The WNBA: Thread II
- Thread starter Phil Plantier
- Start date
This was the killer. They had a great season considering the loss and played really hard every time I saw them play. Should have their heads high this was a very good season all things considered
Fun WNBA Finals Game 1 so far. NY up as much as 7 or 8 early, but Vegas just had a run to tie it up.
The only NY-based team it's easy to root for, imo.
The only NY-based team it's easy to root for, imo.
...well, that escalated quickly. NY took a 5-point lead into the half and now early in the 4th they're down 17.
Thanks for the reminder. I can’t root for any NYC teams, so I prefer this outcome.
Aces took it to therm on all fronts and look like the superior team. Just one game but Liberty have a lot of work to do.
Apparently Kelsey Plum of the Aces saw Brady (who now has a stake in Aces' ownership) at the game and yelled over to him, "It's about F-ing time you showed up." And she apparently wasn't joking.
On the one hand I can understand her wanting the new "owner" of the club to be at a game before now. On the other I'm like...uh....really? You're gonna go there with Tom Brady?
Anyway, Liberty hanging in there after a terrible start tonight.
On the one hand I can understand her wanting the new "owner" of the club to be at a game before now. On the other I'm like...uh....really? You're gonna go there with Tom Brady?
Anyway, Liberty hanging in there after a terrible start tonight.
Huh? She was 100% joking
""I looked at him and I said, 'It's about effing time you showed up,'" Plum said during her post-game press conference. "But what I love about him was he was just like, 'You already know.' Just super excited for his investment in our franchise and understanding what that means for us, and not just us, but the league. And putting eyes on us. I joke around, but man, it's been awesome to have him and I know he cares." "
Ok that makes me feel better. I was passing this on as the story was told to me so I’m glad they misunderstood Plum’s intent. Thanks for clearing it up for me.
Yes and no. Yes because there’s a lot more talent in women’s college hoops and in the WNBA. But no because the Aces aren’t a great example of it. They’re just a super team with massively disproportionate amounts of talent relative to the rest of the league. (NY is close but nobody else is even within shouting distance) That is, the talent distribution in the WNBA has never been more uneven than it is now.
Tommy's gonna be in the Aces' weight room at 5:00am tomorrow, and when Plum gets there he's going to say "good afternoon" to her.
Choke job might be extreme. Aces played good defense.
This is a scene.
View: https://twitter.com/its_whitney/status/1714836612968771706
i can’t stop watching mark davis dance
This is a scene.
View: https://twitter.com/its_whitney/status/1714836612968771706
i can’t stop watching mark davis dance
Choke? I guess. Aces were the 2nd most stacked team in the league, a "severely depleted" aces team is still a beast.
Stewie played like garbage all playoffs and capped it off tonight with a stinker.
Liberty have to get more athletic on the wing this offseason. Someone like Jordin Canada would be perfect for them
The Aces got 45 minutes today from 2 players who pretty much never played outside garbage time all season. They were basically using 6 players in the playoffs and they lost 2 of them in game 3. Liberty scored 23 points in the first quarter and appeared to be in total control and then scored 46 in the last 3 quarters. Absolute choke job when you're playing an elimination game at home.
Even past Caitlin Clark, a lot of talent entering the WNBA tonight. For reference, Alissa Pili is projected to go #13. She scored 37 points against both USCs this year. (Pili is undersized as a frontcourt player and needs some conditioning, but in any case a good barometer of how deep the draft is.)
I won't take that bet, butlet me know if you find somebody who does.
Reese is a rare rebounder, and that skill is more important in the WNBA than the NBA. She has the all around skill to be a great pro.
The WNBA draft experts (who they are, I have no idea) thought Leila Lacan could be the second best guard prospect after Clark. She plays in the pro league in France at 19 y.o. I think the French league partially conflicts with the WNBA schedule, so depending on pay who knows her likelihood of coming over. But with the Olympic prep for Team France she'll definitely not be in the US this year.
From the New Haven Register:
The 2.9-steal average stat jumps out at me, and scouting-wise they say she is a great 2-way player.
Reese is a good defender (not elite but good) and an elite rebounder. She can’t shoot worth a crap though, outside four feet. She’s going to get her points only on putbacks, which she should get a bunch of those opportunities. But the W has lots of big people, unlike what she went up against in college.
