Sports Illustrated broke what is probably the biggest story in WNBA history on a random Monday afternoon.
The story is absurd and involves the league handing out RECORD fines against the New York Liberty, threatening to take all their draft picks, and even floating the idea of not only making the owner Joe Tsai (who owns the Liberty) sell the team, but folding the entire franchise.
What was this most serious infraction that brought about this kind of draconian reaction?
Charter planes.
Seriously.
All of this happened because Joe Tsai wanted to invest in his players and treat them like elite athletes by flying them charter instead of commercial. All because he didn’t want them flying Southwest next to Fred and Karen and their 8 month old son on their way to a game in Phoenix.
You can’t make this up.
Why the outsized reaction?
I have some thoughts on that. Buckle up.
So here’s what happened.
Joe Tsai is the billionaire owner of the Brooklyn Nets and New York Liberty. He wanted to give his Liberty team a team building trip to Napa Valley, so he chartered a plane and sent them off to Wine country. Rookie Didi Richards later said, “Napa was so much fun, though. It was just an opportunity for us to get together as a team and just be beautiful, and you all know I love that. So I was just planning for days what I was going to wear to Napa once they told us.” Liberty guard Jazmine Jones said the team’s owners “treat us just like they treat the NBA team.”
Beautiful story, right, so what’s the problem?
The issue is that flying charter violates the WNBA’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, which constrains the benefits you give players.
I remind you that it’s 2022 and that’s a real sentence I had to write.
It gets SOOOOO much dumber.
The Liberty then chartered flights for each road game of the season’s second half, beginning in August with a trip to Minnesota.
And with each charter flight, the WNBA got more and more pissed. So mad, that the punishment they were floating around was OBSCENE.
Joe Tsai did not back down.
In fact, he doubled down, stating that WNBA athletes should be treated like the elite players they are, and going public over the fact he can’t fly his own team via charter.
So he did the most extraordinary thing. He found a sponsor willing to fly ALL WNBA teams for FREE for three years. You know what happened?
The WNBA Board of Governors turned it down. And why? According to SI: “Some owners worried that players would get used to it, so there’d be no going back, and others wondered whether players might just prefer a salary hike instead.”
Pause.
THEY DIDN’T WANT PLAYERS TO GET USED TO BEING TREATED LIKE ELITE ATHLETES. HAHAHA we have officially entered Banaland, population: WNBA Board of Governors.
And you thought MLB owners had a monopoly on being cheap.
The League originally wanted to slap a $1 million fine on the Liberty – by far the most in the history of the league – but dialed it down to a cool half million. Still a record by far.
Keep in mind that this is a league that has capped salaries at $221k a year, the WNBA Supermax. And you wonder why Mark Davis paid Becky Hammon $1 million a year to coach? Because he can, and wants to, and thinks it will help him win. It’s also the only salary that’s not capped in the CBA.
The WNBA is being hamstrung by a CBA that will do nothing to pay these players what they are worth, especially in light of the incredible growth in ratings for the WNBA and investment from multiple sources including Nike. And the worst part is the CBA is in place until 2027.
What does that all mean?
For me, I’ve come to the realization that professional sports are broken. At least the ones up front and center the last month – the Olympics, Major League Baseball, and now the WNBA.
There are very rich people who own sports teams and as my grandma would say “honey, you don’t get rich by giving it away” and that mentality has stuck with some of these owners despite them being worth literally billions of dollars. If you are a billionaire, you own a team, and you’re against the free market in terms of how much to pay the best athletes in the world?
You are what we call cheap. And you shouldn’t own a professional sports team.
Winners do whatever is necessary to win. There are billionaires owning teams that would rather cut every corner rather than do what it takes to be great.
That to me is a problem. A gigantic problem that hampers the growth of the game that is STRUGGLING to get new consumers. And new eyeballs.
But you know what? There are plenty of rich people who want to own a professional sports team and won’t treat them like the Pittsburgh Pirates.
I’ve got thoughts on how to fix the WNBA but I’ll leave those for another day. For now, let’s bask in the absolute absurdity of a league that penalizes an owner who wants to treat its players like the stars that they are.
For more on this and other professional basketball news, check out The Heat Check with Trysta Krick wherever you get your podcasts, and don’t forget to follow me on TikTok at @ThisHeatCheck and on Twitter at @Trysta_Krick.
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