Pod Insights Planet Money Diary of a WNBA negotiator About this episode Today the WNBA season tips off, but Dallas Wings veteran forward Alysha Clark has already won a high-stakes competition. She – and a Nobel Prize winning economist – were on the team that negotiated a ground-breaking contract for the players. And Alysha wrote all about it in her journal.
Alysha is the oldest player in the league – and when she started she was making a yearly salary of about $36,400. The players flew economy, the rookies in middle seats. They doubled up in hotel rooms. The league was just starting out, wasn’t bringing in money, and, as Alysha says, “That's just what you got.”
Jump forward to 2025 and fans are crowding into stadiums, games are on primetime TV, and the WNBA has a 3.1 billion dollar media rights deal.
So when the players’ contract came up for renewal, they had a once in a generation opportunity to change the future for all of women’s basketball. Maybe all of women's sports. Today on the show, we hear Alysha’s minute by minute account of what it’s like to be a rookie doing high-stakes bargaining. It came right down to the buzzer.
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Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 This message comes from KeyBank. Growing a successful business isn't easy. That's why KeyBank offers strategies to help your business grow today and into the future. Reimagine business as usual. KeyBank opens doors. More at key.com/b2b.
0:18 Speaker 01 This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:22 Speaker 02 There's this player in the WNBA. Her name is Alicia Clark, who has kind of a reputation.
0:28 Speaker 03 I think my teammates would describe me as a tough, gritty, winning, like a winner.
0:36 Speaker 02 Can you go into winner a little bit? Like, what does that mean?
0:39 Speaker 03 I'm gonna be in the right position at the right time. I'm gonna be prepared. Yeah, I just wanna win at all costs. And whatever that looks like, whatever I need to do is what I'll do. So, and I have a track record of winning.
0:51 Speaker 04 Yeah, she's understating it a little bit. Actually, when we were talking to her, the only time she seemed kinda bored was when she was listing her accomplishments.
1:01 Speaker 03 Going back to high school, like, I won a state championship.
1:03 Speaker 02 She went on to win championships in college and in overseas leagues.
1:07 Speaker 03 Then in the WNBA, winning three championships with three of the, how many teams have I played for?
1:13 Speaker 02 So, just to be clear, we're talking to a three-time WNBA champion?
1:17 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:20 Speaker 02 Awesome. But recently, she took part in a competition that had higher stakes than any game she's ever played.
1:27 Speaker 04 Alicia knows long, grueling workouts. She's learned dozens of defensive schemes and offensive plays. She's used to practicing, preparing, strategizing. But this was a totally different kind of endurance challenge.
1:38 Speaker 02 Because instead of running drills, she was studying contracts and labor law.
1:43 Speaker 03 You know, taking the time to sit down and go through this 300-page document and read, and if there's something I didn't understand, I Googled it. And I'm like, OK, what does X, Y, and Z mean? Oh, OK, got it. And so then I would go back and reread a section. And then if there were questions, hey, I saw this. What exactly does this mean?
1:59 Speaker 02 She was doing all of this studying because, for the first time in her life, she was gonna be negotiating the contract for all the players in the WNBA.
2:07 Speaker 04 And, look, it's normal for players to be in Involved in collective bargaining. When union workers sign a new contract with their employers, some of the actual workers have to be part of the negotiations. So Alisha was going to be one of the players negotiating over things like parental leave, 401K matching, housing stipends, and most importantly, pay.
2:26 Speaker 02 What was not normal was how potentially historic this new contract could be. The WNBA has seen astronomical growth since the players got their last contract six years ago. And the players were saying, wait a minute. This is our moment. We want our fair share.
2:43 Speaker 03 Our shares should grow as the business grows because we're the reason the business is growing.
2:50 Speaker 04 All Alisha and the other negotiators had to do was get the league to agree. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erica Barris.
2:59 Speaker 02 And I'm Emma Piesley. Alisha Clark and the other players had a once in a generation opportunity to change the future for all of women's basketball and maybe all of women's sports. And it came right down to the buzzer.
3:14 Speaker 04 Today on the show, we go courtside to one of the most important union negotiations in professional sports history and learn what it's like to be a rookie doing high stakes bargaining. From bluffs and puffs to strategic silence and something called batting up. And the ringer? Economics. Swish.