Reese has a huge motor and will definitely succeed as a pro. I just think her game is limited. What she can do, she does really well. Which will be enough to let her have a good career. But her ceiling is limited by her lack of offensive ability. But maybe that will improve. Who knows.
Yeah I agree with this. I guess my comment is more of a floor/ceiling debate. I think, because of Reese’s elite skills in certain areas, mainly rebounding, she has a much better chance of having a long career than Edwards, who strikes me as being very solid but nothing that stands out versus all the other women in the W.
And I’m a UConn grad.
What Edwards can do that Reese can’t is shoot. And if Edwards can just extend her range a little, suddenly she can be a legit three point threat and that would make her extremely valuable. Edwards is tough as nails, is a very good (not elite) rebounder, can post up smaller players and blow by bigger players. And she’s a good passer.
Two very different styles of play. I hope they’re both hugely successful.
Two very different styles of play. I hope they’re both hugely successful.
According to CBS Sports' Jack Maloney, the Sun have already have a full roster, and can wait a year for Lacan to come. So she's a Euro-stash. Perhaps the first in WNBA history? They drafted three other players in the second and third rounds, but they aren't guaranteed rookie contracts.
Chicago fans still remember the Eddie Curry-Tyson Chandler debacle, so the excitement is tempered with some skepticism about how 2 bigs with very limited offensive range are going to work.
But both of these players have been to the top of the college game as part of great teams, so they both understand having to mesh your game with other great players. And they also both seem like hard workers who will put in the effort to grow (which was a er…challenge for the effortless gifted Curry).
And bottom line - the Sky gutted their squad and brought into 2 high profile rookies that will sell tickets through a rebuilding year. Saw on the twitters that section 100 tix for Fever at Sky have hit $450 each.
It's a very good time for women's basketball. Let's hope the interest continues to climb. The league needs to expand, but to do that, it needs to see a lot more interest from the public.
As for Cardoso-Reese - yeah they won't score from outside of 6 feet (Cardoso's miracle three in the SEC tourney notwithstanding), but they will own the glass, that's for sure.
Yeah with Brionna Jones returning from injury, the Sun have a pretty full roster. They also traded for Moriah Jefferson, who has steadily improved during her 7 years in the league. They were just throwing darts at the wall with their other picks to see who could possibly stick and show out well during training camp. My wife, as a diehard fan, loved the Helena Pueyo pick though.
This will probably be good enough even with limited range to do really well in the league this year. The WNBA has not shifted completely over to the 3-pointer or bust mentality that the men's game is currently in. There are around 100 players in the NBA that average 5 or more 3-point attempts per game for 2023-24, but only 15 players did so in the W this past season. Unless they are playing a team like the Liberty with Ionescu and Stewart who will burn you from deep, limiting the 10-foot and in game on defense is a death blow to many teams.
Funny you should say that now:
Commish Engelbert is "confident" the league will expand to 16 teams by 2028 - ESPN
They announced a 13th team, to be owned by the GS Warriors, will start play in 2026, and will probably be joined by a 14th team that year. Then she aims for 2 more in 2028. Not too different than the NWSL's recent expansion pace, which most commentators describe as "Breakneck".
There's this narrative echoed around (including here) that the league is in financial decline. But while it might have been true or at least arguable through the 2010s, it hasn't been remotely true since Engelbert took over. The new $60M / yr TV deal has been a major help, and the fact that the league's roster costs are so low has meant that team valuations have gone way up the last 4 years, which means it's now an attractive investment to big-money ownership groups who see the ROI.
I've critiqued the WNBA in my lengthy research posts on women's soccer, so I know what the attendance numbers have done relative to the league's first 3-4 years. But the decline in butts-in-seats has stopped, the financials never really ever got that bad, and this new surge of interest has given it a second wind.
Strategically, though, they really need to separate the TV rights from that of the NBA in the negotiations next year, not bundle them again. Unbundling commercial rights from the men's teams has made a huge difference for women's soccer leagues and teams, because your buyer is buying for a very different reason, it's not charity and shouldn't be treated as such by just tossing it in as "oh please won't you also televise the W". There are networks and commercial partners / sponsors who are specifically looking to get the women's-sports fan and the growth story therein, and will pay a premium to get it. By bundling, you lose that extra attention and premium, in exchange for raising the floor. You get partners who aren't as energetically committed to exploiting the relationship and finding the synergies. You also lose price discovery, because the value ascribed to the WNBA in the bundled deal is "whatever Adam Stern assigns to it", so you don't really have a benchmark to grow by or be accountable by. It's just bad business imo.
