Time is running out to get a WNBA deal done

After meeting face-to-face a week ago, it seems the WNBA and the players are back to negotiating. It was reported that after the players submitted a CBA proposal to the league in December, the WNBA still hadn’t responded to it in February. The sides met in person in New York last week, with over 40 players attending in person or over Zoom. At that meeting, the league still did not have a response ready for them, but submitted their latest proposal later in the week, on Friday.

While the league did not budge much on the matters of money — particularly on revenue sharing models — they have appeared to concede a few things to the players. After wanting to take away housing benefits in the league completely, this newest proposal from the league now has housing covered for players with under three years of WNBA service. Players will be entitled to a one-bedroom apartment for the first three years of their WNBA careers, with new developmental players being offered a studio apartment.

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Breanna Stewart told Jack Maloney of CBS Sports at Unrivaled this week that the WNBA conceding on a few of those smaller points was important, and that it “means that the league heard us on things that matter to us,” she said.

Yet, this proposal ultimately will not be accepted by the players, mostly because the league still isn’t offering enough when it comes to revenue-sharing percentage. According to Maloney’s report, there is still a huge gap between the sides on this topic — the players want 30% of gross revenue to be given back to them, resulting in a team salary cap aboove $10 million per year and a max individual player salary of about $2.5 million. The WNBA is still only offering about half of that.

Time continues to tick on the clock to get a deal done, though. The WNBA season is scheduled to start in exactly three months. Training camp usually starts about 2-3 weeks before that, with the WNBA Draft happening a week before camp kicks off. That’s a month right there. There are over 100 free agents who need to negotiate and sign new individual player contracts, setting the league up for an unprecedented free agency period in extremely limited time.

Plus, with two new expansion teams in Toronto and Portland being added to the league this year, an expansion draft also still needs to happen. With no CBA in place, there are no rules on what the expansion draft will look like, and therefore, Toronto and Portland have been unable to fully prepare for that draft. Whenever a new CBA does get signed, existing WNBA teams will need to take time to prepare their protected player lists under whatever new rules are going to be in place, and then the expansion teams will need to receive those lists and prepare accordingly. It’s not something that can happen in just the span of a few days.

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All of this to say, we are starting to cut it close. The players can feel it, as Stewart expressed in the interview with CBS. There is only so much time to negotiate before the start of the season will need to be pushed back. There isn’t a hard date being publicly discussed right now, but the overwhelming belief in my conversations with people around the league is that if something doesn’t happen before February is over, the start of the season could be affected.

So far, there is no serious talk about the players planning a strike. The union voted to authorize their executive committee to initiate a strike back in December, with 98% of the union voting yes. For now, though, it seems like both sides are at least making token efforts in the hope it doesn’t get to that point.