When Caitlin Clark was finally sidelined after a lot of back and forth, people couldn’t help but be reminded of the injuries that keep coming. According to The Next’s tracker, the WNBA has already seen 243 injuries this season, a steep rise from 203 last year. The toll has hit both rookies and veterans alike. Clark and Reese faced each other once in 2025, as did Clark and Rookie of the Year frontrunner Paige Bueckers. MVP candidates A’ja Wilson, Napheesa Collier, and Alyssa Thomas missed a stretch. Breanna Stewart was out for multiple games in August. With stars dropping like flies, you cannot help but ask why. And CBS analyst Erica Ayala recently pointed out the very thing that players have been sounding off about the entire season.

She said on the “We Need To Talk” Podcast, “It’s more games, but not an elongated season. And these games are being compact into this season.” That’s a glaring problem multiple players have pointed out this season. Mercury’s Satou Sabally said in early June, “Cathy (Englebert) added a lot of games, and for us as players, recovery is so important. We put our bodies on the line every single time. We had nine games in 18 days.”

Since 2022, the number of games has risen by 20% to 44. The length of the season? Pretty much the same. As Lucas Seehafer stressed, “if you’ve looked over this time as well since the pandemic, the [WNBA] has systematically been increasing the amount of games over that five years to a high of 44 this year, without actually increasing the number of days in the season, at least not to a significant amount. So basically, they’re cramming in more games, but not extending the season, and that just gives them less and less time for athletes to recover.”

Ayala didn’t stop there. She further took an example of Emma Meesseman, saying, “We certainly hear the players talking about how, even though with charter flights, sometimes you’ll have things like a player like Emma Meesseman or someone who comes in because you’re down a player, and they might be on the road for two weeks before they even have a full practice.”

Emma Meesseman’s long-awaited arrival in New York was already draining because of visa hurdles, but the difficulties hardly ended once she touched down. Before making her Liberty debut in the 85-76 victory over the Dallas Wings, she had yet to go through a proper practice with the team. “I’m not the most open person or like the person that’s easy to go into change,” Meesseman had said.

In the days leading up to her first game, her preparation consisted of a few light shootarounds and one extended training session with Liberty director of player development Andrew Wade. That workout eventually turned into a 3-on-3 scrimmage where Meesseman found herself running the court with Wade, head coach Sandy Brondello, associate head coach Olaf Lange, video coordinator Brian Lankton, and assistant video and scouting coordinator Parker Lovett.

There was a glaring lack of preparation for Meesseman, and the $50 million commitment in 2024 to charter flights did not help much. Fortunately, the league avoided many complaints from Liberty as her experience covered the gaps. Just like Meesseman, there have been other emergency signings who have been put directly into the game without much practice. 

Ayala hence added, “You know, these are all things that impact what you see on the court, and of course, can have an impact on the wear and tear that athletes are having. You need recovery time. You need to be able to have people run through sets and things in practice, and not as much as possible learning it on the fly.”

The charter flights were the solution to these crammed schedules. If the players can get from A to B in less time without any delays of normal travel, they would be safe from travel stress. “Chartering flights not only is a safety measure, the biggest thing, and then obviously what it means to be able to play a game and go home and rest and recover and be the elite athletes that we try to be every single night when we step out onto this court,” WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike had said.

While it has partly done that, the cons in the schedule outweigh the pros of the charter. Who knows how worse the situation might have been without this revolutionary change. 

WNBA’s Injury Crisis Is A Hard Knot to Untangle

From the 2025 season, we know that the charter flights don’t make things much easier for the players to overcome the condensed schedule. That is set to get worse in 2026 with two new teams, Toronto Tempo and the Portland Fire, joining the league. This will bring the total number of WNBA teams to 15. The game total for each team could go beyond 50, depending on the CBA negotiations and the format. 

The simple solution to accommodate more teams and the expanded schedule seems to be simply taking the season beyond September, right? There is a huge problem in doing that, as the majority of the stadiums that WNBA teams play in are NBA Arenas while sharing them. The NBA season starts in October, making it almost impossible to extend the WNBA season. Another possible solution is increasing the roster limits. The WNBA has a hard salary cap of $1,507,100 this season and a 12-player max roster limit. Most teams carry 11-player rosters because of the cap.

According to WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, the addition of expansion teams is the correct way to add to the number of WNBA jobs rather than increasing the roster spots of preexisting teams. “That [adding four teams] will add 48 roster spots in just a couple of years,” Engelbert said. “That, in a league of 144, is a lot. That’s 30 percent. I think it’ll be great when we get those done over the next couple of years.” And the league would have to change the draft requirements if it wanted to expand the rosters, making things more complicated. All of these problems compromise the health of the players, and travel is only one of the problems.