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This is all great news for women’s BB. Love it! And your analysis seems quite sound.
If the league is in better health, it really needs to do something about the salaries, at least for rookie first round picks. I saw something about Caitlin’s rookie contract which is basically averaging about 75k a year. That’s embarrassing.
Agreed. I'd really love to see their pay go up considerably. It's so so so far off what the men make - and yeah I get the economics of it. But also keep in mind that the WNBA plays less than half the games the NBA players do, and WNBA players also play for other leagues during the calendar year, so many (most) of them make much more $$ over the course of a calendar year than their WNBA pay would suggest. Many/most overseas leagues pay a lot more than the WNBA does.
But on the other hand, as a fan of women's college BB, I kind of like that it's worth the while of the top players to stay in school, now that big time NIL money is available. The last thing women's college BB needs is the best players leaving early like they do in the men's game.
But on the whole, I just want to see women's BB at all levels continue to grow in every way.
They aren't allowed to leave early for the wnba in most cases, has nothing to do with NIL
Hmmm yeah I guess I'm thinking more of those who could have left in the last couple of years but didn't, but those are the athletes who have extra covid years of eligibility. I stand corrected.
As a loose Storm fan, can you explain? I know they reloaded a bit this offseason, but I come and go with my paying attention to women's college basketball/WNBA so I'm not really caught up on who is who.
As an aside, I bought tickets to go watch Indiana at Seattle on May 22 and it was nearly sold out and single game tickets aren't even on sale to the general public yet. Caitlin Clark is going to be a massive, massive boon to the league and I hope she plays well enough to keep the momentum going.
Two things:
(1) "what the men make" is a canard. It's thrown around in good faith by people who want to see women's sports take a higher prominence in the sporting firmament, and I'm right there with you on the goal. But this is an entertainment business, and in entertainment, "you eat what you kill" - compensation for the performers is proportional to the revenue in the door, which comes from attendance, viewership / media rights, and commercial revenue (sponsors / official-partners). I cover this with respect to pay in women's soccer, but the same applies. When more people watch and attend, they'll get paid, and not before. This is not a design flaw or evidence of bias, it's the nature of the business. If you want to compare, compare to the pay in the men's leagues in the equivalent year since the league's founding, and you'll see it's actually pretty close.
Now that said, there is bargaining room around the edges, particularly on the % of revenue that goes to roster salaries (it is remarkably low in the WNBA and even MLS down around 15-20%, but not quite as low in NWSL, and is usually in the 50-60% range for most mature sports leagues). Bargaining in this department is probably going to be a focus very soon for their PA. But while WNBA players should be able to increase the slice of the pie that they get, especially as the pie is growing, the complainants would not be particularly impressed by average WNBA salary going from, say, 1.5% of NBA average (where it is today) to 2.5% of NBA average, even if that difference would mean a whole lot to the WNBA players involved. This is a distinction not lost on the WNBPA:
In a 2021 report, [USF Professor Nola] Agha and co-author David Berri found that WNBA players were paid 21 percent of the league’s $60m in revenue in 2019. By comparison, NBA players made approximately 50 percent of their league revenue that year.
“We are not asking to get paid what the men get paid. We’re asking to get paid the same percentage of revenue shared,” Kelsey Plum, a guard with the WNBA’s Las Vegas Aces, said in an interview with The Residency Podcast in November.
I think those percentages might change and start to get a bit more in line with each other. But the denominators will remain different. So anyone looking at the orders-of-magnitude difference and expressing outrage will remain, uh, outraged. Outrage might even be useful to help ol' Kelsey's argument in the next CBA, but it can't change the league's economics. Not unless every online outrage merchant (not including you here!) started actually going to the games.
(2) The above does not apply when you have billionaire oligarchs* in the Russian league who are happy to lose $5-10M / year on their women's team in order to beat each other, and will pay whatever it requires to get the best women's players in the world (most of them American) on their squad and enduring a Russian winter in fuckin' Ekaterinburg. China used to as well, but no longer. A few other things have changed recently, like the Israeli league being suspended this year for obvious reasons. And Russia/China aside, it is not true that "most overseas leagues pay a lot more than the WNBA does".
