So I'm a little unsure of the point you were trying to make, but I read this as a "yes-and" of my point about economics, underscoring it with a comparison to the NHL.
What I'd add to that is that there's a few main factors that drive the difference. But let's first talk about what's the same. The NBA, as is well known, guarantees players 51% of revenue ("basketball-related income"), which has a few carve-outs but is generally pretty comprehensive. The NHL, meanwhile, has the players' share of revenue set at 50%, with some escrowing similar to the NBA but basically no carve-outs. So given those revenue numbers, you'd expect players' shares to be pretty comparable.
But the first big difference is roster size. NHL rosters have minimum 20, max 23 (most carry 23), while NBA teams have minimum 12, max 15 (most carry 14-15), plus smaller things like two-way deals that are probably a wash in a comparison. So even on a per-player basis, just from that factor you'd expect NBA players to get 1.5x that of NHL players.
The second factor is deals struck to handle COVID financial fluctuations. NHL players basically got paid by league owners via deficit financing during the suspended seasons, and because of that debt and the terms agreed with the NHLPA, the salary cap hasn't gone up to match revenue. So we're at a cap of $83.5M / team, for a total possible league payroll of $2.67B which would be only 44.5% of projected revenue. Or about 10% less total player pay than you'd expect given the 50-50 revenue split. In the NBA, they initially dropped player pay by 25% for the balance of the 2019-2020 season, and then agreed on a max 20% player pay cut for the next season, kept the salary cap flat, basically constraining any rise in player payroll and handling shortfalls in league revenue (which were substantial) via increased escrowing. And now you have a total payroll this year of $4.85B, against a projected 2023-24 league revenue of $13B, (2021-22: $10B, 2022-23: $10.9B), which would only be 37.3% of revenue. So while league revenue has since recovered post-pandemic, it would appear that the players are still in arrears to the league based on the league not cutting player pay by as much as they could have, and instead smoothing the cap impact out, and then being made whole over the course of several years.
A third factor is the difference that a single player can make to the team, and thus the league's stratification of salaries from stars to scrubs. The NBA is famously stratified, hence Jaylen Brown's 35%-of-cap max getting to $60M, and the bottom-end players making $1.1-$1.9M (taking up 7% of the roster spots but ~1% of the average team payroll). VS nobody in the NHL really making much more than 10% of the cap, but a minimum salary of $750k, which proportionally is more generous than the NBA (minimum players each taking up ~4% of the roster spots but 0.9% of the average team payroll, so proportionally about double that of minimum players in the NBA). The NBA's stars basically take all the gains, whereas roster-building is much more of a complex puzzle in the NHL and you need to spread talent around a lot more. But the NBA's stars also take more of the minutes - you can only have 5 players on the floor, and come the playoffs, you're only playing 7-8 of them, and your stars can play 80-90% of the minutes, while in the NHL a star forward is still only playing 1/3 of the minutes and a star defenseman ~2/5ths of the minutes. Impact is very different between them, so you'd expect the salaries to be more stratified. This doesn't affect average player comp, but since you raised the maximum league salaries as a point of comparison, I thought it's worth addressing.
So averaging between those factors, if you assume a full 23-man roster and $83.5M salary cap for an NHL team, the average player is making $3.63M, while in the NBA, with a 15-man roster and ~$165M average team payroll, the average player makes $11M (hence that being the MLE amount), a ratio of ~3x more for the average NBA player, driven chiefly by the ~2x league revenue multiple favoring the NBA, and 1.5x bigger roster size in the NHL. I might have my numbers off, or there might be some pandemic-related escrowing that this isn't fully taken into account (e.g. player compensation isn't just the announced salaries, and we don't know the arrears / cap-smoothing situation of both leagues).
