WNBA Dissected: Increased schedule raises questions, Vegas ink another deal, lineups get smaller, and more from 2022 Week 11
Another look around the notable issues and events cropping up around the WNBA in the last week
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Expansion for expansion's sake?
Lost somewhat among the all-star festivities - which didn't exactly go off without a hitch themselves - was the announcement from WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert that the league would be expanding to 40 games next season. She talked about wanting to “grow our footprint” and described the benefits by saying “it will just give us more opportunities for fan touch points, brand partnership, awareness, continue to grow the game, and I think we're looking at exposure, elevating… We need to have a more substantial season, so we'll do that next year.” If you read this column regularly, you may not be surprised to hear that I struggle to see the point.
In most US sports leagues, owners like to play lots of games because they make money from each one. It's an extra game where they can sell tickets, parking, concessions, and the game itself to local broadcasters. However, there's very little evidence that WNBA teams currently make more money on each game they play. Most of the teams don't own their own arena, so have to pay rent for each game (and how much they make from all those ancillary elements varies a lot depending on the arena deal). Attendance has yet to bounce back to pre-pandemic levels, and more teams are playing in small arenas where big crowds aren’t even possible. While more games are at least broadcast on local channels these days, there's no evidence that teams are making much money from those either. The national deals to show games beyond ABC/ESPN via Twitter, Facebook and CBS Sports Network have yet to have any apparent meaningful impact on the bottom line, so putting games on whatever the local channel is in Atlanta, Dallas or wherever seems unlikely to be filling the coffers for the owners. So why expand the schedule?
Maybe it's just to make the league look more important. Major men’s sports in America play vast amounts of regular season games (even though, unlike a lot of leagues elsewhere, the actual winners are decided by playoff games rather than all those regular season ones). So the more you play, the more important you are, right? That logic collapses for me in the face of the NFL. Far and away the most popular sport in America is the one that only plays 17 regular season games per team. The only reason it's even as many as 17 now is money. You can grow the league without having to grow the number of games.
Because there are a whole host of reasons not to expand the schedule. Just this week we had more complaints from Minnesota about travel difficulties which exacerbated the pains of having to play four games in six nights. Cram more games in and those issues are only going to get worse. Players are inevitably wearing down and missing games, which has in part led to all the hardship contracts and roster turnover that has been necessary to fill out rosters this year.
Also, why are we expanding the regular season, rather than the playoffs? Every year, interest spikes dramatically with the postseason when games really matter. But even having dumped byes and single-elimination games, we now have a whole round of best-of-threes which could lead to big upsets. Why play 240 games to jostle for position before rushing through the exciting stuff at the end?
Another element glossed over in all this is that the players don't earn any extra money from the extra games. Yes, the Collective Bargaining Agreement allows the league to expand to as many as 44 regular season games if they want to. But salaries remain exactly the same unless and until the revenue sharing elements are activated - something which looks incredibly unlikely until a new national TV deal kicks in, which probably won't be happening until 2026 after the current one expires. So on a per game basis, players will be earning even less next year. Foreign players might therefore be even less likely to bother with the WNBA, thereby lowering the level of play. Yes, the league said they'd increase playoff bonuses up to around $500,000, from the $340,000 or so they were already at, but that's a small increase for a subset of players. CBA rules stipulate they had to increase the merit bonuses by at least 10% due to the increase in playoff games, so they went higher in the hope that people wouldn't talk about the 11% increase in games that has no accompanying increase in compensation whatsoever.
Even if the WNBA didn’t want to expand the playoffs, they could've made the Commissioner's Cup something that people actually care about and want to pay some attention to, rather than a largely irrelevant element of regular season games that everyone ignores until the very end. If there's time for four extra regular season games per team - 24 games total - they could've turned it into an actual cup tournament. It could be an interesting knock-out competition if they actually put some time and effort into the format.
