Organized labor is a funny topic in today’s discourse. Even as political alignment shifts among the demographic most historically associated with unionization, there’s a clear culture war divide on the issue. One side’s political catechism dictates never criticizing a union. That side is overrepresented within media, and especially within media which covers women’s basketball. So, although we don’t exactly identify with the other side, let us acknowledge:
Caitlin Clark would be better off without a union.
In case you missed it, Clark’s salary this year is going to be $76,535. That’s it. That’s the salary allotted to the first pick in the WNBA Draft in her rookie season. A lot of comparisons are being made between this number and the number for the NBA Draft’s first pick. That’s not the right comparison to make, of course. The NBA makes more money than the WNBA. NBA franchises make more money than WNBA franchises. Comparing WNBA and NBA salaries is as useful as comparing the salaries of gym teachers to those of truck drivers. It’s interesting, but they’re different industries.
The better comparison to make is between what Caitlin Clark earns and what value she generates for her employer, now the Indiana Fever. It’s hard to put a number on that last piece. Estimating what Clark is going to do for the Fever and the WNBA’s respective bottom lines involves a lot of guesswork. So, instead of making those guesses, let’s look at Clark’s impending shoe deal with Nike.
Shams Charania reported this morning that Clark’s deal with Nike is going to be worth upwards of $20 million. He didn’t report the length of the contract, but even if it’s a seven-year deal*, that’s roughly three million dollars a year for Clark, approximately 40 times her salary. It’s not outlandish for a shoe deal to be richer, annually, than a rookie contract, but Zion Williamson’s original Jordan Brand contract paid him roughly 1.5 times more than his salary. 40 is a lot bigger than 1.5. There are other differences—the NBA’s brand is established enough that pay is more tied to competitive value than to marketing value—but looking at what attention Nike expects Clark to draw, it’s outrageous for her to only be making five figures from her full-time employer. The Indiana Fever are going to make a ton of money off of Caitlin Clark. The WNBA is going to make a ton of money off of Caitlin Clark. If Caitlin Clark’s salary/shoe deal ratio was the same as Zion Williamson’s, she’d be making at least two million dollars from the Fever this season.
*From what I can tell, seven years is towards the long end of normal for NBA shoe deals. I’m happy to update this post if someone can share a good source contradicting this.
Is this the WNBA’s union’s fault? Not necessarily. While it’s true that the WNBPA has only secured ten percent of WNBA revenue for players, whereas the NBPA grabs fifty percent of NBA revenue for its members, the WNBA has historically fought a much tougher financial picture than the NBA. Those percentages are percentages of revenue. They’re not percentages of profit. Profit is hard to pin down, because much of it manifests itself in the rising values of franchises (owners virtually always sell NBA franchises for a higher price than they bought them), but given we’ve yet to see an announcement that the WNBA made money in a given year, and given we’d expect the NBA to thump its chest about that if it had happened, the safest bet is that the WNBA still runs at a loss. Both the NBPA and the WNBPA are charged with doing what’s best for their members. For the NBPA, that involves getting as big a slice of the pie as possible. For the WNBPA, there has never been a pie to slice. The WNBPA’s job, instead, has been to secure enough for its highest earners to convince them to not solely play abroad while simultaneously securing enough for its lowest earners to convince them to not “go pro in something other than sports.” That’s an entirely different negotiating situation from what the NBPA faces. Comparing the NBA CBA’s revenue split to the WNBA CBA’s is, again, like gym teachers and truck drivers. Or apples and oranges, to use a more conventional metaphor.
It’s possible the WNBPA has done a terrible job. It’s possible the WNBPA has done a great job. We don’t know. There’s no good comparison. The WNBA has been run at a loss for decades as an effort to boost gender equality. It’s working. While the WNBA isn’t solely responsible for the recent success of women’s college basketball, there’s likely some relationship there to girls growing up in a country with a professional path. Still, the WNBA has always been a lot like a non-profit. It’s existed because of the societal benefit it provides, and it’s not made a profit. That last part is probably about to change.
WNBA franchise values are skyrocketing. The Seattle Storm were valued at $151M last winter. The Chicago Sky were valued at $85M last summer. The Bay Area expansion franchise coming next season cost its owners $50M. These are big jumps from the pre-Covid numbers. In 2019, the New York Liberty sold for only something like $12M. The Liberty likely weren’t as valuable as the Storm or the Sky, but surely they weren’t too far below league average if they were below average at all. New York-based professional sports teams tend to be among the richest in their game. If the rights to build an expansion team are going for $50M, surely the Liberty are worth a comparable amount.
