“It’s getting harder and harder,” Griner informed reporters when requested about the double-duty. “I’m not really looking forward to it, honestly — having to leave my family and go overseas again. Definitely going over this offseason, and then just taking it year by year.”
As is now well-known, Griner’s EuroLeague season got here to a jarring finish on Feb. 17, when the seven-time WNBA all-star and two-time Olympic gold medalist was taken into custody by Russian authorities at an airport exterior Moscow, accused of getting vape cartridges containing cannabis oil in her carry-on bag. She is anticipated to stay detained till not less than May 19, the date of her subsequent court docket listening to, and may spend up to a yr in custody earlier than reaching trial. If convicted, she may face up to 10 years in jail.
On Wednesday, U.S. State Department spokesman Ned Price, following Griner’s first consular go to from U.S. Embassy workers, reported Griner “is doing as well as can be expected under these very difficult circumstances.”
But Griner’s detainment has additionally opened a window into the fraught economics of girls’s skilled basketball and the monetary forces that ship a lot of the WNBA’s high gamers, usually reluctantly, abroad for up to seven months a yr — lured by salaries that in some instances are 4 or 5 occasions what they earn in the WNBA, in addition to luxurious journey perks that not solely don’t exist in the WNBA however are in some instances explicitly disallowed.
And that examination comes at a important inflection level for the WNBA, with the league taking aggressive steps to attempt to hold gamers stateside all yr lengthy, and with participant motion already being influenced by controversial “prioritization” guidelines that may kick in starting in 2023 and that would power a troublesome alternative for gamers: “The W” or their abroad groups.
“It’s something that, if I’m quite honest, I’m not happiest about in our [collective bargaining agreement], because it’s just really limiting what professional women’s basketball players can do in their offseason and their ability to make money overseas,” famous person Breanna Stewart stated about these guidelines throughout a digital news convention with reporters following her re-signing with the Seattle Storm on Feb. 10.
In 2023, veteran gamers who report late to their WNBA crew’s coaching camp due to abroad commitments will probably be fined one % of their wage for every day missed, and they may very well be suspended for the total season in the event that they present up late for the common season. Beginning in 2024, gamers will probably be suspended for the total season in the event that they present up late for coaching camp. Training camp usually begins in April, with the common season starting in early May; some European leagues, in the meantime, function playoffs that may stretch deep into May.
Players with lower than three years of WNBA service, who usually play abroad as a lot for the improvement and further enjoying time as for the cash, are exempt from the prioritization guidelines. There are additionally exceptions for nationwide crew obligation forward of main worldwide tournaments.
Rather than in search of a long-term take care of extra safety, Stewart, 27, selected to signal a one-year contract, largely, she stated, due to the uncertainty over how the prioritization guidelines will play out. The CBA between the league and the Women’s National Basketball Players Association, ratified in 2020, runs by means of 2027.
“You’re cutting off one of my sources of income and not substituting it,” stated Stewart, the 2016 WNBA rookie of the yr and 2018 MVP. “I don’t have a great answer for what’s going to happen. But I think it’s going to affect a lot more players in the WNBA than people realize right now.”
‘Paid like capitalists’
Stewart and Griner, arguably the two most dominant American gamers of the previous decade, had been teammates for 2 seasons with UMMC Ekaterinburg, which is owned by Russian oligarchs and copper-mining magnates and pays the highest salaries in the world: reportedly greater than $1 million every per season for superstars comparable to Stewart and Griner.
That compares to a “supermax” base wage of $228,294 in the WNBA in 2022 (although with bonuses, incentives and offseason advertising and marketing stipends, a handful of elite gamers may earn $500,000 or extra). The WNBA’s common base wage is round $130,000, with the rookie minimal at $60,471 and the veteran minimal at $72,141.
The highest-paid NBA gamers, by comparability, make in extra of $40 million yearly — or greater than two occasions the payroll finances of the total WNBA, which is available in at round $18 million.
That helps explains why many high gamers comparable to Griner, with a restricted variety of prime athletic years by which to earn cash, depend on abroad earnings, even at the expense of relaxation, household time and sometimes private security.
