Title: WNBA Players Say 'Pay Us What You Owe Us'

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Matt: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Welcome back, everybody. I'm Matt Katz, filling in for Brian today. I'm going to end today's show with a little WNBA talk. With a month left in the regular season, the WNBA champion New York Liberty are tied for first place in the Eastern Conference, but off the court, there's an important WNBA story that we're going to look at this morning, and that's a pending new contract for the players. Joining us to talk about the latest with the WNBA is Myles Ehrlich, who covers the WNBA for the WNBA news site Winsidr. He's also co-host of the podcast, "Pull Up with Myles and Owen." Welcome to WNYC, Myles.

Myles: Thanks so much for having me, Matt. Happy to talk W.

Matt: All right. Here we go. Start us off with a little lay of the land. It was a monster year for the WNBA. Last year, rookie Caitlin Clark took the league by storm, ratings skyrocketed. How's the season going with the W?

Myles: Last year was the continuation of growth, but Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, too, both came into the league, and immediately, we just saw this giant jump. Everything had been going up in a linear growth, normal sort of way, and then it was this just giant momentous, comet through the sky jump that we were seeing. That momentum came at the time where they were a year and a half away from the end of the collective bargaining agreement. They had re-signed back in 2020, right ahead of COVID.

There were lots of things that were changed in the last CBA, but the players were taking care of a lot of things beyond salary, which was, there were things like childcare that they had to worry about. There were things like the league wanted prioritization overseas so that players were making sure that they were spending the bulk of their time in the WNBA and staying locally and domestically in the off-season so that they can further promote the league. There were a lot of things that were not quite at the point that we were getting to now. Now, all the players, for the first time in the league's nearly 30-year history, have some leverage. I think that's why everything's come to a head right now.

Matt: The collective bargaining agreement expires on October 31st, and then, as things are coming to a head, I was watching the All-Star Game, I wasn't aware that this CBA was expiring, and then I see the players roll up in these T-shirts, "pay us what you owe us." What are the specifics here in terms of what the players want and what was the message they were trying to send by wearing those T-shirts?

Myles: Being on the ground in Indianapolis for All-Star, I was surprised, and I think a lot of the players themselves are surprised at how much this became the narrative throughout the weekend. The league had met with the players once a month, where they're exchanging proposals and they're talking to one another, but this was the first and probably only opportunity, because of how condensed the season is, that they were able to meet in person. They did that on the Thursday of All-Star weekend, as soon as all the players arrived before any of the festivities.

In the weeks leading up to it, I had spoken to Breanna Stewart or Sabrina Ionescu in the Liberty Market, and they both had the thought, "This is great. We're going to talk about the CBA on the front end, and then we'll just be able to focus on basketball and fun and growing the league for the rest of the weekend." The players left that meeting saying that the league had no sense of urgency. That was something that surprised them. They thought this is the one opportunity that we're all going to be able to sit around a table before the end of the season because yes, there's that 10/31 expiration, but the league is going to go until the last possible day of the finals is October 19th.

There's not going to really be an opportunity for everyone to get together like this. More than 40 players, which is over a quarter of the league, came to Indianapolis, some of them not even all-stars, to be present for this meeting, which is the first time there's been a summit like this and a show of force like this. Instead of just having a couple of players be that leadership head of the CBA, I think it was that everyone got to see firsthand just how they were, in their eyes, being disrespected.

I spoke to Nneka Ogwumike, who is the president of the Players Association, at the end of the weekend. I just asked her, did this weekend with these T-shirts, which they said that they came up with that morning, that was not a predetermined thing to wear those shirts to the game itself, did this weekend meet your expectations, or did this morph into something that you didn't expect at all? She said the latter.

She said she really thought they'd have a great, productive conversation, not that they were going to come to a deal or anything at that time on Thursday, but it was just they were all galvanized by, I think, the unity that they had as a Players Association and as player representation, but also some of the disrespect that they felt like they were met with. The biggest thing that they're pushing for now is salary. I think that there's a lot of people that are in this space, bad faith, that are just going to cherry-pick metrics, but this has been a long time coming.

Kelsey Plum went onto a podcast last year and expressed it very well, where she said, "We're not asking to be paid $70 million, LeBron James is being paid. In the NBA, there's a 50/50 revenue share between the players and between the ownership groups." In the WNBA, that number is 9.3%. They're making about a fifth of that percentage of what is happening on the other side. They're not saying we need to be making $70 million. They're saying we need to be getting our representative share, and that's the big argument here.

Matt: Listeners, are you a WNBA fan, new fan, longtime fan? Do you have questions for the NBA writer with us this morning, Myles Ehrlich, or maybe you have comments about what the players are demanding? Give us a call, send us a text, 212-433-WNYC. That's 212-433-9692. Myles, the players want revenue share. They want a piece of some of the money that these teams are making. What kind of salaries are the players making now? What are we talking about? Approximately.

Myles: Right now, the max salary is approximately $244,000, and the minimum salary is about between $70,000 and $80,000 for rookies because when this current CBA was signed in 2020, the rookies had been making somewhere like $40,000. That was what a lot of the argument was was we need to get this up to a livable wage for all of the players. What then instead happened is once there was that minimum, a lot of veterans that were that middle-class were getting squeezed out, and teams are building their rosters around being top-heavy and then filling it out with whatever the rookie scale contracts they could. There was an issue there.

