The stakes in Indiana are enormous for WNBA — In-depth on Angel Reese’s growth

Basketball Wednesday

Presented by The BIG EAST Conference

Relieved as well was the capacity crowd here to treat this like a playoff game, the intensity no less for the absence of both Clark and New York’s Jonquel Jones, last year’s Finals MVP, in this one. In fact, one could almost be lulled into believing the WNBA as a whole is on sound footing in ways ranging from its media rights haul to the expansion fees paid by groups who aren’t remotely interested in throwing hundreds of millions of dollars away.

No league is without its problems. Somehow, even now, there’s a Greek chorus ready to treat those specific to the WNBA as existential. That doesn’t mean there aren’t potential dangers ahead. Indiana this coming weekend represents a significant opportunity on a pair of fronts for Commissioner Cathy Engelbert’s league.

The first one is what has become a show of force from the WNBPA in response to the WNBA’s latest offer in the ongoing collective bargaining negotiations. Player after player I spoke with, both courtside pregame and in text messages around the league, view this as a moment to finally make public not only their seriousness, but the ways in which the league needs to structure a new deal. It will help if the PA allows them to publicly declare what that looks like, even in basic concept. Otherwise a union isn’t actually marshaling public support, but simply presenting publicly as complaining.

There are pressure points within both coalitions that need to be addressed, with many of those brought up in this vital Madeline Kenney story. On the player side, a work stoppage would bring into sharp relief those who have means of offseason income — especially Unrivaled, but Athletes Unlimited as well — and those players who will need to play overseas to pay not only today’s bills but, potentially, save for tomorrow’s as well.

There are three major constituencies within the PA, and all have a legitimate case for getting prioritized. It is the biggest stars who have driven much of this growth, leading to the kind of revenue that has laid waste to the people viewing the WNBA as something like a tax writeoff. It is many of the players on the rookie scale — Clark, we must note, is both the rookie-scale player of today and an obvious future beneficiary of the max salary tomorrow who also need to be better compensated. Any steps toward making this league more attractive to players coming out of college, many of them more valuable to the WNBA than ever thanks to NIL’s power of attention.

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But the majority of the WNBPA is made up of the league’s middle class, salary-wise. These players who suffered the most under the previous CBA, which virtually doubled max salaries but only escalated the salary cap by around 30%, and those vets have not forgotten it.

“Yeah, a lot of veteran players [remember],” Indiana guard Sydney Colson told me courtside Wednesday evening. “We saw a lot of people be out of the league who have been there a long time, but it was like it made more sense, business-wise, for people to keep rookies and pay them a few thousand dollars less than keeping a veteran. I’m not going to say that it hurt our league, but I think it was just unfortunate that we didn’t have more spots either on rosters to make it work, where rookies can be present and learn from those veterans.”

This is not an uncommon sentiment from WNBA veterans around the league. And getting a new agreement that speaks to this dynamic might be more than just a question of roster quality and emphasizing the role veteran players play in team development. It might unlock the logjam for the WNBA in getting enough player support to reach an agreement. CBA agreements are ultimately about counting the votes — either when a deal is brought to membership, or membership can pressure leadership to make a deal. It also complicates making public demands. This stuff is hard!

The WNBA’s task is more complicated — even Fever guard Kelsey Mitchell smiled at me and pushed back gently on the idea that if media rights go up by a factor of eight or nine, shouldn’t salaries as well?

“I think it’s not that simple, but I think you’ve got a point,” Mitchell told me Wednesday night. “I mean, you make a decent point when it comes to the numbers, but I’m sure it’s more to it. But I like to think that whatever that number is — it’s big, double, triple, or whatever you want — that they use it for the players.”

As Alissa Hirsh points out in her fantastic column this week, using the expansion fees to buy out the non-WNBA owners would be an incredibly useful way to spend that money, and also there’s no way in hell the NBA owners or the 16% stakeholders from the 2022 capital raise would even consider such an idea, being familiar with things like how when graphs and charts point straight up on your investment, it’s probably not time to sell.

But we’ll soon learn whether the WNBA is unified in its approach, whether the WNBPA is willing to acknowledge that a work stoppage by the players and a strike is the same thing — and the only logical outgrowth of any collapse in negotiations, since WNBA owners have no incentive to move on from the current rules — and whether the WNBA is really going to fumble away a long-term labor peace at a moment it has far more money to make the numbers work than ever before. It’s hard to imagine, but the All-Star weekend is about to be at least partially obscured by labor negotiations, so the WNBA has a clear interest in putting this CBA to bed.

And if the league fails to do so in time to prevent a, uh, work stoppage? Well, the columns about the WNBA’s crisis will be louder, more frequent and, perhaps even most important, accurate.

The other subplot that I have my eye on is the overwhelmingly likelihood that we’re about to discover what All-Star weekend without Clark looks like. Oh, she’ll be there, but the Fever bowed to the inevitable Wednesday evening and didn’t play her against New York. This is, truly, the only sane thing the team could have done. I asked head coach Stephanie White whether, in addition to the team doctors, there are additional factors at play when it comes to determining when Clark will return.

“I think that we’ve approached it that way from a slow pace from the beginning,” White told me Wednesday night. “I’m not, and this might just be my ignorance, but I’m not really sure that it’s a re-injury as much as a different kind of injury. I know oftentimes when you’re working with with injuries and the groin and the quad and the hamstring and all of those things, they’re all kind of tied together. And it’s not always just one thing.

“So I think, yes, absolutely, the big picture is the most important her for her health and wellness long-term, and for our team intimately, you know, we’ve been very slow and making sure that every time she comes back, that she’s ready. So we’ll continue to approach it like that. I mean, long term is the most
important.”

Again, there are plenty of ways to recognize that the Indiana Fever and the WNBA aren’t hanging by a thread, with only Clark standing between the league and certain doom — many of the numbers I mentioned up top, for instance, or even competitively, the fact that Indiana entered Wednesday night with a 4.0 positive net rating with Clark off the floor — but the surest sign is that the Fever are, barring some true malpractice, going to keep her off the floor for All-Star weekend.

Everyone beyond the true hysterics get that for as suddenly as this WNBA growth is upon us, something that even catches me by surprise on occasion, when I’ll think about some long-ago limitation of the league and remember it took place a mere seven years ago, it’s been built for a fan base every bit as ready to cheer on Liberty star Breanna Stewart and shower boos on Fever guard Sophie Cunningham in a home arena that isn’t in Indiana as it is for Clark and her progress.

I will say this: I’m expecting a huge number out of the TV ratings on Saturday night. And I don’t think Clark will play. There’s some precedent here for my predictions. But the best part? Even if ratings plummet, the media rights deal and the expansion fees won’t disappear. And anyone who tries to tell you otherwise doesn’t understand what a crisis actually is.

This week in women’s basketball

I love Annie Costabile, but the folks she talked to who expressed hostility to Camp Day games are dead wrong.

Ben Strauss wrote about both Caitlin Clark books.

So did Maitreyi Anantharaman.

I spoke to WISH-TV about “Becoming Caitlin Clark.”

Without Mel Greenberg, none of us are here.

In a crazy coincidence, our Portland Fire reporter at The Next, Annie Peterson, has the same name as our Soccer Monday correspondent!

Sonia Citron is going to win the 3-point contest. That’s my hot take, friends.

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Five at The IX: Angel Reese’s breakout explained

Hope Perry of The Next joined me on the Locked On Women’s Basketball podcast, and we spent a lot of time on Angel Reese‘s growth. Worth a listen!