There’s also the matter of Caitlin Clark herself. Women’s NCAA Tournament viewership was increasing before Clark arrived. But Clark multiplied it. The fact a WNBA player is signing a $20M shoe deal speaks to this earning power as well. WNBA revenue is going to continue to jump, and while expenses will rise alongside it, at some point this thing is going to make money. At some point, the WNBA will be a conventional professional sports league in the financial sense, unless the tide really, really shifts. At that point, the WNBPA’s job is going to change dramatically. It could even change this coming winter. The WNBPA reportedly has the option to opt out of the CBA after this season concludes. Rookie contracts will soon rise for WNBA players. But that doesn’t change what’s happened to Caitlin Clark.
Caitlin Clark is worth more to the Indiana Fever than $76,535. She is making $76,535 from the Fever because of a CBA negotiated between the WNBPA and the WNBA, one which takes negotiation power away from individual players and gives it to all players, as a whole (*collective* bargaining). Sure, she’s getting money from Nike and other endorsement partners, but the Fever and the WNBA are about to line their pockets with the money Caitlin Clark makes them. Would the WNBA be better off without a union? Not necessarily. That’s another question, and a complicated one. But Caitlin Clark would be better off in this specific scenario if she was bargaining individually, not collectively.
To belabor this just a little longer:
In a scenario in which the WNBPA didn’t exist, American professional basketball would still be an option for Caitlin Clark. The NBA has kept the WNBA afloat through both hell and high water. Surely, WNBA teams would continue paying enough to keep players in the league even if those players weren’t bargaining together. Even if the WNBA didn’t exist, a new pro women’s basketball league would currently be forming in its absence. The NWSL is doing well. Women’s college basketball is thriving. There would be a pro league of some sort. In that ecosystem, Clark would be bargaining individually, grabbing as much of the profit pie as she could personally slice. She would have personal leverage. It would not require a strike by the entire WNBPA to get her the money she deserves.
Instead, Clark is subject to the CBA, a CBA built around the financial picture of a pre-Caitlin Clark era. What leverage does she have? She can’t negotiate with other teams. She can’t put public pressure on the Fever. Her rookie contract is what the CBA dictates it must be. Her choice is either to abide by that or to bypass the WNBA, something which would amount to abandoning the American women’s basketball movement.
I visited Oxford, Mississippi once, about eight years ago. My friend’s parents were working at Ole Miss, and I was driving through, from Nashville to Natchez. My friend’s mom showed me around.
There’s a statue on Mississippi’s campus commemorating James Meredith, the first Black student at the University of Mississippi. It was a stop on this little tour, and my friend’s mother commented, off-hand, “Imagine the pressure of knowing everything you did reflected not only on yourself, but on your whole culture.” The Civil Rights movement and women’s basketball are different beasts. Clark is not dealing with anything close to what Meredith faced. But there’s a pressure to being a pioneer that almost all of us will never personally know.
Women’s basketball was growing before Caitlin Clark arrived. It would have grown in her absence. There’s a symbiosis there between Caitlin Clark and her sport. But Clark is accelerating that growth like no one ever has before. Clark is a pioneer. Clark is the first of her kind. Is she going to be the best WNBA player? No. Especially not right at first. But she is the most marketable. She is the most valuable. She is the one drawing more of the attention than any other player in the league. She is making plenty of money to do this. But because of the CBA which governs her industry, she isn’t making that money from the league itself. It isn’t necessarily anybody’s fault. No one envisioned that a Caitlin Clark could be possible.
How Much Does Jimmy Butler’s Injury Hurt the Heat?
Yes yes I know the answer here is “a lot.” The Heat are only favored by a point or two tomorrow night against the Bulls. The game is being played in Miami. This means the Bulls are being treated as a neutral-court favorite against the Heat. All because Jimmy Butler is reportedly expected to miss multiple weeks with an MCL injury. Perhaps a better question is, “Can the Heat win without Jimmy Butler?”
