@wagesofwins
Professor of Economics at Southern Utah University. The latest book is Slaying the Trolls. Also author/co-author of The Wages of Wins Stumbling on Wins https://www.davidberri.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Slaying-Trolls-Wrong-About-Sports/dp/B0D33VK9SN/
Got into basketball blogging in 2009 thanks to @wagesofwins.bsky.social And having almost 20 years doing it, I do have to chuckle that "Tanking" and "Flopping" come up so often as "ruining the league", which they'd been doing for 20 years before I started, and have been doing so for 20 years since!
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We’re hosting a livestream ahead of the Unrivaled championship tonight.
Tap in at 9:15 p.m. ET for the pregame CBA chat with SPECIAL GUEST @wagesofwins.bsky.social, stay for live game commentary from @elindsay08.bsky.social & @busyxb.bsky.social
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Final note...
I have written about the WNBA for years. Published books, academic articles, etc...
I am also interviewed about all sorts of sports issues by the media constantly.
But on this issue, very few reporters have called me.
So, I have tried to tell the story myself.
What the NBA is doing now is directly from their historical playbook.
The NBA makes up a story about losses.
They demand the players take less.
The media takes the NBA's side.
Players eventually cave.
The NBA does this because it always works!
wagesofwins.substack.com/p/the-import...
Throughout these negotiations, the NBA has essentially made the same offer again and again and again to the players.
That is not negotiating. That is simply insulting. It is also not reported enough!
wagesofwins.substack.com/p/how-much-m...
wagesofwins.substack.com/p/groundhog-...
We can see from the NBA's own numbers that they very much expect the WNBA to keep growing.
The NBA's numbers indicate the WNBA will have over $1 billion in revenue by the end of the decade.
And yet... they can't pay the women!
winsidr.com/2026/01/pay-...
The NBA keeps saying "net revenue". But that word doesn't mean what they say it means.
The also keep making up estimates of losses that don't make sense.
It is unreasonable to expect the WNBA players to be successful in negotiating with this.
wagesofwins.substack.com/p/hard-to-ne...
Last October, Sara Chodosh and I wrote about salaries and revenue in the WNBA for the New York Times.
This led to some reaction from the “trolls”. As one can see, the trolls echo what the NBA says and ignores the NBA’s actual history.
wagesofwins.substack.com/p/writing-fo...
The NBA was paying less than 7% of WNBA revenue. Now they are offering less than 15% of WNBA revenue.
More people need to be saying the men of the NBA have never been paid this poorly. This was true even when the NBA was very, very small.
wagesofwins.substack.com/p/because-th...
There is a long history of reporters telling the NBA owners side in collective bargaining negotiations.
A great article from FAIR.org kicks off a discussion of how this pattern has continued in the WNBA negotiations.
wagesofwins.substack.com/p/telling-th...
The NBA continues to insist that the women can’t be paid because the WNBA isn’t that profitable.
Meanwhile, NBA investors keep investing hundreds of millions in the WNBA.
Not enough people have called out this obvious inconsistency.
wagesofwins.substack.com/p/solving-th...
Last summer I noted that the history of poor pay in the WNBA would be a problem.
Unfortunately, that appears to be true.
The NBA has convinced people that going from less than 7% of WNBA revenue to about 15% of league revenue is a huge win.
wagesofwins.substack.com/p/will-wnba-...
I have been seeing quite a bit of criticism of how the WNBA players have handled these negotiations.
Most offering this criticism have generally ignored how badly the NBA (the primary owner of the WNBA) has negotiated.
Here is a quick thread detailing what I have written about this.
