Paige Bueckers, the superstar guard who, in early April, led the storied UConn Huskies women’s basketball team to their twelfth national championship, had a made-for-TV spring. Bueckers is a smooth player. In the fluidity of her shots, the calm precision of the way she picks apart opposing defenses, there’s an ease to her game. It can be frustrating to see her pass up scoring opportunities, to defer when we might want her to attack. But once she gets going, she’s almost impossible to stop. When she celebrates, she smirks, she laughs, she throws off a Michael Jordan–esque shrug. That was easy.
But this spring, as she knifed her way through the NCAA tournament, it was plain to see how hard she was working to win. She dropped 34 points to obliterate South Dakota State in her final home game in front of legions of adoring fans in Storrs, Connecticut. She transcended our mortal coil in order to score an outlandish 19 points in seven minutes to close out the Sweet 16 regional semifinals. She tearfully embraced coach Geno Auriemma, burying her iconic side-braids into his suit jacket, as she left the court, moments before hoisting the championship trophy.
And, of course, she was incredibly visible on TV off the court, as well. Bueckers started as a freshman at UConn shortly before the Supreme Court opened the way for college players to sign name, image, and likeness deals. For the first time, college players were able to benefit from everything from jersey sales to the kind of lucrative endorsement agreements previously accessible only to pros. In 2024, Bueckers was one of the highest-earning female athletes in college sports, which meant that, whenever a commercial break interrupted one of her dominant performances, viewers were more than likely to see her pop right back up in any of several Nike or Gatorade ads that featured her this year.
Despite all this, Bueckers’s most significant TV moment was still to come. A few weeks after March Madness wrapped up, Bueckers entered the WNBA Draft as the consensus number one pick. And, indeed, live on TV on April 14, Bueckers was selected first overall by the Dallas Wings. The event was watched by some 1.25 million viewers, the second-highest viewership in WNBA draft history. But it wasn’t the draft itself that defined Bueckers’s spectacular spring; it was something she did the night before.
On April 13, ESPN reported that Bueckers would sign a three-year contract with Unrivaled, the three-on-three women’s basketball league that just wrapped up its inaugural season this spring (during the WNBA’s offseason). The real news wasn’t that Bueckers signed—this was a foregone conclusion, since she’d acquired an ownership stake in the league last year—but the terms and timing of her contract. The second sentence of ESPN’s report, written by Kendra Andrews, reads: “Bueckers’ first-year salary for the 10-week Unrivaled season will exceed what she would make in four years of her WNBA rookie contract, sources said.” The announcement wasn’t about basketball; it was about power.
This made-for-TV moment belonged as much to members of the WNBA Players’ Association, who have been negotiating since last fall to revise the league’s collective bargaining agreement, as it did to Paige Bueckers. Announcing Bueckers’s contract right before the league’s biggest night was a flex that foregrounded both her emerging stardom and the labor conditions of women’s basketball at a pivotal moment. Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier—the founders of Unrivaled, who also happen to be vice presidents of the WNBA players association—were capitalizing on the very popularity of their league to leverage a better deal. For the next 24 hours, this shocking pay disparity was a part of practically every news hit or panel discussion about the WNBA. It was perfectly choreographed drama.
The WNBA is bigger than it’s ever been on TV. The 2024 season represented a 155 percent gain in viewership from the previous year, and the league’s all-star game and finals set records as well. According to the sportswriter Frankie de la Cretaz, this viewership spike came in tandem with a massive increase in the quality of the games as an on-screen product. “In the past, you would never have seen a WNBA playoff game throw to a SportsCenter interview, but that happened consistently last season,” de la Cretaz told me. More accessible coverage that dives into the nuts and bolts of the game has helped fans “invest in and understand what they’re watching.” The WNBA is finally in the national spotlight, and the league is taking advantage.
But it’s not just the exciting play and the superstar talent on the court. In the midst of a small-screen summer that features Andor’s working-class revolution, the union-busting robber baron heroes of The Gilded Age, and even the jail-broken android protagonist of Murderbot, the WNBA will be the best show about labor on television.
