But this spring, as she knifed her way through the NCAA tournament, it was plain to see how hard she was working to win. She dropped 34 points to obliterate South Dakota State in her final home game in front of legions of adoring fans in Storrs, Connecticut. She transcended our mortal coil in order to score an outlandish 19 points in seven minutes to close out the Sweet 16 regional semifinals. She tearfully embraced coach Geno Auriemma, burying her iconic side-braids into his suit jacket, as she left the court, moments before hoisting the championship trophy.
Despite all this, Bueckers’s most significant TV moment was still to come. A few weeks after March Madness wrapped up, Bueckers entered the WNBA Draft as the consensus number one pick. And, indeed, live on TV on April 14, Bueckers was selected first overall by the Dallas Wings. The event was watched by some 1.25 million viewers, the second-highest viewership in WNBA draft history. But it wasn’t the draft itself that defined Bueckers’s spectacular spring; it was something she did the night before.
This made-for-TV moment belonged as much to members of the WNBA Players’ Association, who have been negotiating since last fall to revise the league’s collective bargaining agreement, as it did to Paige Bueckers. Announcing Bueckers’s contract right before the league’s biggest night was a flex that foregrounded both her emerging stardom and the labor conditions of women’s basketball at a pivotal moment. Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier—the founders of Unrivaled, who also happen to be vice presidents of the WNBA players association—were capitalizing on the very popularity of their league to leverage a better deal. For the next 24 hours, this shocking pay disparity was a part of practically every news hit or panel discussion about the WNBA. It was perfectly choreographed drama.
But it’s not just the exciting play and the superstar talent on the court. In the midst of a small-screen summer that features Andor’s working-class revolution, the union-busting robber baron heroes of The Gilded Age, and even the jail-broken android protagonist of Murderbot, the WNBA will be the best show about labor on television.
But Carrington was not in control for long, as the Lynx feature a pair of offensive assassins who took over promptly in the second half. Once she sees a few jumpers go in, the Lynx’s Courtney Williams is the kind of player who seems like she might never miss again. While the Wings kept the game close for a while, Williams went on a tear, sinking three-pointer after three-pointer, not just running up the score but sapping the Wings of any hope of recovery. Two months earlier, Bueckers was demoralizing opponents with torrents of scoring; now she was on the other side.
For professional athletes, WNBA players do not make all that much money. For instance, Bueckers’s year-one salary as the number one pick will start at just under $79,000; the highest paid players in the WNBA each will earn around $249,000 in 2025. Compare that with the NBA, where the number one pick in the draft will earn a base salary of around $15.6 million next year, and the highest-paid player—Steph Curry—earned almost $56 million this year. This pay disparity between the leagues makes some sense, as the WNBA generates significantly less revenue than the NBA. But, as Los Angeles Sparks star and first vice president of the players association Kelsey Plum has said—and players have repeatedly affirmed—“We’re not asking to get paid what the men get paid. We’re asking to get paid the same percentage of revenue shared.” This is the real disparity. Under the NBA’s current agreement, players receive up to 51 percent of all revenue generated by the league. In the WNBA, players receive 50 percent of what’s called incremental revenue, or revenue earned by the league after exceeding league-defined targets that themselves grow substantially every year. The result is that, in 2025, players will receive just around 20 percent of league revenue. That, among other things, is what the players association is trying to change.
One of the great advantages of the small scale of Unrivaled was the opportunity for viewers to close-read players’ faces, gestures, even social relationships. Like seeing a band at a small club show rather than in a giant arena, the league offered a different kind of access. Unrivaled’s signature event, in fact, was a leaguewide one-on-one tournament. Napheesa Collier won it.
Negotiations over the collective bargaining agreement will hang over this entire WNBA season. The players association opted out of the current CBA last fall; Unrivaled put the pay equity disparity front and center; and Bueckers, the league’s newest ensemble character, dunked it home in April. For all the on-court dramas this year—rivalry, revenge, the rise of new stars and the decline of fading talent—the biggest storyline is that of a league with more money and more attention than it’s ever had deciding how much its players are worth. This WNBA season is about value.
According to The Wall Street Journal, much of the league’s growth last season was spread among young viewers—especially young girls—male viewers, and white viewers. This is a huge shift. The league, which is majority Black and features numerous out gay players, has long been sustained, as de la Cretaz told me, by “the longtime queer and Black fans that have been a staple of supporting the league before anyone else did.” The WNBA’s massive explosion in popularity after last year’s draft not only altered the racial demographics of the fan base but also drew interest from spectators with little to no knowledge of the league itself. They could learn about it—as many of us have—or they could, defiantly, not.
As the WNBA gains attention, it will evolve. It will evolve in the way it treats and compensates its players, either living up to the challenge of player-owned leagues like Unrivaled or continuing to undervalue their talent. It will evolve as new players like Clark and Reese and Bueckers bring new viewers who might not yet know what to expect from the WNBA. It will evolve, as it always has, to be both a thrilling sports league and a medium for rendering visible issues around gender equity and racial equity. It has the possibility, in this summer of regression and fear and the collapse of so many different infrastructures of social justice, of being a hopeful story. Can a league be built around the mutual recognition of the value of women’s labor and do right by itself? Can it quiet the bigoted, bilious voices that threaten to drown out its expressions of joy and power? Can it survive its own growing popularity? Everyone is watching the WNBA.
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