Rough Notes: The Wrong Side Of History with David Berri
Confronting the reality of the WNBA's CBA negotiations.
It’s the most unsettled + tense time to be a WNBA fan. Because as of the exact moment of writing this (late on Thursday night or early on Friday morning, depending how you look at it), the WNBA still doesn’t have a new contract for its players. And while the league’s proposals have changed very little over the last few months, the players continue making concessions. On top of that, we have no idea whether there will be a 2026 WNBA season, or what kind of tumult lies ahead.
My stomach has been lurching as the marathon of negotiations continue. For the last few weeks, I’ve failed to put these feelings into words. Perhaps it’s especially confusing now that I’m here in the Bay Area, where the Golden State Valkyries swept through with revelatory force in the summer of 2025.
It’s difficult to accept these unresolved negotiations on a visceral level: how could we go from the absolute peak of growth in the WNBA, from the half-billion estimated value of the Valkyries, the era of the viral StudBudz, of ‘Plesbians,’ of Angel on the Reese’s box, into such a seemingly stagnant labor battle? How is it that the NBA can continue to lowball WNBA players with such impenetrable authority?
When I am in my feelings about WNBA labor negotiations, I often look to the writings of David Berri. He’s an economist who has covered the (W)NBA for a very long time, and his work often anchors me (especially this essay in the New York Times, a must-read, please check it out.) So when I saw a recent post by David on Bluesky, I reached out immediately:
Soon, David and I were on the phone. But the conversation didn’t exactly lift me up. Which, upon reflection, is perhaps exactly the grounding I needed. Here is our conversation:
David Berri: [Reporters] are not calling me, and I know why. It’s because if you quote me or talk about what I’m saying about the NBA in your article, and you work for ESPN or any of the major news sites, the NBA will give you a call and they will tell you, “stop doing that.”
I used to write for Forbes. I wrote for them for about a year and a half. When I would write about the WNBA, the NBA started complaining about it to my editor. They finally said, “OK, new rule, if you write about the WNBA, you have to let the NBA comment…” And I said, “well, I’m not a reporter, so that’s a little weird to have a rule… But I’ll play along.”
So then [the NBA] had this policy that they’re gonna pay the top player from the G League [the NBA’s development league] $125,000 a year. And I knew at the time that top WNBA players were paid less than that. I also knew that the G League had no attendance and was never was going to get attendance.
So I contacted this NBA person and I asked them a simple question: “The G League salary, is that a cost to you, or do you think that’s an investment of some kind?” And he wrote back, “we’re investing in the G League.” And then he sent me a bunch of financial stuff about the G League, and I’m like, “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask you that. I asked you this question, and you got a chance to comment.” So then I wrote the article saying: “See, the G League is an investment to them, but the WNBA is a cost. And that’s the problem.” And they went ballistic.
They said: “That’s not fair! We sent you a bunch of other stuff too!” And I said: “No. I asked you a question and you answered it.” And my editor got mad at me and said that I didn’t report everything [the NBA] said… so I left Forbes.
Since then, it has been the case that reporters have been reluctant to talk to me about the WNBA because I don’t think the NBA likes it.
Rough Notes: What is the NBA so badly trying to protect?
David Berri: The NBA has a story that they have been telling for 40, 50, 60 years — and it’s that the NBA doesn’t make any money. The WNBA doesn’t make any money. “We can’t pay the players. We have no money. There’s no money in this.”
And economists — not only me but other economists — have gone through and looked at what they’re arguing and said, “well, that doesn’t make sense. What you’re saying does not add up.”
I wrote about this in one of my recent articles — that back in 1983, the NBA claimed they lost $15 to $20 million. That’s what they said they’re losing per year on a league that had $135 million in revenue. So it’s a substantial loss. That’s the claim. And they told the Washington Post: “we are bleeding red ink, and there are gonna be franchises that are going to go out of business because of what the players are demanding in salaries.”
Well, they eventually made a deal with players and the players agreed to go from 57% of revenue to 53% of revenue, which is 4%. And if you do the math, it’s $135 million in revenue and you gave up 4% - that’s not $20 million, that’s about $5 million. You said you’re losing $20 million and you made a deal that only gave you $5 million back? What happened to the $15 million? You should still be bleeding red! You should see franchises fold. You should be going out of business. But that’s not their reaction. They said, “we’re thrilled with this.” How can you be thrilled? Your math says you shouldn’t be thrilled. So I think you’re lying. I think you were lying the whole damn time.
