The WNBA has exploded in popularity during the last two years. Most give credit to star players like Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and the Dallas Wings’ Paige Bueckers.
But with that additional exposure comes more scrutiny of head coaches, and even pushback against the league from some players over compensation.
Ben Pickman covers the WNBA and women’s college basketball for The Athletic. He says the focus on coaches has led to the somewhat surprising firing of Dallas’ head coach. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.
This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:
Texas Standard: Let’s start with the collective bargaining agreement, or CBA. Players opted out of the current CBA at the end of the 2024 season, and they’ve spent the time since then trying to negotiate a new deal. But that hasn’t happened yet.
What are the players asking for that the league has not agreed to?
Ben Pickman: Yeah, this is a pretty contentious moment in this negotiation because the current agreement expires at the end of next week, Oct. 31. And so they’ve been talking this whole time about a number of issues, but it has centered around a revised salary structure and revenue-sharing system.
And so the players want more money, and the league is saying “we will pay you more money,” but the players want a different share of the business. They want, in essence, revenue to be reallocated in a different manner from which it currently is.
And that is a big sticking point because owners very much want to keep the money that they are generating and will continue to generate, and players are saying, “we want a bigger share of that pie.”
Well, do you get a sense that players and league officials can agree on some things and find their way to a compromise?
I think in the end, there is an expectation that there will be an agreement that is eventually reached.
Will that agreement come next week? I would not be so sure about that. These two sides seem very far apart and the last month has been a contentious one, certainly, with Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier even calling out WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert, saying that the WNBA has the worst leadership in the world. It was a standout moment.
And frankly, this negotiation and one of the standout moments in WNBA history, a seminal moment, for having a star player call out a commissioner in a league office. It speaks to the heightened tensions that the two sides feel right now.
Let’s talk about that, Commissioner Cathy Engelbert. Well, there have been calls for her to step down or be fired. Well, what is the latest?
There’s no real update on her status right now. I think both sides seem set on trying to work through negotiation and then we’ll kind of see what happens from there.
We should say the WNBA has grown a ton in Cathy Engelbert’s six-year tenure. I mean, revenue is up, attendance sets records, TV ratings – again, records. It’s hard to find a category in which the WNBA is not experiencing explosive growth.
Where there is that tension, though, is the pushback of how much is that a credit to Engelbert and people at the league office, and how much of that is a reflection of the players and the star players that are entering the league and the changing media environment, as well.
It’s hard to separate all these factors, obviously. There’s no one right or wrong answer, but that’s where you get this kind of murky middle, and that’s why you get this kind of very tense negotiation that is ongoing.
You mentioned the deadline is quickly approaching for the negotiations. It’s Oct. 31. Do you think we’ll get a deal? And if not, what happens with the draft for expansion teams coming up? Plus, there’s the regular draft for college players.
Yeah, I don’t expect a deal to be signed by Oct. 31. And I think that is kind of the general expectation from a lot of different parties and sides.
There’s a number of different ways that this could play out. One of the potential short-term options is just an extension, which is basically a public signaling that they are going to continue to negotiate, that they do want to actively make progress. And in that scenario – and we saw that scenario in the 2020 negotiation – everything just kind of proceeds as normal.
Players can still enter the facility, receive medical treatment from team personnel. They can do that in the short-term even without a new agreement signed.
If they don’t reach an agreement by 10/31 and they don’t reach an extension, then we start to see different options play out. There would be some kind of work stoppage. But again, we’re still a long way away from games being missed when the season begins in May of 2026.
OK, let’s talk about the search for new head coaches and focus on the Dallas Wings. They’ve parted ways with Chris Koclanes after going 10-34 in his first and only season. Was his dismissal a surprise?
It was a little bit of a surprise, mostly because of how he was hired in the first place. And that is because general manager Curt Miller, who was in his first year of the GM of the Wings last year, Chris Koclanes is one of his protegés. And they have long worked together for seven or eight seasons back at multiple jobs. He worked with Curt Miller when he was a coach in both the Connecticut Sun and Dallas Wings.
So they have a huge significant familiarity with each other. And so that’s part of why this was so surprising. And Chris was a first-year head coach. And so normally you see first-year head coaches be afforded opportunities to learn, to grow, to develop. And we did not see that in this situation because as you mentioned, after one year, Chris was let go.
Well what do you know about who the Wings are looking at for a replacement?
Yeah, so if they went with a first-time head coach in hiring Chris Koclanes, right now it seems like experience is what they’re looking at, whether that is experienced coaches who have WNBA head coaching experience, NBA or NBA G League head coaches, or college head coaching experience. So this has kind of been a trend this cycle as different teams around the league look for candidates.
Last year there was a big movement of first-timers getting head coach jobs, getting this kind of newfound experience. And right now we’re seeing a little bit of a zag back where a number of teams, including the Dallas Wings, seem to be looking for more or candidates with more experience.
And we’ll see how that turns out. The Dallas Wings job has changed a lot over the last year.