WNBA players are around a $60k minimum salary, $120k average salary (up from $75k in 2017), and $230k max salary, with a salary cap of $1.4M. Good overview here. That's your starting point for comparisons.
Take Australia. The Australian WNBL did not even make the 2017 list by Sporting Intelligence, as it wasn't fully pro then. I don't have awesome data for the WNBL but sources say that as of last year, the minimum salary is A$15k, average salary A$33k or A$37.5k, with a team salary floor of A$336k and salary cap of A$420k. They have 83 contracted players, compared to 144 in the WNBA. I think we can be assured they're not paying more than the WNBA.
In France, average women's salaries are apparently around € 3,700 / month, or $47k USD / year. That's less than half of the WNBA average. Could average WNBA players get star-level salaries in France? Sure, I suppose it's possible, but more likely, average WNBA players are getting above-average salaries by French league standards, and taking home ~60-70% of their WNBA salary to play there.
There have been a lot of anecdotes (like Brittney Griner making $600k in China, and of course Taurasi getting $1.5M from Ekaterinburg), but in reading what's out there, there's a lot of talk about the top stars' pay, and they tend to take those anecdotes and then yadda-yadda into talking about that as the norm rather than the exception - whereas I'm more interested in the experience of the average WNBA player, those who aren't "Team USA"-grade names.
On the other hand, this woman, Nola Agha, is just about the only scholarly authority I've found on women's basketball comp, and she produced this table in 2021:
Her source: "Note. Data compiled by authors from official league websites and personal communication with a European basketball player agent, July 15, 2020." I can send the full PDF if anyone wants it, it was a little hard to get. She's got a pretty interesting recounting of the history of WBB player comp going back decades and prior to the WNBA.
My cursory look into Prof. Agha's numbers, having done a truly deep dive on the soccer side and thus developed instincts for this data, suggests to me that this agent may have inflated the numbers he reported to her moderately to substantially, and that the right-hand column figures are closer to "max amounts" than "average amounts". But it probably does track the pecking order of league financial scale pretty well. The highest numbers on that list outside of China and Russia (which, again, changed dramatically the last few years due to pandemic / Russian ostracism from global sport) are actually in Italy. Italy apparently has some owners willing to pony up, and there's enough distinct anecdotes out there that I'm willing to believe a decent number of WNBA-level players can get paid slightly better there than at home. But that's about it right now.
Take Australia. The Australian WNBL did not even make the 2017 list by Sporting Intelligence, as it wasn't fully pro then. I don't have awesome data for the WNBL but sources say that as of last year, the minimum salary is A$15k, average salary A$33k or A$37.5k, with a team salary floor of A$336k and salary cap of A$420k. They have 83 contracted players, compared to 144 in the WNBA. I think we can be assured they're not paying more than the WNBA.
In France, average women's salaries are apparently around € 3,700 / month, or $47k USD / year. That's less than half of the WNBA average. Could average WNBA players get star-level salaries in France? Sure, I suppose it's possible, but more likely, average WNBA players are getting above-average salaries by French league standards, and taking home ~60-70% of their WNBA salary to play there.
There have been a lot of anecdotes (like Brittney Griner making $600k in China, and of course Taurasi getting $1.5M from Ekaterinburg), but in reading what's out there, there's a lot of talk about the top stars' pay, and they tend to take those anecdotes and then yadda-yadda into talking about that as the norm rather than the exception - whereas I'm more interested in the experience of the average WNBA player, those who aren't "Team USA"-grade names.
On the other hand, this woman, Nola Agha, is just about the only scholarly authority I've found on women's basketball comp, and she produced this table in 2021:
Her source: "Note. Data compiled by authors from official league websites and personal communication with a European basketball player agent, July 15, 2020." I can send the full PDF if anyone wants it, it was a little hard to get. She's got a pretty interesting recounting of the history of WBB player comp going back decades and prior to the WNBA.
My cursory look into Prof. Agha's numbers, having done a truly deep dive on the soccer side and thus developed instincts for this data, suggests to me that this agent may have inflated the numbers he reported to her moderately to substantially, and that the right-hand column figures are closer to "max amounts" than "average amounts". But it probably does track the pecking order of league financial scale pretty well. The highest numbers on that list outside of China and Russia (which, again, changed dramatically the last few years due to pandemic / Russian ostracism from global sport) are actually in Italy. Italy apparently has some owners willing to pony up, and there's enough distinct anecdotes out there that I'm willing to believe a decent number of WNBA-level players can get paid slightly better there than at home. But that's about it right now.
