WNBA: Where’s the extra prize money promised by the league?

The business of sports—from schedules to (missing) prize money to merchandise to earnings—dominated the week’s women’s basketball news:

WNBA schedule shenanigans

On Monday, the WNBA surprisingly dropped the 2025 schedule. Why?

First, it seems a bit odd to hype next season’s schedule before the free agency period, where a number of prominent players likely will change teams. Imagining forthcoming matchups—including revenge games—makes more sense when every teams’ roster is mostly set. That’s especially true for the Golden State Valkyries, who only began to build their team in Friday’s expansion draft.

Second, shouldn’t the league try to build some anticipation for the schedule release? The WNBA could take a cue from Unrivaled, which effectively has cultivated fan engagement with it’s various announcements of players, rosters and more (and another example is below). The WNBA, which very much values social media metrics as a barometer of the league’s success (but bizarrely announced the three-time MVP winner early on a Sunday morning), too often wastes opportunities to generate fan excitement.

Yes, the WNBA is more successful and popular then ever. Yet, sometimes it seems it has reached such a status in spite of itself. (The bungled roll out of the team name of the Toronto expansion franchise being the latest example, which our Chelsea Leite wrote about at Raptors HQ.)

Nonetheless, there’s still reason to already be excited about the 2025 season, which will tip off on May 16 and include a record 44 games for every team. The Commissioner’s Cup (more on it below, too) returns for a fourth season, with Cup play scheduled for June 1 through 17, and the Commissioner’s Cup Championship Game to be held on July 1. The 2025 season will also see the debut of the WNBA’s revised playoff format. While the first round will remain three games, the higher-seeded team will host Games 1 and 3, giving the lower-seeded team Game 2 and guaranteeing all playoff teams at least one home game. And, for the first time ever, the WNBA Finals will be a seven-game series, with the higher-seeded team hosting Games 1, 2, 5 and 7.

Will the W pay out promised $750,000 prize pool?

Over at The Athletic, Mike Vorkunov discovered an accounting issue within the WNBA’s 2025 schedule announcement.

As Vorkunov notes, the league announced the $500,000 Commissioner’s Cup prize pool, yet, according to the 2020 CBA, the total prize pool for the league’s “special competitions or tournaments” should be $750,000. So, where’s the rest of the agreed-upon prize money?

Vorkunov writes:

The original goal when that CBA was written was for the WNBA to have multiple competitions, according to league sources. The CBA says they could have been held during training camp, the regular season or in the playoffs. But that plan changed, and the league has launched just one. The remaining money that was supposed to be for these new competitions was reallocated elsewhere around the league, those sources said.

It appears the promised $250,000 has just evaporated, rather getting allocated to the Commissioner’s Cup prize pool, as seems like the sensible solution.

Commissioner’s Cup participants, however, will get an extra pay out for a second-straight season, albeit in the form of cryptocurrency. Coinbase, the sponsor of the Cup, gave out $120,000 in cryptocurrency to the 2024 Commissioner’s Cup contestants, the champion Minnesota Lynx and runner-up New York Liberty. The same will happen in 2025, with each player getting $5,000 in cryptocurrency. That’s a nice bonus, although, with the fluctuating value of Bitcoin, players might prefer a portion of the presumably available $250,000 prize pool.

Unrivaled announces captains, merch and more

This past week, Unrivaled announced the league’s six Club Captains. They are:

• Breanna Stewart, Mist Basketball Club
• Napheesa Collier, Lunar Owls Basketball Club
• Satou Sabally, Phantom Basketball Club
• Chelsea Gray, Rose Basketball Club
• Arike Ogunbowale, Vinyl Basketball Club
• Alyssa Thomas, Laces Basketball Club

Unrivaled also signed LSU junior Flau’jae Johnson to an NIL deal. She joins UConn redshirt senior Paige Bueckers as the league’s second collegiate partner. Johnson and Bueckers helped introduce Unrivaled’s new merchandise line, the first of forthcoming content collaborations between the pair of college stars and the league.

Flau’jae, CC get sports biz recognition

Flau’jae Johnson made additional off-court news in the past week, as the hooper-rapper was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Sports 2025 class. WNBA Rookie of the Year Caitlin Clark also made the cut, along with University of Miami twin hoopers Haley and Hanna Cavinder.

In other sports business news, Sportico reported that Clark was the 10th-highest paid female athlete in 2024, raking in an estimated $11.1 million through NIL deals that, once she turned pro, became traditional endorsement deals. Clark’s most lucrative sponsorship is with Nike, which is an eight-year agreement that reportedly is worth more than $3 million a year.

The Clark trading card market also continues to boom, as her 2024 Panini Select WNBA Gold Vinyl signed rookie card sold for $234,850 on Saturday night—smashing the record for a Clark or WNBA card, which was set in October at $97,212.54.

The record-breaking sale trails only the price of a 2003 NetPro Serena Williams autographed patch card (meaning it included a piece of a match-worn outfit), which netted $266,400 in a 2022 sale.