WNBA CBA Explained: The 2021 Roster Shuffle
What We've Learned About Roster Rules From A Wild Season
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Last season we began the endeavor of creating a CBA FAQ resource, including the CBA Explained series that we used in order to present bits and pieces of the 350-page document one topic at a time. Throughout the first 15 pieces of this series, we covered a vast number of rules and topics, but the weirdness of the 2021 season exposed an opportunity for us to refine some of those topics.
To reflect what we’ve learned over the past season, we have refined and added to our work to reflect several interpretations, new information, and useful examples that came up this season. With the regular season now behind us, we figured it would be a great time to recap some key changes. Today, we’re focusing solely on hardship exceptions. All of these changes have been reflected in our Salary Cap Sheets which contains everything you need to know as you prepare for WNBA Free Agency on January 1.
Hardship Contracts
A plethora of circumstances led to the massive increase in the use of hardship contracts in 2021, but largely it was the result of international commitments resulting in late arrivals or early departures before the Olympic break, compounded by an influx of injuries for a number of teams.
Throw in many teams that were very close to the salary cap, to begin with, and many teams simply didn’t have the cap space to sign players the standard contracts to fill those gaps. Teams like Connecticut and Las Vegas were hampered with long-term injuries to Alyssa Thomas and Angel McCoughtry that couldn’t be removed from the cap, further putting them in need of hardship exceptions.
Hardship contracts end immediately once the team no longer qualifies for the hardship, but the portion of the salary that had been paid to the player remains on the cap. As a result, teams needing to sign so many players to hardship contracts led many teams into even worse roster crunches that required General Managers to dig deep into their bag of tricks.
Two teams, in particular, had to maneuver more than the rest of the league: Minnesota and Chicago. In both cases, they had players who made multiple stints on hardship contracts due to the required roster shuffling. Minnesota in particular had longer-term hopes for one of the players.
Hardship contracts are (almost always) for 75% of the applicable minimum base salary, so a team that is eligible for an exception can inch closer to having the cap space to sign someone to a rest-of-season contract, without having to be excessively shorthanded. This is because each day the minimum amount to sign that player for the rest of the season decreases by $X while the player is being paid 75% of $X.
Lexie Brown - The 72-Hour Maneuver
That is a nice feature to allow a team to eventually sign the hardship contract to a stable, rest-of-season contract. However, Chicago was in a situation where they had a larger gap to close and they didn’t want to wait that long as they wanted to sign Lexie Brown.
At the same time, teams are only allowed to be below 11 rostered players for 72 hours before they must get back up to 11 players, so teams can’t just sit around at 10 players for a few weeks to speed up the process. So, the tactic Chicago used was several rounds of signing and releasing Brown and other hardship signings for Chicago with gaps as close to 72 hours as the team could align.
In cases where the player being released had to pass through waivers first, the 72-hour window doesn’t start until the player clears waivers. This effectively means a team can go 120 hours with fewer than 11 rostered players, but the player’s time on waivers still counts on the cap so the benefit still maxes out at three days. Players released from hardship contracts do not go through waivers, so the 72-hour window begins immediately.
By signing the player or players necessary for gameday and then releasing them the day after the game, the team was able to give itself three-day stretches where they closed the gap even faster than if the player had just remained rostered, before signing the same player, or another player, to another contract.
The only other consideration is that teams can’t sign players to rest-of-season contracts if the player had played for the team in the past 10 days. This is why the Sky released Brown from her last hardship contract on June 2 and then once that 10-day window had passed and the Sky had enough cap space, she was signed for good on June 14.
That is the simplified version of what happened with Lexie Brown’s journey to being signed for the rest of the season, but in the background, there were also players leaving and returning from Olympic qualifying that impacted whether the signings were standard or hardship contracts. As we will discuss with the Lynx, just because you are still eligible for a hardship exception after a player returns, doesn’t mean you won’t have to go through roster shuffling.
Layshia Clarendon - One In, One Out
For the Lynx, that was why Layshia Clarendon continually found herself released and re-signed as Cheryl Reeve had to react to injuries, returns from injuries, and re-injuries to large portions of the roster. Clarendon made himself an integral piece of a surging Lynx team and quickly became part of the long-term plans and not just an injury stop-gap, but at times it looked to the average person like they were being put through the wringer for no reason.
What was really happening was a series of roster moves that were required by the CBA. As a result, the Lynx were forced to make them even though Minnesota clearly wanted Clarendon to continue playing for the team. Despite all the confusion, the rules surrounding Clarendon’s back-and-forth journey are actually far simpler than the rules at play with Brown. Minnesota had less of a gap to close to sign Clarendon for the rest of the season, so they were content only making the moves the league required. For the most part, the moves were simple: Clarendon was signed via a hardship exception, and when one of the hurt players returned to play, Clarendon had to be released.
The added wrinkle was that at least one of the releases happened when the Lynx seemingly still had fewer than 10 players available, which implied they were still eligible for the emergency hardship exception and called into question why Clarendon had to be released. In the end, this actually shed some light on the rules where the CBA did not have answers. It turns out, when a player is signed to a hardship exception, the team has to tie that exception to one or more injuries in their application to the league. If that specific player returns, regardless of if the team would be immediately eligible for another hardship contract, the player signed tied to their injury must be released.
This happened on June 20, when Jessica Shepard returned from injury bringing the team to 11 available players. On that day, the Lynx released Clarendon and Cierra Burdick from hardship contracts, and then signed Clarendon again the very next day. We were able to deduce and eventually confirm, from these moves, that Clarendon was the player that was required to be released while Burdick was an optional release. The Lynx were not able to simply choose who to release and get back down to 10 players, and they preferred Clarendon to Burdick, so this order of events was the only way to retain him.
The final rule that the Lynx’s savvy front office brought to light is something we originally hadn’t considered significant enough to include in the CBA FAQ. As mentioned when discussing Lexie Brown, the Sky had to wait 10 days after the last time she played for them before they were allowed to sign her for the rest of the season. However, the Lynx were able to sign Clarendon to his rest-of-season contract just two days later.
This is because the rule is dropped if the midpoint of the season occurs while the 10-day window is still happening. Knowing this, the Lynx snuck Clarendon’s final hardship release into June 30, allowing them to re-sign Clarendon in time for their next game on July 2 rather than wait another seven days.
Megan Gustafson - Roster vs. Salary Hardships
Speaking of rules surrounding hardship contracts that aren’t contained within the CBA, we also came across a weird case with Megan Gustafson. On June 21, Gustafson was signed by Washington on what was referred to as a “roster hardship”, a concept that does not exist within the CBA. Sources confirmed reporting at the time of the signing that she was signed at 100% of the minimum salary instead of the 75% that almost all hardship contracts are signed for.
It is our understanding, after speaking with sources, that Washington was given this non-standard hardship exception because they were limited purely by the maximum roster size of 12 despite having more than enough cap space to sign someone to 100% of the minimum base salary. We will continue to report on these or similar rules as we learn more about them, as we have come across more and more rules that are beyond the reach of the CBA.
In our next piece, we will review some of the other rules that came to light this season surrounding suspensions, contract buyouts, and trade rules. Below are our previous CBA explained pieces
This series is about learning, so we want to hear from you! If you would like a clarification for any rules, suggestions for future CBA Explained topics, or any other questions, please feel free to let us know in the comments or tweet at us @herhoopstats.
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