The WNBA schedule is going to get worse before it gets better

Last week, the Phoenix Mercury played a back-to-back in Las Vegas and San Francisco. These are rare in the WNBA, but it was enough for All-Star forward Satou Sabally to tell reporters that this back-to-back (the Mercury’s only one of the season) led her to believe the league doesn’t care about player safety.

“I know people love to comment and say, ‘Oh, you guys want to get paid more, you guys need to play all these games,’ but at some point there’s a sports science to it,” Sabally said in part after a loss in Las Vegas. “We’ll play tomorrow and we’re professional. We’ll do it.”

During tense labor negotiations and a strange 2025 for the WNBA in which Caitlin Clark looms over the season without actually playing games, it was hard to take this at face value. Sabally’s follow-up TikTok turned into a jab at the men who don’t want WNBA players to make money. The schedule is certainly going to be a key element of WNBA economics going forward and a part of CBA negotiations, but the factors that will determine the schedule are not solely based on collective bargaining.

Unfortunately for Sabally, growth comes at a cost. New broadcast partners want exclusive windows, the players want more money, and owners want to keep driving revenue upward. All of sports history shows us that those trends tend to join together to lead to more games.

The WNBA this year maxed out the allowable games under the current CBA with 44. Each team played 44 games in 118 days, good for about 2.7 days between games over the course of the season. WNBA players get substantially more rest than their NBA brothers do, on average. This is probably why former NBA journeyman Patrick Beverley quickly shot back at Sabally after her comments amid the back-to-back last week.

Just because WNBA players already have a spread-out calendar doesn’t mean they can’t push for a more coherent schedule. The league makes several strange decisions while booking games. With frequent midday games throughout the year plus its careful avoidance of playing on Mondays, the WNBA sometimes works against itself. Some teams already play in smaller arenas because the bigger ones gave scheduling preference to colleges and concerts, another issue the league cannot fully control.

The W may also be creating artificial boundaries on the front- and backend of its schedule. During an appearance on The Bill Simmons Podcast earlier this year, commissioner Cathy Engelbert predicted the league will soon move to 50 games while pushing back on Simmons’ insistence that the calendar change.

“The question is do we want to go into November and and crossover with the NBA and college basketball?” Engelbert said. “People don’t understand, there’s not much you can do on the front end because we love the college draft, we love the rookies.”

“So we’ll look at the back end and how far can we go and how many NFL and college football Saturdays can we go into and we’ll evaluate all that under the CBA.”

The WNBA schedule is brutal on rookies, but there’s no reason it couldn’t change. There’s no fighting March Madness and the academic calendar. But this year, Paige Bueckers was drafted eight days after she won a national title with Connecticut. After that, she got just more than a month before Opening Night. Typically NBA teams report to camp about three weeks before their first regular-season game. That feels like a place to shave a week, with the season starting the second Friday in May.

Start with the 118-day structure this year, running from May 16 to Sept. 11. Bump up to 50 games in that same span and teams still get 2.4 days between games, still more than the NBA gets. If the season instead started May 8 (the second Friday in May), it would end Thursday, Sept. 3. But ideally, the goal would be to have the W’s typical Sunday postseason tipoff air the week before the NFL season begins.

If the W crunched the season down to 111 days, it would have 2.2 days between games — still more than the NBA. Then, the league would get that Sunday to itself across its network partners like ABC, CBS and NBC before having to tackle the football beast.

New broadcast partners at NBC and Prime Video will pose further challenges. Neither has announced its schedule, but it stands to reason that they could book games on Monday and Thursday nights, respectively, once the NBA season ends. That would give the league a desirable yet limiting problem of having national broadcast partners for every day of the week besides Tuesday. This type of careful scheduling is particularly important in the fall, when the biggest WNBA games are going up against football. The W should aim to have as many playoff games as possible on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Too often, ESPN likes to use the WNBA playoffs as football counter-programming. The league clearly has the leverage to push back on that to maximize its own reach.

Catering to these windows and nationalizing the sport would keep the broadcasters happy but likely result in more of the scheduling quirks that Sabally called out. This is what most leagues face as they grow and answer to more overlords.

The far bigger issues for WNBA players is the overall physical toll of the year. Many still play overseas in the winter and spring to supplement their income; the newly formed Unrivaled league requires less travel and fewer games but still doesn’t qualify as “rest.” Meanwhile, many teams still do not run their own training facilities. Rosters are limited to 12 players and there is a hard cap, making it perilously difficult to put a team on the court some nights. All this, more than the schedule, is a failure of the WNBA to keep its players healthy and at top speed all summer.

Every league plays too many games. Yet none of them cut back. The NFL, stuck at 16 for decades, is suddenly marching toward 18 — and international travel for every team. Perhaps a schedule reduction is a card to be played at some point as pitchers keep blowing out their UCLs and NBA players’ Achilles’ go to mush. But that is not where the WNBA is.

In fact, the WNBA is barely tapping into its potential as a national marquee sports product. The coming broadcast deal and CBA will show how popular it can really be. While that growth occurs, Sabally and her fellow players will have to deal with a schedule that is, despite its flaws, still heavier on rest than the NBA while managing to bake in May rest for rookies and a weeklong All-Star game plus a stretched-out postseason.