Talking of time, is there actually space for these additional games? Next year there's no Olympics or World Cup, which should at least help out. They can maybe start a little earlier and end a little later without cutting into international competition. Of course, go too far in either direction and you're affecting the other jobs of your players. Plus, with WNBA Prioritization rules about to start kicking in, extending the schedule earlier has the potential to upset the players even more. We're also yet to see much evidence that the league is willing to reduce the number of games to suit the situation of a given year. Outside of pandemics, the league has historically decided how many games they want, then tried to fit that many games in regardless of there being more obstacles than there were in previous years. The total virtually never goes down. So in 2024 when there's an Olympics or 2026 when there's another World Cup, are they going to be willing to drop back down from 40 if it makes sense? I'll believe it when I see it.
So I just want someone to tell me the reasoning in more detail. Why is 40 games better? How will the game actually grow as a result adding these games? I didn't think there was any particularly good reason to be going up to 36 this year, when Covid-19 was still going to affect rosters, the World Cup limited the length of the season, and 32 seemed to work fine last season. If TV channels are coming to the league and teams demanding more games, then great - tell us that. If you think you can sell each individual game for increasing value, then make that clear as well. If there's a provable value to being able to go up to 40 prior to negotiating a new broadcast deal rather than as part of one, then make that reasoning clear as well. There are much clearer arguments and reasons to expand the league in terms of more teams. New markets, new fans, greater reach, greater interest. Just expanding the number of games played by the same old teams seems like more games just for the sake of more games.
A Plum Deal
A few weeks back when the Las Vegas Aces inked Dearica Hamby to a contract extension, I discussed where they went next. After six months where they'd signed deals with Hamby, A'ja Wilson, Chelsea Gray, Jackie Young and Riquna Williams, the Aces had their entire core locked up through at least 2023, apart from one key piece - Kelsey Plum. This week they completed the set, with Plum agreeing to a multi-year extension, later confirmed to be two seasons at $200,000 per year.
This is great news for Las Vegas. It's become clear that the franchise is keeping their players happy, and they don't want to leave for theoretically greener pastures. Every one of these players could have looked for more money. Wilson signed for the max, but took two years when she could've signed for one in order to become a free agent again a year later when she'd have been eligible for the supermax. Hamby and Young both signed extensions for less than $170,000 per year when they likely would've received max offers from other teams if they waited to hit the open market (2023's regular max figure is $202,154). But as Hamby said herself in response to my tweet about her contract figures:
Gray extended for two years at the max, but at a consistent figure of this year's max. Not the figure that increases each season, but just the same 2022 max number repeated twice more ($196,267). And now Plum has taken a flat $200,000. It's slightly less than the 2023 max, quite a bit less than the $216,300 her extension was eligible to start at, and significantly less than the $234,936 supermax figure she'd have been eligible for if she waited for free agency. It puts her second on the Aces' salary sheet for next season behind Wilson, although Gray technically gained more cash in her extension because the Aces added a $10,000 time-off bonus to her 2022 compensation.
Plum's number means everyone can stay. Obviously, opportunities for trades may crop up or situations may change, but the figures allow Las Vegas to keep Riquna Williams next year. With nine players under contract, they have $138,804 left in cap space, enough for one player on the veteran minimum and one on the base minimum (for players with 0-2 years of WNBA experience). The Aces have also proven with their actions that if they do end up with cap space due to moves that may not have been anticipated, they'll hand it out to their key players in time-off bonuses. There's no scrimping going on here, just an honest effort to keep the gang together.
On a league-wide level, the actions of the Aces players are starting to indicate that the supermax may not be the be-all and end-all. A franchise first has to prove that they're worth it - and getting three No. 1 picks in the right years has certainly helped the Aces with that process - but once they do, players will work with the team to get things done. They may not demand every last penny if it's going to help them win. However, the other side of that is that there will probably still be some players who use salaries to keep score - and that helps even the playing field. If any of these players had said "supermax or else", the Aces would've had to make moves, and it could've opened up opportunities for other franchises. But in this instance, no one did. As a result, Las Vegas look like they'll be challenging for titles for the foreseeable future.