In general, my impression is that WNBA players are going abroad to supplement their domestic salary, but it is no longer true that their WNBA salary is a sideshow by comparison to their overseas earnings. Unless you're an all-star / Team USA level player, the average WNBA player is probably making 60-100% of their domestic salary when she goes abroad. A very worthwhile complement to their earnings, but not categorically different. And while those leagues are pretty static and not growing fast (And funded by the ambitions of the parent club, rather than profit motive), the WNBA is growing, so there may come a time not long from now when the WNBA can pay enough that players will start declining the moonlighting opportunities. That will probably come alongside a lengthened season, itself driven by league expansion. But I predict it'll be here sooner than the skeptics might think.
* the story of how Taurasi and Bird endured the league season when their gangster team owner was executed in a mob hit is pretty crazy.
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View: https://twitter.com/LevAkabas/status/1780332508795539600
I really hope Clark can be great at this level to continue this spike of interest.
I really hope Clark can be great at this level to continue this spike of interest.
Thanks for the long, outstanding post. I'm just going to reply now to this:
NHL rookie salary: $950k max
NBA rookie salary: $10.1m for the #1 pick
The top NBA rookie salary is 10.6 times that of the max rookie salary in the NHL. Crazy, right? For the "same" work, NHL players make far, far less than NBA players.
Biggest NHL contract ever: Alex Ovechkin - 13 years, $124 million ($9.5 m per year)
Biggest NBA contract ever: Jaylen Brown - 5 years, $304 million ($60.8 m per year)
And yet...
NHL revenue: $6 billion
NBA revenue: $10.6 billion
So the NBA brings in 1.8x the revenue that the NHL does, but players make FAR more than NHL players do. It's just economics. It's not sexism or racism. It's just economics.
NBA seasons and NHL seasons are essentially equivalent in length. Same number of regular season games. Basically the same playoff structure. Time frames almost identical.
NHL rookie salary: $950k max
NBA rookie salary: $10.1m for the #1 pick
The top NBA rookie salary is 10.6 times that of the max rookie salary in the NHL. Crazy, right? For the "same" work, NHL players make far, far less than NBA players.
Biggest NHL contract ever: Alex Ovechkin - 13 years, $124 million ($9.5 m per year)
Biggest NBA contract ever: Jaylen Brown - 5 years, $304 million ($60.8 m per year)
And yet...
NHL revenue: $6 billion
NBA revenue: $10.6 billion
So the NBA brings in 1.8x the revenue that the NHL does, but players make FAR more than NHL players do. It's just economics. It's not sexism or racism. It's just economics.
An article in the Trib this morning that Sky tickets are selling at a record rate. Unfortunately, they didn't give hard numbers in the article, but anecdotally I'll say my social media has more Sky content in it the past few days than when they won the title in 2021. And the new jerseys dropped today and folks are fired up for Reese #5.
@InstaFace - your posts here and deep dives in NWSL revenues made me think about another difference between the leagues: NWSL clubs aren't owned by any MLS counterparts, they have owners/ownership groups that are trying to develop their own market. In the WNBA, the Sky are the only team not affiliated with an NBA counterpart. I'm not sure how much of a difference this can make given US league/franchise structures, but strikes me a significant difference.
View: https://twitter.com/ChicagoSports/status/1780619805399093707
@InstaFace - your posts here and deep dives in NWSL revenues made me think about another difference between the leagues: NWSL clubs aren't owned by any MLS counterparts, they have owners/ownership groups that are trying to develop their own market. In the WNBA, the Sky are the only team not affiliated with an NBA counterpart. I'm not sure how much of a difference this can make given US league/franchise structures, but strikes me a significant difference.
View: https://twitter.com/ChicagoSports/status/1780619805399093707
Overall, I think this is true, but a few slight pushbacks. The Seattle Reign were recently purchased by the Sounders. And the Storm used to be owned by the Sonics/Thunder, but are owned by someone else now.
I think with league expansion and popularity, higher salaries will come. That is what I think we are seeing happen with MLS right now. The low end players are slowly getting paid more and more.