This year’s season opener was also Paige Bueckers’s debut. Her team, the Dallas Wings, played the Minnesota Lynx, who were last year’s championship runners-up. And while Bueckers showed off some of the tricks that made her the number one pick—an off-balance jumper, a couple of nifty passes, some hustle plays—it quickly became apparent that she was by no means the main character on the floor. Some viewers might have followed Bueckers here from her college run, but her rising star was almost immediately eclipsed by the charismatic ensemble of talent out there on the WNBA floor with her for the first time. Take her teammate DiJonai Carrington, with her trademark long, bleached blond ponytail and a hand in the face of every opponent. There’s something entrancing about watching a basketball player who has decided they are simply going to steal the ball from the other team. They become untethered, ravenous in pursuit. As the minutes of the first half wound down, the Wings were gaining momentum, but they couldn’t seem to tie up the game, missing out on two opportunities in a row. With a mere two seconds and change left on the clock, the Lynx inbounded the ball, and Carrington lunged, as if spring-loaded. She snagged the ball and wrapped it around to a teammate to tie the game. I leaped out of my seat.
But Carrington was not in control for long, as the Lynx feature a pair of offensive assassins who took over promptly in the second half. Once she sees a few jumpers go in, the Lynx’s Courtney Williams is the kind of player who seems like she might never miss again. While the Wings kept the game close for a while, Williams went on a tear, sinking three-pointer after three-pointer, not just running up the score but sapping the Wings of any hope of recovery. Two months earlier, Bueckers was demoralizing opponents with torrents of scoring; now she was on the other side.
But Williams doesn’t work alone. Part of what makes her so effective is the on-court partnership she has with one of the league’s best players, Napheesa Collier. Collier does not have the flexing flash of last year’s MVP A’ja Wilson or the effortless cool of last year’s champion, Breanna Stewart. Collier, instead, is composed, quiet, even professional on the floor. While her partner Williams scores in thrilling bunches, Collier works with subtle, sustained exactitude. It’s how she works off the court, too.
For professional athletes, WNBA players do not make all that much money. For instance, Bueckers’s year-one salary as the number one pick will start at just under $79,000; the highest paid players in the WNBA each will earn around $249,000 in 2025. Compare that with the NBA, where the number one pick in the draft will earn a base salary of around $15.6 million next year, and the highest-paid player—Steph Curry—earned almost $56 million this year. This pay disparity between the leagues makes some sense, as the WNBA generates significantly less revenue than the NBA. But, as Los Angeles Sparks star and first vice president of the players association Kelsey Plum has said—and players have repeatedly affirmed—“We’re not asking to get paid what the men get paid. We’re asking to get paid the same percentage of revenue shared.” This is the real disparity. Under the NBA’s current agreement, players receive up to 51 percent of all revenue generated by the league. In the WNBA, players receive 50 percent of what’s called incremental revenue, or revenue earned by the league after exceeding league-defined targets that themselves grow substantially every year. The result is that, in 2025, players will receive just around 20 percent of league revenue. That, among other things, is what the players association is trying to change.
So, when Collier and Stewart launched Unrivaled this past January, it was both a showcase of the league’s deep roster of electric talent and a declaration of worth. The league’s first season was designed largely as a TV spectacle. All games were played in a single, 850-seat arena in Miami; aired exclusively on Fridays, Saturdays, and Mondays; broadcast on TNT and TruTV; and streamed live on the Max app. And they were an absolute blast. Three on three is a loose, intimate style of basketball—the kind of playground ball we rarely get to see high-level star athletes play—and, for that reason, it’s an incredible theater for observing the personalities of its players. Viewing close-up as defenders lock into a stance or scorers go on a heater, we learn how to watch the game, who these people are, what they are like.