Their attendance had gone from 7,000 per game in 1970 to around 11,000 per game in 1983. Their audience was growing. They were doing quite well, but they’re like, “No, we’re dying.” You’re not dying - you’re lying. Right? But it worked, and the players took a pay cut, and [the NBA] did it again in 2011, again said they were losing money. And again that didn’t make sense. Again, it worked. Players took a pay cut.
There’s a story that people tell that you’re supposed to be honest… but that isn’t how the world works. They do TV shows where they have people do disgusting things for like a million dollars, and people do that. So I tell students, “would you be willing to lie for a million dollars? Would you lie for $500 million? For $500 million I bet you could look into a camera and say anything and no one would be able to tell that you’re lying because it’s for $500 million dollars.”
Rough Notes: [okay, actually I didn’t even have a question at this point, I was just listening, ‘cuz David was on a roll.]
David Berri: I don’t think the NBA really cares if the women play… If the WNBA vanished, I don’t think Adam Silver would lose any sleep over that. If the NBA vanished, I think Adam Silver would crawl into a ball and cry himself to sleep. But the WNBA, I don’t think he has much affection for this in the slightest.
NBA owners own 60-70% of the WNBA. There’s 30 NBA owners. I think there’s a substantial number of NBA owners who don’t care. There are other NBA owners who do care. But they’re in the minority… I just get the sense that right now, [NBA owners] are like, “I don’t wanna. I don’t care enough to do that.”
I get irritated by people online demanding the women negotiate better. You can’t negotiate with someone who doesn’t care whether they make a deal or not. There’s no way that works.
I think a lot of people make a mistake in treating sports like any other business. This is not a cardboard factory. In order for sports to work, the owner has to have some emotional attachment to it because these are fabulously wealthy people. The amount of money the sports make for them isn’t enough for them to give a damn because they have so much money already. They’re doing it because they like sports. But WNBA owners don’t all like WNBA, which makes it a very unusual bargaining situation, opposed to every other men’s sport where the owners do care.
You can’t negotiate with something that doesn’t care. You don’t have any leverage. So that’s what I think is where we’re kind of at.
Rough Notes: So what are the mechanisms that allow for this? Is it just like a general societal misogyny that allows this lack of caring from the NBA side to persist?
David Berri: Yeah, I’m a big believer that the explanation for all gender disparities is discrimination. A lot of economists, especially male economists, will grasp at any other explanation other than what seems to me the most obvious one. Like: women are risk-averse, or some other nonsense. It’s like, no: it’s discrimination. Men don’t wanna deal with women. They don’t wanna make a deal with them. And so that’s the issue.
That’s a really recurring theme in the economics literature: you have mostly males who will say that the gender wage gap doesn’t exist because of discrimination, it’s women who make other choices or something like that. They’re like, “I don’t understand how it’s possible. Why can’t the women just negotiate it?”
Society just has changed a lot in the last 50 years, but you still have the people who are in a time capsule. They’re still in that world. They haven’t joined us yet. So when you’re like “why can’t you pick up on the fact that women’s sports and men’s sports are equal [in value]?” And it’s like: “Well, I don’t think women and men are equal [in value.]” So therefore they can’t wrap their brain around it.
Rough Notes: [Laughing] But from the perspective of queer WNBA fandom — aka a lot of my readership — it’s kind of mind-boggling that we still live in a world in which what these men with power care about, or don’t care about, is still in a lot of ways dictating these negotiations. Like why can’t we just demand that they have to care based on the fact of our presence?
David Berri: Well, the thing is, according to the NBA’s own numbers, [the WNBA] will have a billion dollars in revenue by 2030. And it’s just gonna keep growing after that. When you get to a point where WNBA revenue is $5 billion, $10 billion — and the league is worth $100 billion? At that point, the women have bargaining power because now it’s too much money for you to say no to it. But the problem is that right now, it’s not big enough to do that.