The question that people often ask is, "Where is this money coming from?" ESPN had the television rights for a very long time to the WNBA. They were paying somewhere in the neighborhood of between $25 and $27 million a year. It was reported last year that there was a new television deal agreed to that's going to be close to 10 times that, about in the $230 to $250 million a year. That's a lot more money coming in that can then be used. It's a 10-year contract, and it's not just ESPN, but it's also Amazon, and I think-- I forget who else is on it, but there are four or five partners.

They also have a current standing deal with ION where they have every Friday night, there's this locally accessible ION channel that shows all these games, and they're able to keep on building these partnerships out. Every year, the league is growing more and more brand ambassadors and partnerships, and we see that at the big league events. This money is there.

The other thing that comes into play is valuations. The Tsais bought the New York Liberty for somewhere in the range of $10 to $14 million back in 2019. That was after they were on the market for about a year, where James Dolan sold them. He was the Knicks owner, and he marooned them up in Westchester. Then the Tsais bought them. A valuation came out with The Athletic a couple of months ago at $450 million for that team. That's a five-year turnaround. There are three expansion teams-

Matt: That's incredible.

Myles: -opening in '28, '29, and '30. There are three new expansion teams that each bought in for $250 million a piece. There's rumors of Boston trying to move the existing Connecticut Sun for $350 million. All of this crying poor narrative that has persisted for so long, unfortunately, a lot of it is rooted in misogyny, which is what is going to be a longstanding issue for this sport and has been a longstanding issue for this sport. These billionaires are not lining up to take a loss on something for public perception. There's real money in this sport, and it's all there.

Matt: What is their argument? You have a player on the court making $70,000 a year, and you have a team worth $450 million, and you have a packed arena. How are they justifying that? Are they saying they're still not profitable as a league?

Myles: It's really hard to tell. I will couch this in saying that the economics of all of this in terms of how some of these ownership groups deploy their finances, that's not my direct expertise, but there is a lot of investment from the NBA side and it's good on the part of these are people that know how to run sports franchises and basketball franchises when it comes to investment in facilities or investments in overseas scouting, things like that. At the other end, it also means that they can manipulate and hide losses wherever they want to, and that's something that we see in every sport.

We see every year that five or six major league baseball teams claim that they turned a profit, and everyone else is saying, "No, we didn't because they're able to play this shell game with their money." The WNBA has been an easy way to say, "Oh, no, no one's investing. There's no money to be found in it," when the way that they're moving in this space, these ownership groups really betrays that idea at all because why would they be investing so much money into it if they weren't turning a profit?

Matt: For sure. We have a couple of minutes left, and I did want to just give folks an update on the champion Liberty. How are the Liberty doing this season? Give us a little late-season scouting report in terms of what we might look forward to for the playoffs.

Myles: It's been an up-and-down season for the defending champs.This is not the typical--Sometimes you always hear about the championship hangover where a team wins a ring and then the players come back, don't have that same drive. They've had some really rough injury luck. They lost finals MVP, Jonquel Jones, for a month, and now JJ's back and playing well. Then as soon as Jonquel comes back, they lose Breanna Stewart, who is the 2023 MVP with the Liberty, for a month, and she'll hopefully be back at the end of August.

Everyone's playing this really condensed constraint schedule, where it started later than last year and ends earlier than last year, and it's 44 games, which is the most ever played in a season before and the most allowable under the current CBA. Every team is kind of going through it. The Liberty have had a lot of their star players in and out of the lineup. Still, they sit tied for second place in the overall standings at 20 and 11. They still have the third-best net rating in the league.

They're still putting up the most points per game with the pace that they're playing with and shooting with the most efficiency. It has been a little bit more up and down than they would have liked. I think the Minnesota Lynx are pacing the league at 27 and 5. Even though 20 and 11 is far behind that, it's still a pretty good showing despite some of the turmoil that they've had in terms of injury in and out of the lineup.

Matt: They're still filling the Barclays Center?

Myles: Oh, yes. When I first was credentialed for the W, it was 2020, and everything was on Zoom. Everything was remote because of the bubble for COVID. Then in 2021, when they moved back to the Barclays Center, they only opened lower bowl, and everything was six seats apart, and I've watched that grow. They used to only have the lower bowl sold out, and then they would open one section at a time. Now, every single game, every section is open, everything is filled up.

Matt: Amazing.

Myles: The WNBA attendance as a whole is just skyrocketing. Everything's been great on that front, even with the in and out and with the rising prices as well, which fans have not been thrilled about.

Matt: Myles Ehrlich covers the WNBA for the WNBA news site, Winsidr. He's also the co-host of the podcast "Pull Up with Miles and Owen." Thanks so much for joining us on the show, Myles, and explaining this whole situation with the WNBA.

Myles: Of course. Thanks so much for having me.

Matt: I'm Matt Katz, and this has been The Brian Lehrer Show. Thanks for listening, everybody. Stay tuned for All Of It.

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