Happy Basketball Wednesday, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. I’m coming to you from South Florida, where I am in the midst of a tropical leg of my book tour for Becoming Caitlin Clark. (Last one is tonight, come join me here!) Ahead of those events, I spent the day at Unrivaled this weekend, taking in the unprecedented moment in the women’s pro game here and chatting with a number of players living with the uncertainty of that moment.
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Basketball Wednesday
The overriding mood from around a dozen players I spoke with at Unrivaled, stars and mid-tier salaried vets alike, was one of cautious optimism that a deal will get done soon.
There are two steps to an agreement — the total package for the players from the league, and the way the WNBPA will be breaking that package down between the salaries for max players, vets and rookies. The more vets speak up now, the easier it will be to make sure the final agreement does not increase max salaries too much relative to the salary cap increase to render the ability of veterans to keep getting contracts a relic of the past.
“I don’t know if I have a specific number,” Rachel Banham told me this weekend. “We have some general idea of what we want to land on. I know we talked about, the last CBA, the middle class people got hurt a little bit because teams were paying Max and then they’re only wanting rookie contracts. So the vets were getting cut, are getting screwed with the money piece. To be honest, with our stuff that we have right now, it’s hard to even get into that discussion, because we’re so stuck with the league on the revenue percentages that we haven’t been able to get to some of the details of the other stuff, like the intricate pieces of the actual salaries. It’s very general right now, because we can’t even agree on the revenue.”
In the meantime, Unrivaled maintains a vacation resort feeling. Much of the conversation about what it isn’t misses the point of what it is. In Year 2, it is not yet an established in-person destination with 18,000 fans in the stands every night. But that is not the plan or even the purpose of Unrivaled in Year 2.
Incidentally, I’m not sure exactly why there are criticisms of the gameplay itself. I saw two games in person, one a blowout, the other one a close contest with a one-point margin, and no one treated winning or losing as immaterial and no one played defense at an all-star game level. It was an entertaining product featuring many of the best players in the world. Competition varies. Take a look at the WNBA schedule and you’ll see the same thing. If we’re comparing regular season Unrivaled games to the WNBA Finals, we’re doing it wrong.
The level of intentionality in Unrivaled is hard to miss. There’s a childcare room with a tiny, Fisher-Price hoop — stickers for each Unrivaled team are affixed to the backboard. Little touches like this abound. Companies like Sephora and Sprite have joined up, and these are relatively small-bore deals compared to the kind the WNBA or its teams typically sign. But that’s the point, too: big companies want in early. They want to see where this goes.
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The public statements from Napheesa Collier and Alex Bazzell alike are open-ended, and for a good reason. Is the league positioned to overtake the WNBA? Sure depends on labor peace to even begin to answer that question, and labor peace will come with second-order effects (raises for players chief among them) that scramble the positioning further.
Will it be a partner with the league? Will the television ratings, down from Year 1, solidify sufficiently to make sure Turner stays with the six-year deal that contains an opt-out after three? As we’ve discussed here many times, the media rights deal is the lifeblood of any league, and that six-year deal with Turner was the surest sign that Unrivaled was ready for prime time when it was signed. It is also fundamental to the league’s future.
It’s impossible to quantify how much better everyone within the women’s basketball ecosphere can do by working collectively, so isolating which part of the ratings drop came from the expected downsizing of audience as novelty wears off and which part is a WNBA that’s limited in how it can promote is impossible to say. (It’s also a reason why negotiations getting personal in this small space never made much sense for anyone involved.)
But when I asked Breanna Stewart what she’d be looking at as benchmarks of success, she didn’t shy away from the ratings conversation.
“TV ratings are one thing for sure,” Stewart said. “Obviously, you want them to be consistently high no matter if we play on Friday, Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, and know that we have a space of our own here. In the league of sports, people aren’t typically used to seeing women’s professional basketball at this time unless you’re watching EuroLeague or something like that. So, ratings is a huge one.”
The fact that Unrivaled’s one field trip this season to Philadelphia sold out in just a few days — and as a Philly-area resident, I can vouch for the amount of buzz around the area about it — is simultaneously a key indicator of the appetite for Unrivaled, an argument against keeping Unrivaled in Miami primarily (which is part of the attraction for so many players) and a fantastic early sign of success for the 2030 WNBA expansion to the city.
If all of those things seem unrelated, or we’re still unsure of how they come together, well: welcome to the uncertainty of pro women’s basketball right now. It’s a moment that calls for compartmentalizing. Folks on the WNBPA Executive Committee like Stewart and Kelsey Plum are taking meetings all day, then competing at night.
“Honestly, it’s hard, especially these past few weeks,” Stewart said. “I feel like when I’m here, I’m locked in, I’m practicing with my team. But when I go home, we have EC calls. “We have all these things that we have to be a part of, because you want to make sure that everything is going exactly according to plan.
“So I told [Stewart’s wife] Marta [Xargay] today, ‘My brain is hurting a little bit like having to think about all these things’. But it’s the position I want to be in. I wanted to, obviously, be here at Unrivaled and help bring this to fruition and as a co-founder. But also I want to make sure that the league, the W when it comes time to get back to that, it’s going to be something that’s going to be a generational shift in the CBA.”
It is the role Stewart imagined for herself dating back to the very night she was drafted into the WNBA back in 2016. She’s not walking away from it now, no one at Unrivaled is. There’s a tension about navigating the negotiations, there’s a chance to get better — for Banham, getting used to being this open when she shoots, for Plum, a chance to improve her game at the defensive end, every player I spoke with had a clear on-court goal. But they’re all having fun, too.
Early in the second quarter Saturday night, Plum spotted Banham’s bun coming loose. Despite the adversarial nature of a basketball game, Plum took a moment and tightened Banham’s bun, punctuating the impromptu styling with a pat on the back.
“I’m a woman of the people,” Plum said, smiling. “You know, if I see a stray flying, you know, we’re on national TV, I’ve gotta help my girl out.”
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