If you go back to the player strikes on the men’s side back in the ‘70s and ‘80s, those men had bargaining power, not just because the owners loved the men’s sports, but also because those male owners were just millionaires. They were rich, but they’re just millionaires — so the team was kind of expensive to them. But now you have [NBA] teams that are owned by billionaires, and the size of the WNBA franchises are equivalent to what was in existence in the ‘70s and ‘80s on the men’s side… so that’s what the women are facing. They’re facing these incredibly fabulously wealthy owners, and the WNBA is still pretty small.
I do think that if you were to sit down with some of these owners, you’d find that the thought of forcing the women come to them and accept their deal makes them extraordinarily happy. I think that makes them extremely happy. They were laughing at [the players] when they said “Pay Us What You Owe Us.” They thought that was funny. Like this one guy, who used to be the president of the Marlins, he’s been doing talk shows —
Rough Notes: Oh yeah, that guy.
David Berri: Yeah, he thinks it’s funny: “I’m not gonna tell you what I owe you because I don’t know. I don’t owe you anything.” But you only don’t owe them anything if you don’t care whether it exists or not.
You know, I’ve thought from the beginning that the only thing that the women can do is to try and get the public on their side as much as they can. That’s really hard. The NBA has the media on their side, so it’s really hard to communicate with the public. It’s difficult. You’re fighting against a lot of history here. And a lot of attitude. But [WNBA players] have made a tremendous amount of progress compared to where they started.
Ultimately, in 20-30 years, I believe the women who are doing this fight are gonna look amazingly great, and the men who have been resisting this are gonna look very stupid… People are gonna say: “Hey, it took you this long to pay the women what you’re paying the men, and you made up a bunch of stories for why you weren’t doing that?” People are gonna look back and go, “well, you clearly were lying. You clearly were making that up.”
In the meantime, it’s very frustrating! It’s frustrating that we have to keep having these conversations… it’s all very insulting. The [offers from the league] have become almost comical.
I do think there might be value in having a short strike. Do as much of a media blitz as you can, emphasize as much as you can the disparity, and then make it so that internally you reach an agreement.
Right now, I think you make this deal as best you can, but it’s not permanent. It’s not the only deal you’re ever gonna make. In a few years there’ll be another. Another opportunity to do this again — the league will keep getting bigger and bigger, and the other voices in the room that believe in this product will speak up more. NBA owners and WNBA owners are not united. And that you don’t hear about that, right?
So there you have it. The ongoing CBA negotiations feel so sucky precisely for the same reason that women’s basketball is so exciting — because women’s basketball players have dared to demand their worth. Once again, this means that both players & fans are outpacing the institutions that mediate the sport’s progress (& stagnation.) And given the fact that the Players’ Association has dropped their proposal for shared revenue from 40% (in 2025) to 26% (by February of 2026), they’re simply not going to get the deal they deserve this time around. The fight is far from over.
Ultimately, recalibrating inequities that have plagued women’s basketball for decades is a disruption that extends far beyond a single CBA negotiation. It requires taking on some of the most conservative, patriarchal power structures that still have a hold on our society. And we have to sit with the real discomfort that changing this is still incomplete.
The silver lining: if you’re a women’s basketball fan, you’re learning the depth of this struggle. Our future begs for radical collectivity, historical investigation (I’m on it!) and a continued, persistent untangling of the myth that women’s basketball doesn’t matter. That, as we all know, is the wrong side of history. But we will have to force the issue — and it will be painful.
Of course, this is also why we gotta keep believing…
Thank you, I love that you interviewed Berri! I learned from you (and others) how the WNBA was founded not for immediate profit, but partly to destroy the new American Basketball League. The ABL proved there was an audience and threatened to break the NBA’s monopoly on US pro basketball. Time passes… and by the next CBA negotiation, the WNBA will be big enough that owners will be hurt immediately by a strike.
Which leaves the current negotiation… the NBA isn’t offering a fair deal because they can lie about numbers, but also because the players probably don’t have the power to force a better deal through strike action. The WNBA offer is a big enough raise that I think some kind of deal will get made and, as Berri and you say, that will set up the next negotiation where the players will be stronger and better organized and the WNBA will have more to lose.
David is now the second prominent author I know of who was black balled by the NBA for writing about inconvenient topics. The other was Henry Abbott who dared ask questions about PEDs. Who's next?