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4:51 Speaker 02 On the court, Alicia Clark is a forward for the Dallas Wings. But over her time with the WNBA, she has been in pretty much every position: being cut from her team, twice; being a bench player; getting the minimum WNBA salary;
5:04 Speaker 03 being the, like, middle man in terms of, I'm not the superstar, but I'm not a rookie;
5:08 Speaker 04 then, being a starter, winning all of those championships. She says that's why she stepped up a couple of years ago to help negotiate this contract.
5:16 Speaker 03 I just knew that my lived experience would be so crucial and beneficial to this negotiation.
5:23 Speaker 02 Alicia is the oldest player in the league, 38. And when she first started thinking about these contract negotiations two years ago, she knew what she did not want: the kind of contract she had back when she was a rookie. What was your salary?
5:38 Speaker 03 My salary? Oh, I think I wrote it down. Let me check. Hold on.
5:41 Speaker 04 You're pulling out, like, a red diary notebook?
5:44 Speaker 03 Yeah, I am. I am.
5:46 Speaker 04 Yes, Alicia Clark starts flipping through a real old-school diary. During the contract negotiations, she was making entries multiple times a day in her careful, cursive writing.
5:55 Speaker 03 This is... This was my handy-dandy notebook.
5:59 Speaker 02 Do you normally keep, like, a diary?
6:02 Speaker 03 Uh, no, I am like a diary, like, journal person, just because I like to remember stuff. And I have so many thoughts.
6:10 Speaker 04 She finds the page she was looking for.
6:12 Speaker 03 So my first contract, I think, was $36,400.
6:19 Speaker 02 That was during her first WNBA season in 2012.
6:22 Speaker 03 I looked at it. I was like, OK, I'm making $36,400 for five months. Like, that's decent. And I'm like, I'm not going to look at the rest of the months of the year. We'll figure that out later. But for these five months, I was just like, this is what professional athletes are making, or at least... The women professional athletes.
6:42 Speaker 04 Nothing they had was like what the men had.
6:45 Speaker 03 Our practice court was a church gym.
6:49 Speaker 02 Alicia says they flew economy and middle seats if you were a rookie. Didn't matter how tall you were. And when they traveled, most players had roommates.
6:57 Speaker 03 Adults, professional athletes, sharing a hotel room.
7:01 Speaker 04 Did you say anything about it? Like, I know you were like, well, this is good. But were you, did it occur to you, be like, wait, should I get more?
7:09 Speaker 03 Oh, no, there was, there was no thought or even opportunity to get more. That is, that's just what you got.
7:14 Speaker 04 At the time, the WNBA was not turning a profit, which is typical for a new league. Many professional sports leagues don't make money for a while. Alicia says when the WNBA players asked for more money, they were always told the same thing. No one comes to the games. The revenue just isn't there.
7:32 Speaker 02 In the beginning, the NBA owned the WNBA. They're still majority owners. And in their 2002 negotiations, the NBA commissioner threatened to cancel the upcoming season if they couldn't reach an agreement.
7:46 Speaker 04 But over Alicia's career, women's basketball has changed a lot. It started slow. More people going to games, more television stations showing them. During the height of the pandemic, they were one of the only sports on television. And ever since, women's basketball has gone bonkers.
8:04 Speaker 02 Remember when Katelyn Clark broke the NCAA all-time scoring record?
8:07 Speaker 06 Here comes Clark. How will she go for history?
8:11 Speaker 04 She got so popular, she was invited on Saturday Night Live. Here to comment is Katelyn Clark.
8:22 Speaker 02 When Angel Reese's first preseason game with the Chicago Sky wasn't televised, a fan streamed the game from their phone and it got 500,000 views. And off the court, Angel is a regular at the Met Gala.
8:35 Speaker 04 So now, money is coming in from skyrocketing ticket prices and advertising revenue. The league is projected to get $3.1 billion over the next 11 years from a new media rights deal.
8:48 Speaker 02 And the players have gotten better deals as things have changed. They got rid of their roommates. Recently, they've been flying charter.
8:55 Speaker 04 They got parental leave and they got somewhat higher salaries. Last year, the minimum salary, like for a rookie, was around $66,000. And for the first time, the players did get a bonus because the WNBA made enough money to trigger it.
