The WNBA/NBA Doesn’t Believe IN Phee

And Are the People of the WNBA/NBA Really Great Business People?

It appears we are at a moment in WNBA history. And it appears that Napheesa Collier is driving the story. Certainly – as ESPN reported – a dispute between Collier and Cathy Engelbert (the WNBA Commissioner) is getting an immense amount of attention.

Collier recently contended that Engelbert made a number of comments that are disparaging of the WNBA and its players. Engelbert argues... well, she didn’t make those comments. For many, the issue is whether or not we should believe what Phee said. For the record, I do.

Pic from: https://lynx.wnba.com/news/napheesa-collier-named-western-conference-player-of-the-month

Quick note: I am a bit biased. I have met Collier twice and she doesn’t strike me as a person that just makes stuff up (Those last sentences are completely irrelevant to this story. I just threw that in the story to bother a specific person I know and like!).

Ultimately, though, I think that is all beside the point. In this story, I am going to argue that the bigger issue right now is whether or not the WNBA truly believes IN Phee and every other player in the WNBA.

This argument begins with a statement made by Sophie Cunningham a few days ago:

I think there are a lot of people in position of powers in the WNBA who, they might be really great business people, but they don’t know s--- about basketball.”

This statement was made about Cathy Engelbert. And my original plan was to write a column about how Engelbert isn’t the problem. The real problem is with the entity that owns the majority of the WNBA. And that’s the NBA!

The amazing Lindsey Gibbs, though, beat me to the story. In “WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert is under fire, but the NBA is the real power worth challenging”, Gibbs makes it clear that it is Adam Silver and the NBA owners who are the primary reason why WNBA players are unhappy. As Gibbs explains in detail, it’s the NBA who is the de facto majority owner of the WNBA. Therefore, the NBA is the primary decision-maker in the WNBA so whatever problems exist are ultimately the NBA’s responsibility.

What Gibbs says is most definitely true. And because she said it first, I needed to find something else to write about. So, this story isn’t going to address who owns the WNBA. It is going to address the idea that the WNBA owners (yes, this is primarily the NBA!) are “really great business people” (as Cunningham suggested).

There are a series of fundamental and related questions at the heart of that story.

• How much does the NBA – again, the entity that is essentially the majority owner of the WNBA (yes, I keep saying that!) – truly believe in women’s professional basketball?

• Or to put it differently, do the leaders of the NBA believe right now that the WNBA will one day have the same attendance and revenues we see in the NBA today?

• Do they believe the WNBA is just as good as the NBA and has the same bright future?

• Or should the WNBA/NBA continue to worry – as players quote Cathy Engelbert – about the sustainability of the WNBA?

Let’s start with a very cool graphic (made by Sara Chodosh) from the article we published in the New York Times on Sunday: What It Would Look Like to Pay W.N.B.A. Players What They Deserve

This graphic tells two stories.

From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, the NBA grew consistently.

And after keeping pace with this NBA’s growth path for years, the WNBA is now sprinting ahead of the NBA’s historic pace.

That second story is quite important and we will get to this in a moment. But let’s talk about the NBA’s growth path first. Today the NBA is multi-billion-dollar entity with fans all over the world. But back in the NBA’s third decade (i.e. where the WNBA is today), it was a very different story. And at that time, it was quite clear that many men in professional basketball didn’t really see where the NBA was going.

Let’s go back to 1976. At that time, the NBA was finishing its 30^th season in league history. The 1975-76 season was the first where the NBA averaged more than 10,000 fans per game. We don’t know league revenue for certain, but given what we know about attendance and the national broadcasting deal, it is estimated that NBA revenue was about $60 million (about $350 million in today’s dollars).

That may not sound very impressive today. But just seven years earlier, average attendance in the NBA was less than 7,000. And it’s estimated league revenue was less than half what it appeared to be in 1976. So, the NBA grew substantially in the 1970s.

Given all this, one would expect people in 1976 to be optimistic about the NBA’s future. But clearly not everyone believed.

To see, let’s look at the ABA and NBA merger.

In 1976, four ABA teams were going to join the NBA. Two other ABA teams, though, decided to go a different route. Both routes are somewhat unbelievable today but do illustrate the same point.

Let’s start with the story of the Kentucky Colonels owner John Y. Brown. The NBA asked Brown if he would pay $4.5 million (about $25 million today) to join the league. Brown thought this was too much and he decided to accept $3 million to fold his ABA team.

Brown, though, wasn’t done with professional basketball. He decided to buy into the Buffalo Braves of the NBA. And then in 1978 he swapped that franchise (yes, it was a trade!) for the Boston Celtics. John Y. Brown, though, began his ownership of the Celtics by making the legendary Red Auerbach angry. Auerbach wasn’t angry for long. In 1979, Brown decided to give up on owning the Celtics and ended his association with the NBA.

This was not entirely a surprising outcome. Prior to Brown coming to Boston, a number of different people had owned the team. And all of them sold the team for no more than $6 million (less than $60 million in today’s dollars). Today, that same franchise is worth $6 BILLION. Clearly, all those owners in the 1960s and 1970s – including John Y. Brown – shouldn’t have sold. They should have had more faith in the NBA product.