“We had to go to a communist country to get paid like capitalists,” Diana Taurasi, the Mercury’s famous person guard, famously stated in 2019 of her tenure in Russia. In 2015, Taurasi skipped the WNBA season when UMMC Ekaterinburg paid her to relaxation throughout its offseason to keep contemporary for the following season.
Stewart and Griner share the identical agent, Lindsay Kagawa Colas of Wasserman, who was amongst the many brokers, crew executives and gamers contacted for this story who both didn’t return messages or declined to remark. The WNBA, in session with the State Department and crisis-communications consultants accustomed to political-hostage conditions, has requested all league-related personnel not to talk about Griner or points associated to Russia.
At the identical time, the problem of prioritization has develop into an enormous and divisive problem for the WNBA as brokers start negotiating contracts for gamers with abroad groups for a 2022-23 season that begins in the fall, and that at its again finish will bump up in opposition to the 2023 WNBA season and the new penalties.
“I defend the WNBA completely and [league] management is doing a great job of growing the league,” stated veteran agent Mike Cound, whose purchasers consists of seven-time WNBA all-star Candace Dupree and four-time WNBA all-star DeWanna Bonner. “But we’ve got holes in this thing, because suspending the top players doesn’t help the league or the teams or the fans — and it sure as hell doesn’t help the players. Myself and [other agents], we’re already looking for ways around this.”
It’s unclear whether or not Americans could have enjoying alternatives in Russia in the subsequent European season; the aftermath of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which ended the Russian basketball season, had American gamers scrambling to get out of the nation and added layers of complexity and peril to Griner’s predicament. But China, one other nation that has traditionally paid high salaries (together with to Griner in 2013 and 2014), is anticipated to revive its girls’s skilled league after a two-year hiatus due to covid-19.
In the podcast they co-host, “Tea With A and Phee,” WNBA stars A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces and Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx have spoken candidly about the problem of prioritization, at occasions suggesting the guidelines may backfire on the WNBA by forcing gamers, if confronted with the alternative, to hold enjoying abroad and shun the WNBA.
“I feel like that was a bad move,” Collier stated at one level relating to prioritization. “If I’m not making that much in the league … I’m going overseas and having the summer off.” At one other level, she stated, “I think they’re going to be surprised how many people choose not to play in the WNBA.”
Wilson added, “Summers off do sound good. I’m not going to lie … All it takes is one person. If we have one person do it, everyone’s going to start thinking, ‘Hmm, maybe I could do this, too.’”
Collier and Wilson, by means of spokesmen for his or her WNBA groups, declined to remark for this story.
“If there are players who don’t choose to prioritize the WNBA, that’s a risk the owners took when they fought for this,” stated WNBA Commissioner Cathy Englebert of the menace of gamers shunning the league in favor of their abroad groups. “The owners agreed to triple the pay of the top players. In return for that, they want to build a league that’s prioritized.”
Last season, a complete of 55 gamers, together with Griner, reported late to their WNBA groups due to abroad commitments, in accordance to the Hartford Courant, and round 12 missed their groups’ common season openers. Then there are the gamers who are suffering critical accidents abroad — as Stewart as soon as did with a torn Achilles’ tendon whereas enjoying for Russia’s Dynamo Kursk, costing her the total 2019 WNBA season — or who develop into worn down from the year-round schedule.
Agents, in fact, may try to discover abroad groups keen to let gamers go away in April to make it again for the begin of WNBA coaching camp — besides that’s when many leagues are staging their playoffs. Would any crew be keen to let one in every of its finest gamers stroll away proper earlier than the largest video games of the season?
Asked if she may envision a future by which high gamers don’t want to go abroad to earn what they do now, Allison Galer, an agent who represents Chiney Ogwumike and Liz Cambage, amongst others, stated: “I think there’s a pathway to that, with the right infrastructure that the teams and the agents will have to provide. It has to come from everyone proactively looking for ways to make money in the WNBA — and make money in the WNBA offseason. And it has to be proactive because it’s not going to happen by itself.”