9:11 Speaker 02 But going into contract negotiations this year, with the WNBA pie growing exponentially, Alisha was on a mission. Can you tell us a little bit about what was on your wish list?
9:21 Speaker 03 Yeah, I mean, everything. We were like, where do we start?
9:25 Speaker 04 Literally, everything needed to be thrown out and started over again.
9:29 Speaker 03 No, literally, that's literally what we said. We were like, this all needs to be scrapped and we need to redo this entire CBA.
9:37 Speaker 04 The entire collective bargaining agreement. And if you're gonna ask for more of everything, Alisha learned, you have to be able to explain why.
9:47 Speaker 02 When an organization is making a profit, there are no rules that say management has to take this much and labor gets this much. You make it up. And when you're getting ready to negotiate, one thing you look for are comps in your industry. Like, other plumbers or teachers or whatever make this much money, so we should make that much.
10:04 Speaker 04 But there was no comparable professional women's basketball league in the country. And just asking for the same as what the men make, the average men's salary is around $10 million, just wasn't gonna work. Because despite all the growth of the WNBA, it still doesn't bring in nearly the kind of money the NBA does. The new pie is not that big.
10:26 Speaker 02 So it was gonna take some complicated math to figure out a fair comparison. And that was a first big challenge for the players as they prepped to start bargaining with the league.
10:35 Speaker 03 Mind you, Claudia Goldin is on our side.
10:40 Speaker 04 You heard that right, Planet Money fam. The Claudia Goldin, the Nobel Prize-winning economic historian and labor economist.
10:48 Speaker 07 2023 Prize in the Economic Sciences was awarded to Claudia Goldin.
10:53 Speaker 07 The price motivation reads for having advanced our understanding of women's labor market outcomes.
10:58 Speaker 04 When the WNBA players asked Claudia, after she won the Nobel, to help them negotiate their pay, she said, OK, but for no pay. So she was one of the people advising the player's side. Did you get to meet her?
11:13 Speaker 03 Via Zoom.
11:14 Speaker 04 Via Zoom? What was that like? Can you describe it? What did she tell you?
11:18 Speaker 03 I mean, just basically like what you guys are fighting for is more than fair. And she was like, honestly, it's embarrassing what they're paying you guys. So just to know, like, to have confidence that what you're fighting for is more than fair. And they have it.
11:36 Speaker 02 We exchanged emails with Claudia. She didn't want to come on because she wanted the focus to be on the players. And she said the math she was doing for them was not actually complicated. It was simple. It's all laid out in an op ed she wrote last year for the New York Times. Claudia wanted to find what a reasonable gap between the NBA and WNBA salaries would be by comparing their revenue. So she looked at what the W and the NBA each bring in from advertising, streaming, and game attendance.
12:04 Speaker 04 She accounted for the fact that the NBA season has more games, the games themselves are longer, and there are fewer WNBA teams. Then she crunched all those numbers and estimated that the average WNBA salary should be about a quarter to a third of the average NBA salary. In reality, Claudia calculated it was more like 1/80.
12:30 Speaker 02 And part of the reason that gap existed is because of the WNBA's previous collective bargaining agreement. The player salaries were not tied to revenue. They grew at a fixed rate that did not account for the incredible growth of the league.
12:43 Speaker 04 So that is the pot of money that Alicia and her negotiating team decided to zero in on: revenue. They wanted what's called revenue share, which Alicia says she didn't really understand in her rookie years.
12:58 Speaker 03 Like, you know what revenue is? And you know, like, obviously, revenue share is like, OK, you're sharing in the money that you're, that's coming in. But like, what does that actually look like in, in the terms that they have?
13:10 Speaker 02 The players did have an opportunity for some rev share from an earlier contract. That's how they got those bonuses last year. But the way the agreement worked, their salaries and their share of the revenue didn't grow at the same pace as the WNBA's overall revenue.
13:25 Speaker 03 If the business grew, our share stayed the same.
13:28 Speaker 04 So they sent their first proposal to the league in February of 2025. And what they asked for was 40% of revenue to split between players. We know now they weren't willing to settle for less. But negotiators usually start out with something called an anchor number to influence the direction of negotiations. By the way, NBA players get about 50% of rev share using a different system.