The second factor is deals struck to handle COVID financial fluctuations. NHL players basically got paid by league owners via deficit financing during the suspended seasons, and because of that debt and the terms agreed with the NHLPA, the salary cap hasn't gone up to match revenue. So we're at a cap of $83.5M / team, for a total possible league payroll of $2.67B which would be only 44.5% of projected revenue. Or about 10% less total player pay than you'd expect given the 50-50 revenue split. In the NBA, they initially dropped player pay by 25% for the balance of the 2019-2020 season, and then agreed on a max 20% player pay cut for the next season, kept the salary cap flat, basically constraining any rise in player payroll and handling shortfalls in league revenue (which were substantial) via increased escrowing. And now you have a total payroll this year of $4.85B, against a projected 2023-24 league revenue of $13B, (2021-22: $10B, 2022-23: $10.9B), which would only be 37.3% of revenue. So while league revenue has since recovered post-pandemic, it would appear that the players are still in arrears to the league based on the league not cutting player pay by as much as they could have, and instead smoothing the cap impact out, and then being made whole over the course of several years.
A third factor is the difference that a single player can make to the team, and thus the league's stratification of salaries from stars to scrubs. The NBA is famously stratified, hence Jaylen Brown's 35%-of-cap max getting to $60M, and the bottom-end players making $1.1-$1.9M (taking up 7% of the roster spots but ~1% of the average team payroll). VS nobody in the NHL really making much more than 10% of the cap, but a minimum salary of $750k, which proportionally is more generous than the NBA (minimum players each taking up ~4% of the roster spots but 0.9% of the average team payroll, so proportionally about double that of minimum players in the NBA). The NBA's stars basically take all the gains, whereas roster-building is much more of a complex puzzle in the NHL and you need to spread talent around a lot more. But the NBA's stars also take more of the minutes - you can only have 5 players on the floor, and come the playoffs, you're only playing 7-8 of them, and your stars can play 80-90% of the minutes, while in the NHL a star forward is still only playing 1/3 of the minutes and a star defenseman ~2/5ths of the minutes. Impact is very different between them, so you'd expect the salaries to be more stratified. This doesn't affect average player comp, but since you raised the maximum league salaries as a point of comparison, I thought it's worth addressing.
So averaging between those factors, if you assume a full 23-man roster and $83.5M salary cap for an NHL team, the average player is making $3.63M, while in the NBA, with a 15-man roster and ~$165M average team payroll, the average player makes $11M (hence that being the MLE amount), a ratio of ~3x more for the average NBA player, driven chiefly by the ~2x league revenue multiple favoring the NBA, and 1.5x bigger roster size in the NHL. I might have my numbers off, or there might be some pandemic-related escrowing that this isn't fully taken into account (e.g. player compensation isn't just the announced salaries, and we don't know the arrears / cap-smoothing situation of both leagues).
Bottom line: Players' total and average comp is about what you'd expect in both leagues, given their announced revenue sharing split with the players.
Bringing this back to the WNBA, it's unsurprising that women's basketball players average more than women's soccer players, because there's just so many more players per roster on a soccer team. There are also many fewer pro basketball player jobs available. 12 teams x roster size of 12 (vs 22-26 for soccer teams), even if that goes to 14 or 16 teams soon, it's still harder to get in the door as a player.
And the key economics factor that I'm tracking will be the revenue split, in both cases. As Kelsey Plum said above, WNBA players are getting about 21% of revenue, which is really low, and what you'd expect from a new league trying to constrain costs to reach financial stability and handle some expected big bumps and roadblocks along the way. I estimate NWSL payrolls at being about 18% of revenue, but their nearest competitor, the WSL in the UK, is probably paying 60-70% of (much lower) revenues to players this season. The WSL can afford to be that generous because their parent clubs are all Premier League financial behemoths and the women's team is a rounding error to them, but that's only sustainable so long as the league is showing revenue growth as a result of that investment. But long-term, you'd expect those numbers to both creep towards the 50% that mature, profitable sports leagues get to (50% for straight player payroll, 60-65% in total staff costs, which is how the soccer numbers are reported)