Or to put it differently, they should have followed the lead of Ozzie and Daniel Silna. These two brothers owned the Spirits of St. Louis of the ABA. But they didn’t simply take the same buyout the NBA offered Brown and the Kentucky Colonels. The Silna brothers said they would take a smaller buyout if the NBA also agreed to give these brothers a share of any future television money the NBA was able to collect. In 1976, the NBA was only getting $8.8 million per year. But as time went by, the NBA became much more popular. By the time the NBA was able to buy the Silna brothers out of this ill-advised deal in 2014, these brothers had collected about $800 million!

Those in the NBA who made this deal with the Silna brothers – like John Y. Brown and all the owners of the Celtics – didn’t believe the NBA would become what it would today. Due to their lack of faith, they made deals that today don’t look very good.

We have to remember, though, that these deals were made in the 1970s. Today we know the NBA has an international audience and is worth billions. No one could have known for sure this was all going to happen fifty years ago.

Today the WNBA is a bit past where the NBA was in its 30^th season. The WNBA averaged more than 11,000 fans per game this last season (the NBA actually doesn’t match the WNBA average this year until the mid-1980s!). As noted in the New York Times, WNBA revenue in 2025 is at least $300 million and given the new media deal will likely reach $500 million in the league’s 30^th season next year.

At least, that is what I thought as we worked on the New York Times article this past month. Today, ESPN made the following statement: “According to a report from Deloitte earlier this year, revenues are projected to top $1 billion this year.”

I have no idea how Deloitte reached the conclusion (the amazing David M. Perry suggested maybe Deloitte included the expansion fees). But if true, that means WNBA revenue has increased 1000% in just six years! And that also means WNBA players are only getting 2% of league revenue (will have to talk about this more in a future story!).

So, the WNBA – as the above graph from the New York Times illustrated -- is definitely growing immensely fast. In fact – as that graph makes clear – it is growing faster than the NBA in the 1970s. The pace of that growth should make it clear that WNBA decision-makers should be more like the Silna brothers and less like John Y. Brown. But somehow this isn’t happening.

One story illustrates how little faith the WNBA/NBA have in its own product today. In 2022, the WNBA decided it wanted an infusion of capital. Consequently, the WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert managed a capital campaign that resulted in 16% of the league being sold for just $75 million. That would suggest the entire WNBA in 2022 was worth less than $500 million.

To put this deal in perspective, just three years later, the New York Liberty – one team in that league – did its own capital raise. That capital raise indicated the Liberty – again, just one team in the WNBA – was worth $450 million.

In 2025, the average NBA team is worth $4.66 billion. With thirty teams, this means the NBA is worth nearly $140 billion. If we believe women’s professional basketball is really on the same trajectory as men’s professional basketball, in fifty years the WNBA will be worth $140 billion. And 16% of that will be more than $22 billion. At that point, that 2022 capital raise is going to look like a worse deal than the one the NBA made with Silna brothers in 1976. We certainly should expect many articles to be written about how Cathy Engelbert and the WNBA sold 16% of a $140 billion enterprise for just $75 million!

Some might say that back in 2022 the WNBA really, really needed some capital. But should the NBA have reduced its share of the league from 50% to 42% for just $37.5 million? Should the WNBA owners – which included some NBA owners – also reduced their ownership share from 50% to 42% for just $37.5 million? If the WNBA truly just needed some cash, why couldn’t the NBA – the entity that is the de facto majority owner – just give the WNBA the money? Remember, in 2021-22 the Houston Rockets of the NBA paid John Wall $44.3 million to just sit out the season. If one NBA team had $44.3 million to pay a player to do absolutely nothing, couldn’t 30 NBA owners find some way to inject $75 million into an entity they had to know would eventually be worth billions?

If the NBA truly believed in the WNBA, this would have been an easy decision. But it is clear from the behavior of the NBA that they have never believed the WNBA product is just as good as the NBA’s product. And despite what we see in the data, it seems clear they still don’t believe in the future of the WNBA.

We can make the same argument by looking at the NBA’s new media deal. As I wrote here last November (and in this academic article last summer), the media deal that the WNBA seems so proud of today seems to be “very much a low-ball” deal (as Cheryl Miller put it at the time!). Certainly, given the ratings we have seen for the WNBA it doesn’t look like the women are only worth about $2 billion of a $76 billion media deal. But that is the deal the WNBA accepted without shopping their rights to multiple entities.

Both the capital raise and the media rights deal tell a very clear story. It doesn’t look like the NBA and WNBA truly believe IN Phee and the rest of the women playing in this league. They simply don’t seem to believe women’s professional basketball is as good as men’s professional basketball. And they don’t believe that someday the WNBA will be just as successful as the NBA.

Again, this is the fundamental issue facing the WNBA and its players right now. If the WNBA and NBA truly believed in the product they are selling, they wouldn’t be worried about the “sustainability” of the WNBA. They would know for certain the WNBA’s future is both sustainable and very, very bright. And the would definitely just pay the women of the WNBA what they are owed (i.e. the same revenue split they give the men of the NBA!).