13:53 Speaker 02 In response to the WNBA players' proposals, the league did eventually offer some big jumps in salaries. At one point, they said they'd increase the max salary from about 250K to more than a million. But they were still insisting on a fixed-rate system. They were not budging on the players' rev share ask.
14:13 Speaker 04 So they're going back and forth, and Alicia and the other negotiators are following along with help from, you could say, the Claudia Goldin team, the math team.
14:21 Speaker 03 I'm a visual person, so I needed to see. Like, you can tell me something, but I'm like, let me just see it. And so they created, like, pie charts for us. Like, hey-
14:31 Speaker 04 I love pie charts.
14:32 Speaker 03 You know, it's amazing. And so it was like, hey, here is what happened, right? Like, here's the revenue. Here's their estimated, what they're saying. What they're offering you is this piece.
14:41 Speaker 02 OK, but they told the players, now watch the pie as the years go by. Look at the revenue the league is projecting.
14:48 Speaker 03 Here's what they're projecting the league to make over, you know, the next five years. And here's what happens to your share that they're offering you over those five years. And when you see it, you're like, huh! What? Why is that getting smaller?
15:01 Speaker 04 Why isn't it getting bigger with the increased revenue?
15:03 Speaker 03 And it's like, exactly. So in our revenue model, here's what it would look like. That was really eye opening. Because, you know, they're like, oh, there's million dollar contracts. There's this, there's average salary of this. And the players just see the numbers and we're, everyone's just like, but look at the salaries. And it's like, I, I, look at this pie chart. Look at this chart. Look at how this, look at the graph.
15:25 Speaker 02 As the negotiations move forward, Alicia and the other players on the committee had to pay the closest attention to every detail. This was a game they were only just learning to play. And with any game, there are lots of techniques.
15:37 Speaker 04 We've actually been looking at a list of, quote, "hard bargaining techniques" on a Harvard Law School post about negotiation tactics. Things negotiators might use in a situation like this. Now, a source with the league told us, quote, "We did not rely on negotiating tactics" or anything of that nature. But we think that some of the experiences Alicia told us about sound a little like some of the tactics on the list.
16:02 Speaker 03 They said they would lose hundreds of millions of dollars if they did it our way. That was their whole spiel. I mean, they said it in the, in, in the media all the time. We would lose hundreds of millions of dollars if we did it the way the players want to do it.
16:18 Speaker 02 To us, that sounded a little like a technique the Harvard Law School calls bluffing and puffing. Their post says these kinds of exaggerated claims and misrepresentations can throw negotiations off track.
16:30 Speaker 04 And Alicia said it really helped to have their own math in their pocket, especially when they thought the league was seriously lowballing them.
16:39 Speaker 03 What they offered in the beginning was embarrassing. I was like, this is actually embarrassing. And the fact that you put it in writing is even more embarrassing. Because I'm like, we have this amazing staff of advisors that are giving us facts, not like feelings and, you know, we're all in our, our feelings about stuff, et cetera. But let me show you what is actually here. That's where the confidence was gained.
17:03 Speaker 02 Another negotiating strategy it seemed like the players might have encountered. This one is on some other lists of labor negotiating tactics. It's what you might call a strategic pause, like a pause in conversation, or in this case, a pause in the whole negotiation.
17:18 Speaker 04 Yeah. Alicia says in December, 10 months into the negotiation, after the players sent a new proposal, the league went silent, waited more than six weeks to respond. Our source on the lead side says this was not a negotiating tactic and that the union's prior proposal did not warrant a response. Regardless, after what seems like a dramatic pause, the league invited the players to come to their headquarters in New York. This was now February.
17:43 Speaker 03 And so we were like, OK, they're calling a meeting. Like, surely they're going to come with something.
17:47 Speaker 04 Right.
17:47 Speaker 03 And they showed up with nothing.
17:49 Speaker 04 Why call a meeting, then?
17:51 Speaker 03 That's what we were trying to figure out. Like, you had people dropping everything to come to New York to be here for this, and you guys don't even show up with a proposal.
17:59 Speaker 02 Next, the league made a move that, to us, sounds kind of like what the Harvard Law School list calls threats and warnings.
