Chaos brings panic. “Will there not be a WNBA season next year?” Asked Rachel DeMita. And considering the current situation, a fair question to ask. The two sides are not closer to agreeing to a CBA than they were when the WNBPA pulled out last year. Adam Silver refuted the idea of “revenue sharing” being the right term for the new CBA. Cathy Engelbert’s team stresses the same offering, a similar revenue-sharing model tied to the league targets being achieved. WNBPA fired back with a strong statement of their own. 

However, ESPN analyst Rebecca Lobo thinks the WNBA will sustain regardless of the 2026 lockout. The main reason is the ‘leverage’, comparing the situation to when she was a player. “This is the first time I’m watching these CBA negotiations from afar without the fear that the league is going to fold. Because to me, in every previous CBA negotiation, there was a real possibility that the NBA could just say, ‘This is too much. We’re losing money. We’re not willing to invest. We’ll just fold the league.’” Lobo said, “That’s not a reality anymore — that’s not an economic reality. These franchises are worth too much; these women are worth too much.”

“With her saying that, with her admitting that the NBA can pull the plug at any time and that the league wouldn’t have a league, just kind of shows how much the WNBA was relying on the NBA,” Rachel DeMita said on ‘Courtside Club’, referring to Lobo’s statement. 

However, this isn’t quite the breaking news. Almost everyone knew that the NBA had been the driver of the WNBA through its rough years. According to AS.com, the NBA currently subsidizes the WNBA with approximately $15 million annually to help cover critical costs like operations, marketing, player salaries, and facilities. That is in addition to owning 42% of the league and effectively controlling more than 60% of it (six of the WNBA’s 14 franchises are owned by NBA team owners). Despite that and the 2024 boost, it was predicted to lose around $50 million for the 2024 season by CBS Sports. 

“The WNBA owes the NBA so much we won’t see any windfall for years,” an NBA team executive told The Post last year. So, even if the NBA did not incur a profit until the 1980s, more than 24 years after its founding, the situation is different with the WNBA. The NBA owns the entire league itself, while the WNBA and Cathy Engelbert have been supported by the NBA and outside investors. For Cathy Engelbert, it makes things difficult in negotiating with the players. The players still deserve a better share of the pie than they are currently getting, but Engelbert has been cornered in such a situation that it’s very difficult to give it to them. 

However, it’s still Engelbert’s responsibility to be transparent regarding the league’s finances. We still don’t know how the $75 million capital raise in 2022 was spent. You would think the players have been given the revenues of the league and just the fans are in the dark, but that’s not the case. “I feel like we’re going based off educated estimations. We still have a lack of transparency that [doesn’t] allow us to really know,” WNBPA President Nneka Ogwumike said on June 24. “There is nothing that we know when it comes to how much money the league is making.”

Fueled by $250 million expansion fees from Cleveland, Detroit, and Philadelphia, a massive $2.2 billion media rights deal, and surging corporate investment, the league’s financial landscape looks nothing like it did when the last CBA was signed. But let’s look at what the realistic numbers we might expect are after everything is said and done. 

The 50/50 Question: How High Can Cathy Engelbert Go?

Realistically, even Napheesa Collier and Co. can’t expect to get where the NBA players share. The NBA gets 51% of all its basketball-related income, but it’s much older. The WNBA is facing different dynamics, larger operational costs a complicated sharing model where they need to look at sustainability. 

In the current CBA, a revenue-sharing provision exists that potentially gives players 17.5% of the revenue, but that is if a set ‘surplus’ number had been achieved, which wasn’t. The WNBA is proposing something similar, but with a lower revenue target, according to some reports. The players want that target gone outright with a higher share.

“(WNBA players) have to work their way up to that 50/50 deal,” said Dr. Daniel Kelly II, Associate Dean and Clinical Professor at the Preston Robert Tisch Institute for Global Sport via the Athletic. “Can they get a model that grows with the league’s growth? That I think they can get. They may not get 50 percent. They may get 20 percent. But with a growth escalator, as the revenues are increasing, then their number are going to increase, then that sets them up for future deals to be able to negotiate with more leverage.”

In September, Eric Pincus of Bleacher Report floated around the idea of “a moderate rise to 12-12.5 percent of the league’s revenue”. It was not a prediction but an assumption that would lead to salary cap could rise to $2.9 million per team, with top salaries climbing to $415,000–$482,000. The current proposal is almost twice that ($850,000 top salary). So, the players have overshot Pincus’ expectations so that the 20% number looks more likely, which will still be more than twice what they earn now. Only time will tell whether the league will bend to the ‘removal of revenue targets’ demand.