The thing the Heat reminded us last year, especially in the Eastern Conference Finals, is that even when they’re an 8-seed, they’re more than an 8-seed. The Heat have gears other teams don’t possess. Some combination of Heat Culture and Jimmy Butler are capable of elevating the Heat beyond their regular season selves when the NBA’s format changes from an 82-game aggregation to a series of seven-game series. The question now, with Butler likely out not only tomorrow night but missing the ensuing hypothetical rematch with the Celtics, is how much Heat Culture can do even when Jimmy Butler’s out.
Warning: We are about to do some reckless math. It’s going to involve a lot of assumptions. If you know the NBA well, it might make you furious.
Let’s start by saying that the Celtics were a little worse than themselves last playoffs and that the Heat were roughly equivalent to the Celtics last playoffs. The Celtics went 57–25 in the regular season. The Heat went 44–38. Let’s attribute about three quarters of the closing of that gap to the Heat and about one quarter to the Celtics. Let’s say they were both 53-win Eastern Conference teams.
We found last summer, in our NBA Core Score exercise (that’s coming back soon, by the way—have been trying to get to it all week but have been too busy researching WNBA franchise valuations!), that a player held in Jimmy Butler’s regard is worth about seven wins. Butler played roughly the same number of games this year as he played last year. The Heat finished with roughly the same record this year as they finished with last year. I don’t think it’s absurd to again call the Playoff Heat the equivalent of a 53-win Eastern Conference team. This is only a little optimistic compared to where betting markets had the Eastern Conference picture entering April. Without Butler, then? The Heat are a 46-win Eastern Conference team. Which is exactly what they were this regular season.
This extremely haphazard estimation, then, holds that removing Jimmy Butler from the Heat is about the same as removing the entirety of their Butler/Heat Culture playoff advantage. It returns them to their regular season selves. That should still be enough to beat the Bulls, especially at home, but against a Celtics team that’s better than last year’s, the hypothetical first round matchup is looking as lopsided as they come.
The Rest
College basketball:
- Reed Sheppard is leaving Kentucky and entering the NBA Draft, and while Kentucky did have some hope that the Sheppard family’s closeness to Mark Pope would result in the lottery pick staying in Lexington another year, this isn’t too big a surprise. The upside for Kentucky is that Pope likely won’t be saddled with top-five expectations in his first year leading the program. The downside is that Kentucky won’t have the guy who might have been the preseason Wooden Award favorite, and that expectations should still outpace reason, and come with some blowback when left unmet.
- I made a comment in a blog post this January or February that Wisconsin was set to enter this coming year with realistic Final Four hopes. Now, AJ Storr’s headed to Kansas and Chucky Hepburn just entered the transfer portal himself. To which I say: My bad, guys.
The NBA:
- The Sixers/Heat game itself turned into a masterpiece by the end, even if it came in something of a brutalist style. Sixers/Knicks is a really exciting blueprint for a series.
Chicago, the Packers, and Iowa State:
- The Heat’s loss is the Bulls’ gain, as Coby White & Co. suddenly have a real chance of downing Miami and reaching the first round, even with Alex Caruso questionable. I know, I know. They’re doomed against the Celtics. But better to make a third first round in ten years than to not make it, especially if the franchise is directionless either way.
- Jameson Taillon starts for the Cubs in the series opener against the Marlins, and it’s worth remembering how much better he was last year than his early-season performance. He ended up with an ERA, xERA, and FIP all below 5.00, which puts him in the “positively contributing” section of the starting pitching world. Over the back half of the season, his performance was especially solid, with his 4.23 FIP beginning July 1st slightly better than the median among the 150 pitchers who threw the most innings. In other words, over the back half of last year, Jameson Taillon pitched like the third-best starter on the average team. Jameson Taillon was the average MLB starter. That’s not phenomenal, and he’s expected to regress a little this year, but as long as his back’s fine now, he should provide some rotation depth, and the Cubs can use that, with the bats doing more than the arms so far this year.
- Blackhawks season finale tonight in Los Angeles. Given how much more fun it is to be a Blackhawks fan right now if you don’t think about the 2023–24 season, it’s about to get a lot more fun to be a Blackhawks fan.
- The Packers signed Andre Dillard today after the Titans cut him last month to save cap space. It’s unclear if he’ll start, and if so, where, but he’s played left tackle in the past.
- Hunter Dekkers is back into college football, but at Iowa Western Community College. Hope things work out for the guy. He did something very dumb but much more harmless than the comparably dumb things other college-aged people do.