18:07 Speaker 04 After the six weeks of silence and the big nothing of a trip to New York, Alicia says the league gave the players a suddenly urgent deadline. If you don't sign a contract by March 10th, the season will be in jeopardy.
18:20 Speaker 03 They wasted six weeks and then all of a sudden created this false timeline that we all of a sudden all had to be, had to jump on. And it was like, OK, well, where was this sense of urgency when you wasted these six weeks?
18:32 Speaker 02 For the record, our person on the league's side says it was not a threat or warning. Either way, by now, they were way behind schedule, and the start of the season was looming. So in March, both sides agreed to get together in person in New York again.
18:47 Speaker 04 Alicia packed a bag, thinking, it's just for a few days.
18:50 Speaker 03 You know, I was like, what can we get in this carry on?
18:53 Speaker 04 And in that carry on was her trusty diary.
18:56 Speaker 02 This meeting seemed for real because they had blocked off the entire third floor of the Langham Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York. There was a conference room with a big rectangular table. And Alicia said the first meeting between the players and the league was very passionate.
19:11 Speaker 03 Because at this point, we were so pissed off at how, at how they were moving.
19:17 Speaker 04 In her diary, she wrote down what she heard the league say after they all sat down.
19:22 Speaker 03 This is from March 10th.
19:24 Speaker 04 OK.
19:26 Speaker 03 Let me double check my, yeah. It was like, we're putting forward a proposal now. We'd like to walk out tonight and get a deal done. On day one, we were like, I'm sorry, what?
19:38 Speaker 02 That didn't happen. Instead, for days, they went back and forth with proposals covering not just rev share, but all the other little details, like when the season should start, how many training staff should there be, should the players be provided with cars?
19:52 Speaker 04 Alicia and the other players on the exec committee quickly settled into a routine. They did their workouts in the morning, and then in the afternoon, they negotiated. And Alicia kept diary entries.
20:04 Speaker 03 We met today at 12:45 to go through the proposal the league sent after 5 a.m. We went through rev share, housing.
20:10 Speaker 02 They did make some progress right away with the help of an aptly nicknamed player who was on the negotiation team.
20:16 Speaker 03 Breezy was working on her charts with the numbers and salaries. And, you know, that's why we called her Breezy, Hidden Figures Turner.
20:24 Speaker 02 I got real familiar with the charts. That's Brianna Turner. She's a forward for the Las Vegas Aces and the WNBA Players Association treasurer. I was just all in the Excel and like the Google Sheets and had my notes and was just making lots of charts.
20:41 Speaker 04 Breezy on the court, Hidden Figures in the negotiation room.
20:44 Speaker 02 Because she'd take whatever proposal the league was offering and stick it in her spreadsheet and see what it really meant. The chart I was making was just like, looking at like a $5 million salary cap. Like, I think the league came back with like the maximum salary being like 20% of the cap and thinking like, okay, if two players have max salaries, that's 40% of the cap right there, then you're leaving 60% of the cap for 10 people. They're just like trying to figure out math.
21:06 Speaker 03 We see you, Hidden Figures.
21:08 Speaker 02 Brianna also got into it with the league when they proposed cutting housing out of their package. They were saying, basically, you're making more money, you can pay for your own housing. But Brianna argued, in the more transient and sometimes fickle world of professional sports, that could leave players without a place to live. So it's like, what happens if you get cut or you get traded?
21:26 Speaker 04 Then you're on the hook for rent in a city that you don't even live in anymore.
21:30 Speaker 02 Like, you're just expecting these landlords to be nice when like realistically, that's not the case? Brianna says she addressed the full room. What happens in L.A. in 228? And they're like, what do you mean? And I was like, the Olympics, like, do you think? Housing costs are going to rise that summer. And they were just like, you can just tell they hadn't considered that before. The days were marathons, ending at 1 or 2 a.m. for the players and 4 or 5 a.m. for the staff. Every single night, I was just praying the security would cook us out. I was like, please cook us up in this building. Please get us out of here.
22:02 Speaker 04 They weren't really bothered by the quick-moving parts of the negotiations. They're used to a fast-paced competition. It was the slow-moving parts that frustrated them the most, when they were benched, but still in the game. Like, when just the lawyers were in the room, talking without them. What did you do when you waited?