The WNBA’s collective bargaining settlement was signed in 2020, one yr after the arrival of Englebert as commissioner and simply earlier than the onset of the covid-19 pandemic that upended the subsequent two seasons. It was extensively hailed at the time as the most progressive in skilled sports activities, that includes not solely important pay raises but additionally a beneficiant maternity go away, a child-care stipend and expense reimbursement for adoption, surrogacy or infertility remedy.
That might have contributed to a drop in the variety of gamers who went abroad this offseason — down from 89 as lately as 2017-18, in accordance to the league, to 70 this yr. (The lingering pandemic might need additionally performed a task.) Among the gamers who stayed again had been superstars comparable to Taurasi, Sue Bird, Candace Parker, Skylar Diggins-Smith, Sabrina Ionescu, Elana Della Donne and Chiney Ogwumike. Some gamers obtained a part of the $1 million fund the league put aside for offseason advertising and marketing offers; others labored as broadcasters or coaches in the NBA; others have by no means performed abroad.
Less mentioned at the time of the CBA’s ratification — maybe as a result of they wouldn’t kick in till a number of years down the highway — had been the prioritization guidelines.
In an interview, Englebert, who earlier than heading the WNBA was the first feminine CEO of Deloitte, characterised the guidelines as a justifiable ask from the league’s house owners in trade for doubling the high base wage and constructing in important raises for all gamers, underscored by a 30 % improve in the league’s wage cap.
“We understand: we don’t want to take away from their options,” Englebert stated. “But we’ve built the only professional women’s league to have lasted 25 years. I think we’ve earned the trust of players.”
The WNBA will play the longest season in its historical past this yr, 36 video games per crew, and Englebert stated she would love to develop the league’s footprint much more, each when it comes to the schedule and an growth from the present 12 groups. But an extended schedule would create much more battle with abroad leagues, which, as she identified, existed lengthy earlier than the WNBA’s debut in 1997.
“Everyone wants to point a finger at the league,” Englebert stated. “I always say, ‘It’s actually the ecosystem around us that’s broken.’”
The WNBA, Englebert stated, is in the midst of a “three- to five-year transformation” by which a part of her mission is to “disrupt the media-rights-fee valuation” to develop the league’s income. The league lately raised $75 million from greater than a dozen traders, which Englebert has stated it will use to increase advertising and marketing initiatives and construct a sustainable enterprise mannequin.
But to try this, she stated, the league wants its stars of their WNBA uniforms all season lengthy, as a substitute of displaying up a number of weeks into the common season.
However, Terri Jackson, government director of the WNBPA, characterised the prioritization guidelines as “unnecessarily strict” and stated the league has not performed sufficient, in the two years since the ratification of the CBA, to make good on its guarantees to work with FIBA, basketball’s worldwide governing physique, and the abroad skilled leagues to match up schedules to keep away from conflicts.
“They were adamant [prioritization] was their top priority,” Jackson stated of the WNBA’s house owners. “And when they introduced it, they were clear they wanted it to start immediately, in 2020. We were like, ‘Absolutely not.’ That did not make sense. We were pretty insistent it had to be phased in, which is where we arrived. …
“Unless the economics change significantly, and without more cooperation with the league and the international leagues thru FIBA, and without greater flexibility, I’m not certain this is [the way] the league and teams will have intended for this to play out.”
Jackson posed a rhetorical question: “In any other industry is it OK to limit the earning capacity of your employees when they’re not scheduled to work, when they’ve fulfilled their commitments to you?”
Englebert, however, turned the question around: The CBA, she said, “doesn’t say you can’t play in the offseason anywhere else. It just says you have to come back on time by the start of training camp. What job did you ever have where you didn’t have to show up on time?”
Acknowledging the gamers accredited the CBA in 2020 in “overwhelming” numbers, Jackson additionally stated, “Do we recognize this is part of the CBA, that we represented it to the players, that we wrestled with it, that we pushed back as hard as we could, and this is where we are? Yes, we recognize that. But as with any contract, it can be amended… I believe [the owners and league] are going to want to have the conversation with us to rethink this.
“We’ll be open to coming back to revisit this,” Jackson added. “I was saying that even when we signed it. I’m not backing out of the deal. It’s more like: just be careful what you ask for.”