In 2026, colleges must teach students that this is not the end of the world. We must teach hope. Current undergraduates can barely remember a time before the threats of climate change and authoritarianism loomed to catastrophic scale. Since 2010, the future depicted in TV, books, and games has been dystopian or apocalyptic, so for our current students the end of the world feels more familiar and realistic than a future with hope. Now we are asking them to choose majors and life paths when the desirability, indeed the very existence, of whole sectors of employment are in question, due to the overwhelming promises of LLMs and machine learning. As young people hear daily that vocation after vocation may vanish into automation’s maw, and that democracy, liberty, land, sea, and sky are all in jeopardy, despair is growing. Despair is very emotionally tempting. It means freedom from the responsibility to shape the future. This is a terrifying turning point, but many generations before us have faced such turning points, and met them. We can offer our students perspective. Only a few dozen institutions on Earth are more than 900 years old, and the vast majority are universities. The university system is not a house of straw to buckle in this storm: We are the rocks that have sheltered the knowledge, hope, and truth through tumults which have toppled kingdoms while classrooms endured. We can endure this, and be a guiding light through it, but only by recentering, by teaching citizens, not workers; power, not PowerPoint; aspiration, not apocalypse. Despair is how we lose. The classroom is where we battle it. All other battles flow from here. Ada Palmer is an associate professor of history at the University of Chicago.
This, from Ada Palmer as part of The Chronicle's survey of 11 scholars on the future of higher ed, is what I needed to end the week.
We need more movies about women's sports.
Like, how about a movie about a women's basketball team that barely makes the playoffs. But somehow wins in the playoffs.
Maybe we could call that team "The Vinyl".
Just tossing out ideas here...
The WNBA players are now just asking for 26% of revenue. This is down from 27.5%.
www.espn.com/wnba/story/_...
According to the NBA/WNBA owners math, the player just gave up $70 million. Or $100 million.
Yes, the NBA's own numbers tell different stories.
wagesofwins.substack.com/p/the-import...
Fine. I've started a newsletter. For now, it will mainly be weekly updates on what I'm up to -- what I'm working on, what (if anything) I've published, what I'm reading, that kind of thing. Maybe if there's something I'm dying to blog about, I'll do it. We'll see! www.patreon.com/cw/jessicawl...
We keep seeing reports of divisions and questions among the WNBA players.
But we don't see similar reports about owners.
That doesn't mean the NBA/WNBA owners are united.
They are definitely not.
But they are also definitely not talking to the press.
Maybe we should ask why!
They announced tonight that the University of Iowa basketball has had 51 consecutive sellouts.
Women's basketball has always been about more than just one player. This is true at the University of Iowa. It is true everywhere!
At this point, though, the NBA has already won.
Their strategy -- taken directly from Nixon -- has worked.
So, why can't the NBA make the victory sign and get ready for the next WNBA season?
Both stories come from the NBA’s numbers. But both numbers can’t be right.
This all suggests the NBA is once again making claims about losses that aren't backed by evidence.
And they are doing this to win the negotiations.
If we look at the NBA’s salary offers, the WNBA players have already given the NBA nearly $600 million in concession.
If you look at the NBA’s estimates of WNBA losses, the players have made more than $850 million concessions.
The WNBA players are asking for too much. If the NBA agrees, the WNBA will lose millions!
This argument has led the players to make significant concessions. How much have the WNBA players already conceded? It depends which NBA numbers you believe.
In 2011, the NBA used the same playbook. Once again, losses were claimed. Once again, the story wasn’t believable. Once again it worked!
Today it is the same story. The numbers we see from the NBA about the WNBA don't add up!
The NBA agreed. But that makes no sense.
If losses were $15 to $20 million, how could a $5 million concession help?
The NBA never should have accepted that offer if the losses were that large.
It very much seems the NBA's tale of massive losses wasn't really true.
The NBA insisted that because it was losing money and franchises might soon be folding that it needed the players to take a pay cut.
The players did agree to accept 53% if revenue. So, the players agreed to take about $5 million less.
The NBA told the Washington Post in 1983 that is was losing $15-$20 million per year.
The NBA also said it was paying 57% of revenue to the players.
Because the NBA also reported average salaries, we could see that NBA revenue was about $138 million.
The NBA first claimed it was losing money in 1971 when it wanted a merger with the ABA. Two economists reviewed their financial statements and disagreed with this story.
In 1983, the NBA made the same argument. This time there were no financial statements to review.