22:21 Speaker 02 I feel like I did everything and nothing. Like, I was just scrolling, watching stuff on my laptop, make my little charts, get in fresh air. They played card games, went on walks. Everyone had shows they were watching. And sometimes, they all watched things together, like the Oscars. Alicia says they were watching when the first woman cinematographer won for Sinner's.
22:45 Speaker 03 We were all like, let's go, like, women are up, let's go. This is a sign, like, just, you know. And then, like, when Michael B. Jordan won for Best Actor, like, erupted. We were all in there, like, hooting and hollering, like, it was just so dope. It was, it was a good time.
23:02 Speaker 04 Did anyone from the hotel come in and be like, why are you all screaming so loudly?
23:07 Speaker 03 No, so they, like, came running, they're like, what, wait, what happened? And we were like, oh, Sinner's just won an Oscar. And they were like, we thought maybe, like, you guys were cheering because a deal was being done. And we're like, oh, we didn't think of how that might come off.
23:22 Speaker 04 Yeah, no deal. By day six, the hotel had given the players cozy blankets and pillows, so they were comfortable. But the negotiations were stalled, especially on the most important stuff: the money.
23:37 Speaker 04 Alicia's journal entry.
23:39 Speaker 03 I even, I was like, there wasn't an in-person, no in-person convos for the group have happened since last week. And it was like, us being there was the whole point. So we could sit in front of you and negotiate and talk about these things. But you're not even allowing us to do that.
23:54 Speaker 02 Alicia says the players had lowered and lowered their rev share ask from 40% all the way down to 20. But they couldn't go any lower and still represent what the players said they wanted.
24:04 Speaker 03 And I'm like, why do we keep allowing them to like, blow through what we're asking? Like, we've asked for a response and they keep being like, okay, maybe a little bit later, in a little bit, in a little bit. And I'm like, at what point are we going to put our foot down?
24:20 Speaker 04 That's when Alicia and her team of negotiators started really considering their own hard bargaining tactic. Maybe the biggest, hardest, bargainiest tactic yet. That's after the break.
24:40 Speaker 05 Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. This message comes from Avalara Aviator. Aviator is the agent hub for tax and compliance. If you've listened to enough podcasts, you know a confident answer isn't necessarily a correct one. Sources matter. The same goes for AI, tax, and compliance. Aviator is grounded in 20-plus years of Avalara tax intelligence and delivers source-backed audit-defensible outcomes with human oversight built in. Because the AI said so, won't pass an audit. Visit avalara.com/aviator. This message comes from EasyCater. Making it easy for organizations to order food for meetings and events from favorite restaurants, set up meal programs for their employees,
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25:45 Speaker 04 Sitting at that big rectangular negotiating table in their 5th Avenue hotel, Alicia Clark and Brianna Turner were thinking more and more about a hard bargaining tactic of last resort. One they really didn't want to use, but they had also planned for.
26:01 Speaker 02 See, a few months earlier, Alicia and Brianna and the whole negotiating team had gone to the other 150-plus players in the league and asked them, basically, hey, what do you want to do if they don't give us what we want?
26:14 Speaker 04 They were basically asking the players for their version of what experienced negotiators call BATNA, best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Meaning, what will you do if you don't reach a deal?
26:27 Speaker 02 And what the players said, we walk. They authorize a strike if necessary. And Alicia says this was a long time in the making.
26:36 Speaker 03 Every meeting that we had as player leadership, executive committee, over the course of these last 18 months, it was save your money, tell your teammates to save their money, be sure you're saving your money, be sure you're saving your money. We don't know what's going to come, but we want to be prepared.
26:51 Speaker 04 And so, jump forward to March, six days into their negotiations, they're sitting around the hotel lounge, wrapped in blankets, waiting and waiting for a satisfying response to their proposal.
27:01 Speaker 03 I think the morale was like an F-it type of feeling, to be honest. Like, you're either about to come to this table and negotiate like you should have been, or we're walking. Like, we're not going to continue wasting our time sitting here.
27:16 Speaker 02 That's when Alicia and the players instructed their lawyer.
