The players have made it clear they will not budge on wanting to address revenue sharing and salary in the next CBA, which they hope is “transformational.”
“The biggest thing that’s the holdup right now is we want more salary, we want bigger salary and that type of thing, but we want to talk about the percentages and the revenue share,” WNBPA vice president Breanna Stewart said on Friday. “Based on their most recent proposal, we just aren’t able to get to a place where we’re actually even talking about the same thing.”
The CBA negotiations have been a heavy point of contention at All-Star Weekend. The league and players’ association met in person for the first time since December in a meeting the players called “a missed opportunity” to make real progress in their discussions.
“We were disappointed for sure,” WNBPA vice president Napheesa Collier said on Friday. “What they came back with was just nowhere near what we asked for or even in the same conversation.”
More than 40 players attended Thursday’s meeting, an unprecedented number for a CBA negotiation.
During her news conference Saturday, league commissioner Cathy Engelbert said she loved to see so many players come to the meeting and show interest in the negotiations.
For the players, their presence was a way of showing the league that “we mean business and we are going to demand everything, and we’re going to keep going until we get what’s right,” Las Vegas forward A’ja Wilson said.
“This was a very historical way for players to show up, and they understood how big the moment was,” union president Nneka Ogwumike said. “We were hoping perhaps more would be yielded given the engagement. I don’t anticipate us having another meeting with that many players involved.”
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