(Small) Lineup Minutiae
It's not really minutiae at this point, because they've been doing it for weeks, but the relative success of the Phoenix Mercury since Tina Charles's departure has been fascinating. This is a team that is now playing genuinely 'four-out'. They don't have a big that can stretch the floor or anything like that - their center Brianna Turner very much can't stretch the floor, or even offer much scoring inside - but they've been surviving with four perimeter players on the floor at almost all times. Sophie Cunningham has been tasked as the primary nominal power forward, with lots of double-teaming, rotation help, and zone defense to cover up the holes.
And it's worked. Or it's worked at least as well as anything else was working for Phoenix for most of the season. The Mercury are 5-4 since Charles departed, and have a net rating of +2.6 over that period, good enough for sixth in the league and a significant uptick from the -3.0 they're sitting at for the whole season. They've not had the toughest schedule over that period - just two of the nine games were against the league's clear top-five teams - but it's enough of a sample to be more than a fluke. They're getting killed on the glass, as you'd expect, but that was happening when Charles was there as well.
It's interesting because however much coaches and general managers talk about 'positionless basketball', they generally come back to playing two bigs, or at the very least one true center and a solid forward who's comfortable in the paint. If teams see four-out as a consistent, genuine option, it opens up different roster builds, where you can stock up with more wings and not need so many backup bigs. If you can survive defensively, it creates mismatches at the other end, especially if teams have someone at the 4 who can handle and create a little more than Cunningham can. She's doing an impressive job, but she's mostly a gunner and energy player. Someone who can beat their defender off the dribble and shoot from that spot leads us towards the same transformation the men's game has undergone in recent times, where players who grew up at the 2 or 3 are now consistently playing the 4.
The question is whether this lasts, or if it ends up being seen as a gimmicky quirk from a team who ran out of alternative options. We've seen a lot more zone defense around the league this year, which is another step towards this kind of basketball. You play more zone when your lineup doesn't fit traditional man-to-man. A couple of days ago we saw Atlanta and Las Vegas go simultaneously small for a long stretch of their game against each other. If the Mercury can win some games through to the end of the season, and maybe even make a playoff run, more WNBA teams might start looking towards small lineups as their base groups.
Clark's Corner
This has been a messy season for the Los Angeles Sparks, and that might be generous. Coaching changes, major acquisitions that haven't quite worked out, players showing up late, others in and out of the lineup, disastrous defensive numbers after that was the one thing they could rely on last year - it's fair to say that not everything has gone to plan.
However, there have been a few positive notes. Nneka Ogwumike has stepped up her production compared to the last couple of seasons; her sister Chiney has stayed healthy enough to be a consistent contributor, even if it's clear that the player we saw back in her Connecticut days is gone for good; Lexie Brown is cementing herself as a genuine WNBA player; and Brittney Sykes continues to do Brittney Sykes things.
Sykes is an absolute pest and has been for years. The chase-down blocks she achieves with her speed, athleticism and timing are perfect for the Twitter age, but those long arms and quick reflexes make her a consistent defensive annoyance in lots of other ways as well. The video below is of her three steals from a game last week, but you see similar actions in virtually every game. She's constantly moving and poking her way into passing lanes.
The one thing that has held Sykes back from becoming a genuinely elite two-way wing is her shooting, which has never been consistent enough. She'll take threes, but not enough of them go in for defenses to worry about her. That said, this season we've seen a step up in her ballhandling and distribution, stepping in to play minutes as essentially the point guard in Los Angeles (despite their many, many other options). She's a free agent this offseason, and while it's unlikely that anyone will sign her primarily to play the point, being a capable option as a secondary ballhandler or emergency point guard only increases her value. The Sparks have so many impending free agents that no one really knows what they'll look like next year - no one even knows who the head coach or general manager is going to be - but plenty of teams will have interest in Sykes if she's willing to look elsewhere. As with all these Clark's Corner players, you'd much rather have Sykes on your team than have to deal with her playing against you.
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