One of the great advantages of the small scale of Unrivaled was the opportunity for viewers to close-read players’ faces, gestures, even social relationships. Like seeing a band at a small club show rather than in a giant arena, the league offered a different kind of access. Unrivaled’s signature event, in fact, was a leaguewide one-on-one tournament. Napheesa Collier won it.
But Unrivaled isn’t just about getting to know the players better. It’s also political. It does not seem to be a coincidence that Unrivaled’s average salary—$220,000—is right around the WNBA’s maximum base salary. Prior to Unrivaled, the only meaningful option for players to supplement their salaries—outside of endorsements—was to play in an overseas professional league during the WNBA offseason. Unrivaled, which plans to increase its roster of 36 players, has positioned itself as a domestic alternative, a much-needed resource for players, a celebration of WNBA talent, and an implicit critique of WNBA business.
Negotiations over the collective bargaining agreement will hang over this entire WNBA season. The players association opted out of the current CBA last fall; Unrivaled put the pay equity disparity front and center; and Bueckers, the league’s newest ensemble character, dunked it home in April. For all the on-court dramas this year—rivalry, revenge, the rise of new stars and the decline of fading talent—the biggest storyline is that of a league with more money and more attention than it’s ever had deciding how much its players are worth. This WNBA season is about value.
I came to the WNBA the same way a lot of people like me—white men—have: recently, through Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, and through my daughter. We got hooked on the two players as they battled it out in the 2023 NCAA finals. Clark, as you may have heard, is a pugnacious competitor, a player with a generational talent for outside shooting, and a generational temper as well. Her on-court passion galvanized thousands of new—especially young—fans, at the same time that it made her a nuisance to her opponents. One of those opponents in college was Angel Reese. Reese is a brilliant player on both ends, already one of the best rebounders in the WNBA after her rookie season, a seemingly natural-born celebrity off the court, and she is as fiery an on-court presence as Clark. When the two were drafted together in 2024, their adoring fans came along with them.
According to The Wall Street Journal, much of the league’s growth last season was spread among young viewers—especially young girls—male viewers, and white viewers. This is a huge shift. The league, which is majority Black and features numerous out gay players, has long been sustained, as de la Cretaz told me, by “the longtime queer and Black fans that have been a staple of supporting the league before anyone else did.” The WNBA’s massive explosion in popularity after last year’s draft not only altered the racial demographics of the fan base but also drew interest from spectators with little to no knowledge of the league itself. They could learn about it—as many of us have—or they could, defiantly, not.
So all of a sudden, right-wing commentators like Matt Walsh were weighing in, as were sitting congresspeople and cable news pundits. The league’s entry into the national media environment was thus often focused on the perceived, and racialized, mistreatment of Clark by her peers. Every time Clark received a hard foul, every time she exchanged words with Reese, every time a veteran player expressed skepticism about her immediate dominance of the league, the incident would receive Culture War–style news coverage. Clark herself worked to downplay these dynamics, and has spoken about the implicit and explicit racism of the way fans and media members have positioned her as a victim of a jealous and violent league. “I know where this league comes from,” she recently told David Letterman, “a lot of Black women that grew up making this league what it is.” Clark isn’t the first white player to make a statement like this, but the fact that she needed to say it suggests that, as the league scales up in popularity, it’s now subject to the toxic tides that characterize seemingly everything else in popular culture.
As the WNBA gains attention, it will evolve. It will evolve in the way it treats and compensates its players, either living up to the challenge of player-owned leagues like Unrivaled or continuing to undervalue their talent. It will evolve as new players like Clark and Reese and Bueckers bring new viewers who might not yet know what to expect from the WNBA. It will evolve, as it always has, to be both a thrilling sports league and a medium for rendering visible issues around gender equity and racial equity. It has the possibility, in this summer of regression and fear and the collapse of so many different infrastructures of social justice, of being a hopeful story. Can a league be built around the mutual recognition of the value of women’s labor and do right by itself? Can it quiet the bigoted, bilious voices that threaten to drown out its expressions of joy and power? Can it survive its own growing popularity? Everyone is watching the WNBA.
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