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The WNBA and the players’ union will meet Monday in New York for the first time in several weeks to try to move forward the stalled negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement.
Kelsey Plum, a point guard who played for the Los Angeles Sparks last year in her ninth WNBA season, is vice president of the players union. Plum mentioned the meeting to reporters while she was preparing for a game in Philadelphia with Phantom BC, the team she captains in Unrivaled, the South Florida-based 3-on-3 league that features dozens of WNBA players.
“I think we’ll learn a lot from this meeting. I’m not trying to put it on the meeting, but this is a meeting that I think everyone understands what’s at stake,” Plum said. “The league has their timelines; we as players understand what’s at stake. I always come into anything that I do with a great attitude, and I’m going to see the best in this.”
Plum will be joined at the meeting by other members of the executive council, including Napheesa Collier and Nneka Ogwumike, as well as union leadership.
The league will have its regular negotiating team, including WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, the labor relations committee and a few other owners, according to a person familiar with the situation. The person spoke on condition of anonymity Friday because of the sensitive nature of the negotiations.
The person also said the league had been asking for the meeting for a few weeks and it was agreed upon by the union Thursday.
Players said union leadership had been coming to chat with them frequently, including this week.
“Both sides want to get something done, we just got to make moves to get there,” Rachel Banham said. “It’s got to be an actual negotiation with compromise.”
Natasha Cloud took a more hardened stance.
“It would be the worst business decision of any business to not literally pay the players that make your business go. Without us, there is no W season,” she said.
Talks to reach a new collective bargaining agreement haven’t had much traction over the past few weeks as the union says it is waiting for a response to a proposal it sent close to Christmas that included a 30% gross revenue share for the players. According to another person familiar with the negotiations, the league didn’t feel that proposal was much different then the previous one the union had sent.
That person spoke on condition of anonymity also because of the sensitive nature of the negotiations.
The league’s most recent offer last month would guarantee a maximum base salary of $1 million in 2026 that could reach $1.3 million through revenue sharing.
That’s up from the current $249,000 and could grow to nearly $2 million over the life of the agreement, the person told the AP.
The two sides have been in a “status quo” period after the latest extension of the current CBA ran out Jan. 9. They agreed to a moratorium a few days later that halted the initial stages of free agency in which teams would seek to deliver qualifying offers and franchise tag designations to players.
If a new CBA isn’t agreed upon soon, it could delay the start of the 2026 season. It has already delayed the expansion draft for two teams set to debut this year, the Portland Fire and the Toronto Tempo. The league did release its schedule last week, with the regular season set to begin May 8.
The last CBA was announced in the middle of January 2020, a month after it had been agreed to. It could easily take two months from when a new CBA is reached to get to the start of free agency, which was supposed to begin Sunday.