27:19 Speaker 03 Tell them if they don't come back tonight, we're walking. And that was like the first real time that I was like, let's buckle up.
27:29 Speaker 04 And this time, it was the players who gave the league a hardball deadline. You have till 9:30 PM.
27:37 Speaker 02 And this is a huge deal. It's a nuclear option. The players are going to lose their salaries, potentially lose a whole season.
27:44 Speaker 04 The league, for their part, is going to lose even more money if there's a strike, because there will not be games. And if it goes on long enough, they could fully lose fans, lose momentum. That pie could start getting smaller instead of continuing to grow.
28:00 Speaker 02 9:30 PM rolls around, still no deal. But 20 minutes later, the league says, basically, hold tight. They're formatting and printing something up. At 10:55 PM, they meet.
28:14 Speaker 03 So I hate when like people walk into a room and don't speak.
28:19 Speaker 03 So I said to them, "Good evening."
28:21 Speaker 04 Alicia has notes in her journal.
28:23 Speaker 03 He literally was like, "We're," what did he say? "Contemplating an agreement for the first time for the shared basketball revenue systems."
28:30 Speaker 02 The rep share.
28:31 Speaker 03 I put "big effing deal" about them wanting to move to our system. Proud of this group.
28:36 Speaker 04 For another 24 hours, they went back and forth on details. And then, on March 18th, day eight, at 2 a.m., Alicia and Brianna and the rest of the players are scattered around the conference room, lying in their blankets.
28:49 Speaker 03 I open up my laptop to start watching my show. Not even two minutes later, they come, everybody in the room.
28:54 Speaker 02 Everyone gets to the meeting room now. And we're like, "Oh, that's her serious voice." The league side starts talking.
29:00 Speaker 03 "You guys will have a $7 million cap, starting in 2026. Your shared basketball revenue will be 20%. You know, it'll grow the 20% over the course every year."
29:11 Speaker 04 Alicia and the other players are looking at each other.
29:14 Speaker 03 We were just kind of like, "So does that mean you guys are accepting it? Like, what is..." And they're like, "Yes, we accept this deal. We accept this agreement." And we were like, "Okay, you could just say that." Like, "What?"
29:26 Speaker 02 They had secured their 20% revenue share.
29:29 Speaker 03 "Holy crap. We really just got this done."
29:32 Speaker 04 She recorded her final diary entry from the negotiations.
29:36 Speaker 03 I literally put in like huge things across the bottom. "2:22 a.m., we agreed." Underline exclamation point and put a big heart. Like, that's what I put.
29:47 Speaker 04 "I'm out."
29:48 Speaker 03 Yeah. Like, we did it.
29:52 Speaker 02 Alicia gives a weepy toast to both sides.
29:55 Speaker 03 I'm gonna get emotional because this deal is gonna change the lives of so many players moving forward. And everyone that spent time away from family and friends, you're gonna see the results of this for decades. So, congratulations on an amazing, transformational deal. Thank you for everybody's hard work. And thank you for believing in this league and believing in us as athletes. So cheers.
30:20 Speaker 04 This agreement was a big deal. At the draft, a few weeks later, the WNBA commissioner called it the first comprehensive revenue share model in the history of women's professional sports. And the rev share is just one of the big changes. The players secured housing for everyone and even one-time payments to retired players, so they get a cut, too.
30:42 Speaker 02 And salaries overall are way higher. The lowest-paid player in 2026 will make more than the highest-paid player in 2025.
30:50 Speaker 04 So now, the players' math, built on the math of a Nobel laureate, is embedded in the pages of every WNBA player's contract. Alicia gets to keep her reputation as a winner. And as for Brianna, also known as Hidden Figures.
31:06 Speaker 02 Have you done anything for yourself to celebrate? Like? I got myself a new, I got myself a new financial advisor, a new financier. That's awesome.
31:18 Speaker 02 This episode was produced by me, Emma Peaslee, with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Mary Ann McKeon. It was fact-checked by Vito Emanuel. It was engineered by Jimmy Keely and James Willis. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.
31:31 Speaker 04 Special thanks to Erin Drake, Dave Barry, and Nola Aga. I'm Erica Barris.
31:36 Speaker 02 And I'm Emma Peaslee. This is NPR. Thanks for listening.
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