Phee your mind

Napheesa Collier – top-3 player, union officer and co-founder of Unrivaled – puts WNBA leadership on blast by name. The fight for the future of the league is on. Good morning. Let's basketball.

Make no mistake about it: there is a war for the future of the WNBA, and Napheesa Collier just struck the first blow. Two days after her Minnesota Lynx were eliminated in a series dominated by the Phoenix Mercury but marred by highly questionable officiating and the Game 4 absence of both Collier (injured in a controversial no-call in Game 3) and coach Cheryl Reeve (suspended after a boisterous reaction to said no-call), Collier took to the podium for an end-of-season exit interview.

She took the opportunity to not just lament the WNBA's well-known officiating struggles, but to also call into question WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert's leadership. Well, hold on – "call into question" is a euphemism. That betrays what Phee actually did. She didn't "call into question" Engelbert's leadership. Collier said:

"We have the best players in the world. We have the best fans in the world. But right now, we have the worst leadership in the world."

No questions there. That's a statement. She did it calmly, a little nervously, clearly and powerfully. And there's six minutes of it, which I highly encourage you to watch because it frames up the state of the league-player relationship right now and it provides a window into what the WNBA has ahead of it in the months to come.

This is just a brilliant piece of rhetorical work. The messenger always matters, and Phee's confident and calm defiance punches the points home. Collier immediately speaks to the reigning officiating controversy – one which saw her coach earn a record $15,000 fine and had two other coaches get fined for supporting Reeve's comments – but then pivots to the mindset at the league office.

The most savvy thing Collier does here is almost immediately pull Caitlin Clark into the fight but relaying a statement Engelbert made to Phee during a private conversation months ago.

Collier says that she lamented to Engelbert the low salaries that high-impact young players like Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers earn. She said Engelbert retorted that Clark should be grateful because the "WNBA platform" allows her to make all that off-court money (much of which was in place thanks to endorsement deals before she stepped foot on a WNBA court, of course) and that players should be "on their knees" thanking Engelbert for the new media rights deal.

Clark is the stalking horse of the coming collective bargaining negotiations between WNBA players and team owners. Like it or not, she has brought a new fandom to the WNBA. It's a fandom of her and perhaps her team, and it comes with heavy complications. If she steps up to join the fight as Engelbert digs in and the players fight for a bigger share of the growing pot, the league office is going to be knocked backward. Like it or not, Clark's fame brings that power.

What Collier did is get Clark's fandom invested in the fight by sharing private information about Engelbert demeaning Clark's earning potential, something some of the world's more vocal Clark fans are already cued up to argue. Many of them think the WNBA is only growing because of Clark. To have the commissioner suggest the opposite – that the league office deserves the credit – is a slap in the face.

It's a real slap in the face to both the youngsters bringing more fans to the table and the established stars like Collier, A'ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart who have been building the on-court superstructure to which the Clarks, Reeses and Bueckerses have joined. In a statement, Engelbert said she was "disheartened by how Napheesa characterized [their] conversations." But she stopped short of denying the statements, and players from Wilson to Nneka Ogwumike to Clark's Fever teammates signed onto Collier's sentiments.

In an interesting twist, on Tuesday Tom Friend of the Sports Business Journal reported that Engelbert will leave the WNBA after the collective bargaining agreement is completed. It'll be interesting to see if players latch onto that as a cut against Engelbert's investment in the future of the league.

This is all really about the players' labor deal and the idea of respect. The WNBA does not have a player-league revenue split like the NBA. Salary structure rules are set through the collective bargaining process, but they are not calculated based on an overall share of revenue. If they were, you'd see player salaries skyrocketing in response to increased revenue for the league (revenue Engelbert is apparently patting herself on the back about). Stars who have long bristled at low guaranteed salaries in the WNBA have reached a breaking point as they witness more money coming into the league and appear cut off from it while the league office complains about losses at the team level.

Everything attached to a dollar sign is a fight with the league. A team got punished for giving its players access to private flights in lieu of commercial airline service! Engelbert may be a brilliant business leader – I don't know, color me skeptical but that's not my world – but her tenure should not have survived that ridiculous fight over private charters and her lectures about fiscal responsibility as she was demanding that some of the best women athletes in the world cram into exit rows on red-eyes. It's an embarrassing, small pose. Her tenure definitely shouldn't have survived her tone-deaf remarks on harassment targeted at players last year. More than anything, given how players have felt about her leadership, letting Engelbert lead the league into an era-defining negotiation feels like malpractice. But the team owners have let her get this far.

What makes all of this more savvy and impressive for Collier is that she has an alternative league sitting right there to get players paid during a work stoppage that seems increasingly inevitable. Was the timing of Collier and Stewart's Unrivaled league intentional based on the prospect of a WNBA stoppage in 2026? We'll never know. But Collier's husband Alex Bazzell, who as Phee mentioned in her monologue runs Unrivaled, is well positioned to provide a different model of leadership in women's sports.

Unrivaled is nowhere near as big as the WNBA in terms of player base, revenue or cultural relevance. This stuff takes lots of time and lots of resources. But in presenting a model of how a league can do right for the players, it's a real ace in the hole for the players' union. The timing of its start-up in 2025 and its coming second season when WNBA free agency should be happening (but likely won't) is impeccable. Collier has set the tone for the argument that better things are possible by helping to provide a real-world example of how.

Whether that will get the league to budge remains to be seen. There are enough new-money NBA-adjacent owners in the WNBA that probably see the value in splitting revenue with players in order to not disrupt positive momentum for the league. There are also underresourced WNBA ownership groups unwilling to cash out by selling their team, hanging on to a paradigm that no longer exists. Engelbert's pose indicates where the majority lies, and that's not a good sign for quick resolution or coming harmony.

The stakes in NBA labor negotiations have always been such that the players give because the cost of losing a whole season is so utterly painful. Because WNBA players are paid so relatively little, I'm not sure that's really the case here. That's also not a good sign for quick resolution or coming harmony.

When it comes to the battle of public opinion, Collier proved that players have a huge advantage and intend to use it. That was a helluva start. Let's see what the players cook up next.

In Other News

Jonathan Kuminga signed a two-year, $48 million deal with the Warriors. The second year is ... a team option, but Kuminga has reportedly waived his "inherent" no-trade clause. Essentially, the Warriors ensure they don't lose Kuminga for free while maintaining maximum flexibility to move him midseason. Kuminga gets $24 million to maybe play for a possibly good team and live in the Bay Area for at least four months, and has a likely path to making $24 million next year to almost certainly play basketball. It's not a bad deal for anyone, really.

And now, a nation turns its eyes on Quentin Grimes.

Alright, that's all. Be excellent to each other.