What the WNBA schedule dropping now tells us — Shea Ralph talks Vanderbilt Commodores

Basketball Wednesday

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I can report a few things after speaking with several sources familiar with how this happened. We know, for instance, that the league and WNBPA agreeing to a moratorium has cleared the way for the WNBA to do this, legally. Whether or not it will improve the chances for labor peace happening quickly is a different question entirely.

As I have written in this space, the original deadline, along with the two subsequent deadlines, weren’t really deadlines. Sure, each day that passed compressed all the league business that must get done between now and the start of the 2026 WNBA season. But that just increased the degree of difficulty, rather than forced things like the delay of a season.

That balance has begun to shift. It came first in the form of missed revenue opportunities, both for teams who would normally be selling tickets and sponsorships, then to new potential partners who could not or would not sign on without labor peace assured. Arenas need to know which days to block off. So do television networks.

But this is a massive risk in several ways.

The first is how it will impact the current negotiations with the WNBPA itself. The league was contractually obligated, per the last CBA (which is currently in effect) to run a draft of the schedule by the PA ahead of finalizing it and releasing it. Neither side could confirm that this happened, which, to be clear, does not mean it didn’t happen. But in a negotiation which took several days just to get both sides to agree on whether a moratorium was even offered, it is an additional friction point in a process that hardly lacks them.

But the bigger worry, and one I have come back to both in this space and the podcast, is the potential damage to the WNBA as an entity in the compact with its fans. One reason why it has been so concerning to me that the WNBPA continued to make this negotiation publicly personal is that the two sides are not bargaining over an exit agreement. A CBA is a working document, and the day after it is signed, the players and the league need to work together in a host of ways that reflect their shared destiny.

A fan base that decides collectively that the WNBA is not properly invested in compensating players, whether or not that’s true, is a problem for the league. A fan base that decides collectively that the WNBA is insulting the players themselves is an order of magnitude bigger.

Similarly, releasing this schedule today while CBA negotiations continue is a way to announce that the WNBA is going on with its season whether or not the players are on board. That is, of course, an absurd position, since the games cannot go on without the players. But this move makes it likelier that fans, already being told for months that this is less a negotiation than the WNBA itself working to insult the players, will read it through that lens.

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Worse yet, the legitimacy of the schedule itself will be rightly questioned by those same fans, undermining the very point of releasing it — a guarantee of stability. This is not to say the WNBA was wrong to do so. Rather, it is less definitive than the moment calls for.

The moment calls for something the league alone cannot provide. The time for labor peace is now. Any further delay will do more than just siphon money out of the very pot being debated. It will do further damage to a relationship between the league and its fans that could take years to rebuild, if a moment such as now even presents itself once again. That will hurt everybody’s bottom line, players and league alike.

And the trust is gone. Multiple sources familiar with the thinking of team owners told The IX Sports that the belief is that this is less about hitting a specific revenue target and more about making a public stand. Similarly, players are almost uniformly disillusioned by what they are hearing is less about a financial settlement and more about keeping them from fully accessing the revenue the WNBA produces. How true either of these things are is less important than the fact that a critical mass of parties on both sides believe them to be true.

It’s just business. The sooner all parties can find a way to split the difference and embrace that, the truer it will be. Because from here, deep inside a well poisoned by much of the rhetoric used — particularly from the PA to date, the league largely avoiding the back-and-forth — every single action and inaction will run contrary to the shared business opportunity players and management alike have in front of them.

Jackie Powell contributed reporting to this story.

This week in women’s basketball

I still remember Aliyah Boston, at the podium after South Carolina lost to Iowa in the 2023 Final Four, declare that “this is Raven’s team now”. Aliyah was right.

Speaking of the Gamecocks, our Rob Knox caught up with Dawn Staley on MLK weekend.

Matthew Walter’s Bracketology is here. Who wouldn’t love a South Carolina-LSU game for a trip to the Final Four?!?

How many times do I have to tell you how great Ivy League basketball is?!?

The Midrange Monarch herself, Paige Bueckers, won Unrivaled’s free throw contest.

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Five at The IX: Shea Ralph, Vanderbilt

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