Happy Basketball Wednesday, presented by The BIG EAST Conference. I doubt this is any of you, but just in case it is: at WNBA games, please stop throwing objects on the court. Any objects. Especially those objects.
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Basketball Wednesday
Let’s talk about what would seem to be a relatively obscure subject: how WNBA teams provide information to the public about injuries. It is not your imagination: teams have gotten exponentially more private about this, particularly during the 2025 season. Let’s compare, shall we?
An Aces injury report from 2022:
And here’s an Aces injury report from earlier this season.
Truly, this is just the start of it, and I don’t want to pick on the Aces specifically, though several front offices I spoke with about this issue mentioned, in particular, the lack of transparency around Chelsea Gray’s injury following the 2023 WNBA Finals and well into the 2024 season as a tipping-point moment for teams to avoid revealing as much as they had to the media and the league alike.
But it spread, particularly here in 2025. Here’s Mystics coach Sydney Johnson on Georgia Amoore on either the actual day or day before she had surgery. (The team never told Copeland either way.)
Many teams went to absurd lengths this year not to confirm injuries in postgame, or to even hide injuries that they’d already reported to the league on public injury reports.
“Oh absolutely, it has become a race to the bottom,” one front office member told The IX Sports.
I am here to say, absolutely, that this does a disservice to fans and media alike. For fans following their teams, knowing if a player will be out three days, three weeks or three months affects both how they are processing that injury and even can affect ticket purchasing decisions. And as our Lucas Seehafer has documented, injuries are a growing problem in the WNBA.
Sadly, that’s probably not a good enough reason to fix this. The good news or bad news is, there’s a much, much better reason to fix this: gambling.
Do you know why we have injury reports in professional sports? Well, back in 1947, the National Football League forced teams to begin providing public injury reports. Then-commissioner Bert Bell can explain why.
“Because of their spies the big gambling houses may know [Sammy] Baugh is hurt and probably won’t be at his best if he plays at all,” Bell said. “But the public won’t know. The public may fall for prices that seem good but aren’t because of Baugh’s injury.”
What’s amazing about his statement is that at the time, sports gambling was illegal! As you’ve probably noticed, that is not only no longer true, but pro leagues, including the WNBA, have direct contracts with gambling companies. You can just go to the WNBA’s own site and get the FanDuel odds on future games.
The reason WNBA lineups are now public 30 minutes before tip, not 10, is from complaints out of fantasy partners, three league sources told The IX Sports. So while it is not clear whether FanDuel has complained about the league’s move away from injury transparency — the WNBA did not respond to a request for comment on this, and FanDuel declined to make anyone available to discuss it — the company would seem to have a vested interest in more transparency for its customers from the WNBA.
And the flip side, as Cathy Engelbert herself spoke about during her press conference ahead of the 2024 WNBA Draft, is the increase in betting activity on the WNBA’s role in engaging and keeping fans.
“Yes, I think with eyes on the game increasing at historic levels, obviously betting is not legal in
every state,” Engelbert said. “Integrity is No. 1 for us, so obviously we do a lot in that area. But certainly from a perspective of bringing in a fan base that might not have been in the WNBA before.”
And that’s not even the biggest reason! That integrity point, which Engelbert referred to, she expanded on when asked further about it that night.
“Do I worry about things like that? Sure, and everybody should in sports. But I do think it’s happening around us, and if we’re not cognizant of what’s going on and how that can benefit the viewership of the league and things like that, so we don’t want to leave that on the table, but we want to do it in the right way with the right guardrails around integrity. We have not, to my knowledge, had issues on that, but we’ll continue to monitor it for sure.”
The league continues to do so. But so does the NBA, which nevertheless had multiple gambling scandals this past season, as does MLB, which is in the midst of another one as we speak. Teams around the league I spoke to about this are universally surprised that there hasn’t been such a scandal in the WNBA yet.
“Yes – given our player salaries we are at extreme risk,” one front office figure told The IX Sports.
I can’t disagree. And even with a scaled-up salary structure in a new collective bargaining agreement, it is obvious that not only will WNBA salaries sit far short of NBA or MLB compensation, but that even those levels of financial compensation cannot protect a league fully against potential temptation of its players.
Which brings us back to the basic question, beyond monitoring: what can the WNBA do? Well, as one front office member put it to me, think of any gap between public and private injury knowledge as an arbitrage play, no different than insider knowledge of a company’s financial outlook. Trading on that knowledge is a crime. Betting on a WNBA team because you have knowledge of a player’s return, or against that team due to an injury that hasn’t been disclosed, is not.
The only real weapon the WNBA has at its disposal? Forcing teams to be publicly forthcoming. It eliminates the race to the bottom stemming from competition, which will lead to more competitive balance, and it can do more than anything else to inoculate the league against gambling problems in the years ahead.
That I can ask a coach about a player at postgame without it turning into a state secret is just the ancillary benefit that makes my job, and the fan experience, better in the process.
Monumental Sports and Entertainment, the group that owns the Washington Mystics, holds a minority stake in The IX Sports. The IX Sports’ editorial operations are entirely independent of Monumental and all other business partners.
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