As with most public tension between the league and its players in the past several months, revenue sharing was at the center of everything. Let’s unpack this latest spat and what it means in the context of negotiations.

Silver’s revenue share comments

On Tuesday, Oct. 21, Silver did a sit-down interview on NBC’s “The Today Show” about the start of the 2025-26 NBA season. As the interview with Craig Melvin would down, Melvin asked Silver whether he believed players should receive a larger share of revenue in the next CBA, citing the 9% figure that has been widely referenced in public debate of the topic.

Silver began his answer with a direct answer of “yes”, which is in line with what the WNBPA is fighting for. What raised alarms for the union, however, was how Silver continued his answer.

Following that brief affirmation that players should receive a higher share of total revenue, Silver pushed back on framing it strictly in those terms. “I think share isn’t the right way to look at it, because there’s so much more revenue in the NBA,” Silver continued.

When Melvin interjected to ask how people should view it, if not revenue share, Silver recommended “absolute numbers” as the basis for assessing the negotiations, noting that the players will deserve to make more and will end up making significantly more in the next CBA — a factual point but a deflection nonetheless.

The bookends of Silver’s answers — that revenue share should be higher than 9%, and the players deserve the raises they will receive — are something both sides would agree with, particularly on the raise front.

It doesn’t take a math whiz to see the incoming surge in TV revenue — which will approximately quadruple beginning next season — and conclude that the players deserve “a big increase,” as Silver puts it. The few hard numbers the league has offered players that have been reported are roughly in line with the growth in TV money: a starting point of around $850,000 for supermax contracts and $300,000 for minimum contracts, first reported by Annie Costabile at Front Office Sports. That’s up from $249,244 for supermax contracts and $70,103 for the lowest-salaried minimum contracts.

But the friction here lies in the details of what that guaranteed raise looks like and the mechanisms for continuing to align the league’s finances with compensation across the life of the next CBA. The WNBPA did not appreciate Silver maintaining the party line about focusing on absolute numbers rather than relative share.

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A poor choice of words

Individual players and statements from the WNBPA have made it very clear for quite some time that they view a salary cap tied directly to league revenue as a necessity. Meanwhile, recent reports say the league has not flinched from its position that revenue sharing should be a stand-alone system, not tied to the salary cap.

In a statement to The Athletic, WNBPA executive director Terri Jackson took issue with the insistence on downplaying revenue share and including it in the salary cap, the central pillar of the union’s platform in negotiations.

“You know they know it’s bad when the best they say they can do is more of the same,” Jackson said. “A fixed salary system and a separate revenue-sharing plan that only includes a piece of a piece of the pie, and pays themselves back first.”

In the statement, Jackson also made multiple references to the word “uncapped”, alleging that the league has misleadingly positioned its latest proposals as having uncapped revenue-sharing potential. Without knowing the actual mechanisms and formula for revenue sharing that the league has proposed, it is impossible to prove or disprove that allegation with absolute certainty.

However, using the 2020 CBA as a comparison casts doubt on such a claim. As we have broken down before here at The IX, the current CBA’s revenue-sharing mechanisms are, in fact, uncapped, as players would receive 35% of any dollar above the cumulative revenue targets with no upper limit.

Jackson’s imprecise choice of words has proven to be an unforced error for the union. More effective messaging could have highlighted the pitfalls of the current CBA’s system, which allows for deeply adverse outcomes for players and their compensation.

For example, consider a scenario in which the COVID-19 pandemic does not happen and revenue exactly meets each season’s targets for six straight years. By the end of 2025, league revenue would have tripled from the 2019 starting point. In that scenario, the salary cap rises 3% each season for a total of 19% from 2020 to 2026, but the players would not receive a penny of revenue sharing to show for it.

So while there is indeed no upper limit to the current system, it was designed with the risk of falling even further behind in revenue sharing.

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League office capitalizes on misstep

Instead, the use of the word uncapped became a central piece of a WNBA statement that refuted that point.

“It is incorrect and surprising that the Players Association is claiming that the WNBA has not offered an uncapped revenue sharing model that is directly tied to the league’s performance,” the statement reads. “The comprehensive proposals we have made to the players include a revenue sharing component that would result in the players’ compensation increasing as league revenue increases — without any cap on the upside.”

Had Jackson centered the complaint around a perceived deception of what the proposal would actually mean for player compensation, the league would not have had the same footing to plainly — and likely correctly — decry it as incorrect. 

Without the misstep, the league may also not have gone as far with a second claim in the statement — or have felt the need to issue the statement at all.

“While we have delivered comprehensive proposals that seek an agreement that will benefit all,” the statement continued, “the Players Association has yet to offer a viable economic proposal and has repeatedly refused to engage in any meaningful way on many of our proposal terms.”

That the league claims the PA’s proposals are not even “viable” financially is perhaps the strongest and most pointed public rebuke of the players to emerge in these negotiations.

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Where do negotiations go from here?

In some ways, it’s a repeat of the news cycle Collier ignited with her statement at Lynx exit interviews in late September. But while this spat was less personal, it’s also coming much closer to the Oct. 31 expiration of the CBA. There’s a chance that deadline can be worked around, extended or even just simply ignored for a while. But with just one week to go until that date, tensions are clearly rising and the gap between parties isn’t appearing to get any smaller.

And there’s clearly a lot of mistrust from the players towards the league. In an interview with Forbes over the summer, WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike accused the league of “a lack of transparency” about its financials and said the WNBPA goes off of “educated estimations” on how much revenue the league makes.

Later in the summer, a league spokesperson refuted any accusation about the lack of transparency to The IX Basketball: “We annually provide the WNBPA with audited financial statements and records for the league, so there is full transparency on whether revenue sharing is triggered.”

But what revenue should and shouldn’t be considered is, itself, up for debate. According to Costabile, the league’s current proposal only accounts for league office revenue and not any revenue generated by individual teams. As Jackson’s statement said, the union views that as “a piece of a piece of the pie.”

In spite of all of the protracted negotiations and seeming hostility, there is also reason to be optimistic, and it is tied to the very source of this saga. After all, the reason there is so much fervent debate about how to allocate revenue is that there is more revenue than ever before.

When appropriately tuned, either system can yield advantageous results for either side of the negotiations. That’s the nice thing about talks like this, where the subject being fought over is basically just an algebraic equation. Between the two proposals lies an endless combination of inputs, and plenty of opportunity for modifications on top of them. 

The players could sacrifice some money up front in exchange for elevating percentages of direct revenue over the course of the agreement. The owners could significantly raise their salary cap figures to a point where the players can stomach the risk of a regressing revenue share. Or the owners could tune their current system to eliminate that risk entirely, if they haven’t already.

There has never been more room to maneuver in negotiations. But with so much at stake for both sides, finding a middle ground is sure sounding a lot easier said than done.