinction — between a higher number in a broken system versus a lower number in a system that scales — is the whole negotiation.
What leverage actually looks like when your owner also owns an NBA team
Ben made a point I keep coming back to: in most of these WNBA ownership situations, the people across the table from the players are billionaires who also own NBA franchises. Mat Ishbia owns the Phoenix Mercury and the Phoenix Suns. Joe Tsai owns the Liberty and the Brooklyn Nets. Minnesota's ownership group has both the Lynx and the Timberwolves.
That matters because the standard player-leverage playbook — hold out, threaten to miss games, hurt the owner's bottom line until the deal moves — doesn't quite work when a WNBA work stoppage is a rounding error compared to what those same owners stand to lose in an NBA disruption. You can't squeeze someone by threatening to shut down the thing that represents five percent of their sports portfolio.
I've been in this situation from the inside. 2010, 2011, we had our CBA moment in the NFL — a quasi-lockout, players trying to hold the line, everybody talking about solidarity. The honest version of what happened is that 89 or 90 percent of the guys simply could not afford to miss games. The NFLPA had a mechanism to hold back money for players specifically for a lockout scenario. We still didn't get there. The guys who needed the checks came back to the table, and that was it. You need the whole collective to hold — not most of it, all of it — and that's almost impossible to manufacture when the income disparity inside the union is as wide as it is. Some guys can survive a four-month work stoppage. Most can't.
What's different for the WNBA is that the players actually have an exit valve the NFL players didn't. Ben walked through it: Unrivaled, the player-founded three-on-three winter league that launched last year, paid an average salary of $220,000 — not counting the equity stakes players received for participating. The European leagues — Turkey, France, Italy, the Czech Republic — have been absorbing WNBA players in the offseason for years. A work stoppage doesn't mean zero. It means a shift in where you're playing and how much you're making, which is a different kind of pressure than most labor negotiations produce.
I'll take that further: the LIV Golf parallel is real. If you're a sovereign wealth fund looking for a brand with existing global stars, women's basketball is an obvious target. These athletes already have the skills, the audience, and the international credibility. Someone with the right checkbook could build a serious league around them. That changes the math on a lockout in ways that didn't exist five years ago.
PULL QUOTE: "There's no way that a practice squad guy that will probably never play a game of football in a season is making three times the amount as a superstar for the WNBA. That just doesn't add up." — Ben Pickman
The veterans are negotiating for a different career than the rookies are playing
Here's the thing Ben said that I found most interesting from a pure labor politics standpoint: almost every veteran in the WNBA is a free agent this offseason. Two players — not two teams, two players — who aren't on rookie contracts are signed to deals. Everyone else is holding out to see what the new CBA looks like before they commit.
That's obviously strategic. But it creates a strange internal tension in the players' union, because the veterans who are leading the negotiations and sitting on the executive committee came up in a completely different financial reality than the players entering the league today. Breanna Stewart has a Puma deal. She has been building endorsements for years. She is a household name with major brand relationships. She did not benefit from NIL — she graduated before NIL existed. The players who are coming in now — Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese — arrived as millionaires before they ever signed a WNBA contract.
I have my own version of this story. In the 2011 NFL CBA, there were veterans in leadership positions who were genuinely focused on retirement benefits — pension mechanisms, post-career healthcare, long-term security. I understood the impulse. But I sat in those rooms getting increasingly frustrated, because from where I stood, the young guys needed money now, not promises about what the league would contribute in thirty years. A guy who plays two and a half years and washes out never gets to those retirement benefits. He needed to maximize the contract he signed at 22, because that was it. The veterans, understandably, were negotiating for the career they'd had. The rookies needed someone negotiating for the career most of them would actually get.
The WNBA equivalent: the NIL generation is entering a league where the floor matters most, because their upside is already being captured elsewhere — by sponsors, by social media, by the brand architecture they built in college. The veterans need the ceiling to move, because their post-playing earning power was always going to come from the league itself. Same negotiation, different needs, one seat at the table.
What I'd actually want done before October 31st
Three things — not because they're all achievable by the deadline, but because they're the ones where I think the players have the most real leverage:
- Get the BRI structure or something that functions like it, even if the percentage is lower than the NBA. The number itself — $250,000 max, $78,000 floor — will go up because the owners have publicly said it will go up. That's already conceded. What isn't conceded is the mechanism. A fixed cap with generous increases sounds like a win, but in five years when the next media deal comes in at $4 billion instead of $2.2 billion, the players will be back in the same position — arguing about a number rather than collecting a percentage. The players should trade some short-term dollars for the right system, because the right system is worth multiples of any one-time salary increase over the life of a decade-long deal.
- Codify charter travel and facility standards now, in writing, with teeth. Ben laid out the current situation plainly: Chicago practices in a public rec center. There have been kids' birthday parties happening just off a WNBA practice court. That is not a metaphor for how the league values its players — that is literally what has been happening. Charter flights are not currently written into the CBA; they exist because of informal agreements that can be revoked. Facilities are not standardized; they exist on a spectrum from purpose-built training centers to whatever the local tribe or university was willing to rent out. These are basic operating conditions. They should be legally binding, not discretionary. The Portland Fire is building a world-class facility right now, and that's great, but it shouldn't be optional for franchises that would rather not spend the money.
- Think hard about who's doing the retiring and who's doing the entering, and don't let veteran interests crowd out the floor. The best thing the veterans can do for the players coming in behind them isn't to maximize the ceiling — it's to establish a floor that isn't embarrassing. Caitlin Clark at $78,000 is the story that's moving public opinion right now. That floor is the number that tells every young woman considering basketball as a profession what the professional version of that career is worth. The veterans negotiating for pension stability are negotiating for themselves. The rookies need someone negotiating for the version of this league that exists in 2030. Both things matter. Neither should erase the other.
The NHL analogy Ben raised is the one I keep returning to. The WNBA has momentum right now — real, earned, undeniable momentum. The momentum in women's basketball is the kind that doesn't come back quickly if you squander it. The NHL had buzz in the mid-'90s, then had a work stoppage, then entered what they literally called the Dead Puck Era, then missed an entire season in the early 2000s. The buzz that looked permanent turned out to be fragile.
The players know this. The owners know this. Both sides have more to lose from a prolonged dispute than from the short-term pain of a deal that leaves both sides a little unhappy.
The best outcomes in negotiations come when both sides are hurting just enough to stop.