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Our team is proud to announce the launch of WNBA Salary Cap Sheets on herhoopstats.com. As the WNBA grows, salary cap and CBA information will become even more important to following the league. Our goal is to be your No. 1 source for that information.
We’re releasing this new functionality now with the 2021 contract cycle just beginning. Teams can extend core, restricted, and reserved qualifying offers from January 1 until January 14. Players and teams may begin negotiating contracts on January 15 and can sign new contracts starting on February 1.
Here’s a sample of the “current salaries” section for the Los Angeles Sparks.
The salary cap sheets build on our other work including our WNBA CBA FAQ, our WNBA free agency list, and our recent mock offseason podcast and articles. You can listen to the podcast by subscribing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
The salary cap sheets include every player on every team, broken down by contract type, through 2025. Key Features include:
Permanent URLs to HTML pages that we will update as transactions occur and new contracts are confirmed
Sortable tables of the data
Key Team Totals such as salary cap room and total guaranteed salary
2021 Draft Picks and their rookie scale contract info
Key Dates in 2021 for free agency and contracts
CBA Terms and Rules
A friendly layout to make this information available to all
Go directly to the salary cap sheets for every team:
All the data presented on our salary cap sheets has been independently double-sourced by Richard Cohen, a huge task. Morgan Reeder led the way with the layout design to make the WNBA salary cap sheets easy to read and understand.
In addition to showing the roster and the salaries, the salary cap sheets provide the key summary totals for each team. The example below is the current situation for the Chicago Sky. As you can see, they currently have 11 players on their books who have a total salary of just under $1.2MM. Four of those salaries are protected (Courtney Vandersloot at $200,000, Allie Quigley at $194,000, Stefanie Dolson at $175,000, and Kahleah Copper at $165,000) for a total of $734,000 in guaranteed salary. The Sky are currently $141,434 under the cap and $76,796 over the team minimum, so they could choose to stand pat with their roster. Alternatively, they could choose to sign a free agent with their cap room or cut an unprotected contract and apply the savings to re-signing Cheyenne Parker who will probably command a higher salary than their cap space.
Perhaps most likely, though, Chicago could simply sign their 2021 1st Round draft pick. They pick eighth as is shown in our 2021 Draft Assets section and it is their only pick in the draft. The CBA fully specifies the salary of rookie scale contracts if a player is not cut from the contract, so we can show their salary out to 2024, a team option year.
The Indiana Fever have the most selections in the 2021 Draft with six, shown below, while the Washington Mystics have traded all of their picks.
At this moment the WNBA hasn’t set the date of the 2021 Draft, but we do know the beginnings of the WNBA 2021 calendar as mentioned above. The sheets list the dates we do know and reminds us of when other key dates have been in previous seasons for reference. We also include a brief description of the significance of each milestone and an expandable details section with more information. Links to our CBA FAQ are also included.
Additionally, we’ve included a mini-glossary of terms for quick reference after the salary data. Again, the brief descriptions expand to provide additional detail and include links to our CBA FAQ.
We’ve done our best to cover salaries and the CBA in an accessible way as accurately as possible. Corrections, comments, questions, or suggestions? Email aaronbarzilai@herhoopstats.com and include SALARY CAP in the subject.
We’re planning to do more with the salary data going forward. Keep an eye out for enhancements and follow along with the data as the year progresses.
Happy New Year and thanks for all your support!
Thanks for reading the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter. If you like our work, be sure to check out our stats site, our podcast, and our social media accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. You can also buy Her Hoop Stats gear, such as laptop stickers, mugs, and shirts!
Haven’t subscribed to the Her Hoop Stats Newsletter yet?