Faith Without Works
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As far as I can tell, NBA players have been consistently welcoming if not openly affectionate towards their WNBA colleagues. In the mid-1990s, Michael Jordan and Sheryl Swoopes were competitive on the court and friendly off it. Before their deaths, Kobe Bryant became one of the WNBA’s loudest champions, and it looked like his daughter Gianna would soon be one of the faces of women’s basketball under his tutelage. Modern NBA superstars like Kevin Durant and Stephen Curry have been relentlessly complimentary of the W and its talent — some of my favorite moments of the 2020 (2021?) Summer Olympics involved Durant interacting with Brittney Griner and the other members of the USA women’s basketball team on social media. At any given WNBA game, you’re certain to catch an NBA player or four in attendance. Despite the general public’s (sexist and patriarchal) argument that the men’s game is vaguely better, the professionals — to a man — all appear to disagree.
That being said, I’m sure you’ve heard by now that the aforementioned Brittney Griner — one of basketball’s true living legends, regardless of gender — is currently a political prisoner of Russia, her nearly six-month detainment the alleged byproduct of an attempt to “smuggle” cannabis oil into their country, where those oils remain illegal. Since 2014, Griner’s competed in the Russian Premier League during the WNBA’s offseason, where she reportedly earns upwards of $1 million from her team UMMC Ekaterinburg. Contrast that with the WNBA’s supermaximum salary of $228,094 (in 2014, it was an even paltrier $107,500), and it ain’t hard to tell how or why Griner and many of her counterparts make that trek year after year despite the clear and present danger seemingly always at hand.
You could poll every single NBA player today and I bet they’d all agree, unanimously and vociferously, that the circumstances leading to Brittney Griner’s detainment have been unfair. So how do you think they’d respond to the idea of sacrificing some of their financial security if it guaranteed preventing scenarios like these from happening again?
The NBA’s salary cap for the upcoming 2022-2023 season is approximately $124 million, nearly ninety times the WNBA’s. Bradley Beal, a fine player whose teams have won very little of significance, just inked a contract guaranteeing him $251 million over the next five years, an average of just over $50 million per season. Damian Lillard, another fine player whose teams have won only slightly more than Beal’s, is on the verge of collecting $63 million in one season.
NBA contracts are fully guaranteed, which means every player selected in the first round of this year’s NBA draft — several of whom may never play in an NBA game — is ensured a bigger payday than Diana motherfucking Taurasi. Hell, the 30th pick in this year's NBA draft is scheduled to make more this season than every WNBA team is legally permitted to spend on its roster. (Even prorated to a 36-game WNBA season, the 30th pick in this year’s draft is scheduled to make nearly four times the supermaximum WNBA salary.) My daddy always used to tell me there’s no such thing as extra money in this world, but in the case of the National Basketball Association, we might have an exception to that rule.
I understand this isn’t strictly about pay equity: The NBA generates far more revenue than the W, and combined with the difference in the number of games played, there’s no way to argue in good faith that the league’s salaries should be perfectly equal. Plus, the WNBA’s just entered its 26th season; in the NBA’s 26th season, it was a 17-team league facing its own uncertainties and questions regarding its profitability, and the salaries were but a fraction of a fraction of some of the eye-popping numbers we routinely see today. You don’t have to squint too hard to spot the similarities between where the NBA was then and where the WNBA is right now.
But that fledgling NBA also didn’t have a multibillion-dollar sports league as its sibling organization, a sympathetic support system to help navigate the early hardships and, like a compassionate older sibling does, swing some cash the little sibling’s way when their finances are funny. This isn’t to suggest the NBA has done neither of these for the W; I’ve read story after story after story about WNBA founder and former NBA commissioner David Stern’s dogged determination to make the women’s league internationally significant, and there’s no telling how many hundreds of millions of dollars the NBA has spent subsidizing the WNBA since its inception. The WNBA does not exist without the backing — both cultural and financial — of the NBA, and that’s indisputable.
And yet I wonder and worry if the NBA is resting on its laurels a bit in that regard: the knowledge that it’s already done a lot for the W, and it’s currently doing so much for the W, and therefore there’s a limit on what it’s permitted to do for the W moving forward. In the summer of 1996, months after the NBA approved the WNBA’s creation, the NBA set its salary cap for the upcoming season at $24.3 million. ($100 million less than it is today, for those keeping score at home!) The NBA was much, much, much less profitable then, but by all accounts, David Stern still made it a priority to invest a non-negligible amount of NBA capital into making the WNBA a legitimate enterprise. Knowing that backstory, no matter the NBA’s current investment in the WNBA, the men’s league’s ever-rising revenues suggest that an even larger financial commitment in the W isn’t and shouldn’t be out of the question — and particularly now that the capitalist pursuit of more competitive wages abroad by one of the WNBA’s greatest players ever may soon yield the tragic albeit avoidable outcome of nine years hard labor in a Russian penal colony.
I won’t pretend to be privy to the work the NBA is or isn’t doing behind the scenes on Brittney Griner’s behalf. On July 22, Tania Ganguli reported a story for the New York Times titled “N.B.A. Mostly Keeps Low Profile in Public Campaign to Free Brittney Griner” in which anonymous league executives insisted their initial silence on her detainment was strategic, while Ganguli noted that current NBA commissioner Adam Silver “has said publicly that the league and its teams are using their influence and connections to help Griner in ways the public cannot see.” The NBA and WNBA did issue a short joint statement following Griner’s August 4 sentencing, decrying the verdict and reiterating their commitment to her safe return to the United States. On this matter at least, I am admittedly predisposed to give Silver and the NBA the benefit of the doubt. Basketball is my preferred pastime and Silver’s NBA the source of probably too much of my enjoyment these days, so it would be personally distressing to discover he and the organization he helms at the very least weren’t exhausting every resource at their disposal to bring Griner home.
However, if their efforts are isolated to extricating Griner from Russia without any root-cause analysis of how we even got here in the first place, I’m afraid we’ll have missed the point of this lesson altogether. The easy route — the path of least resistance here — is to lay this all at Russia’s feet while ignoring the American realities that must change if we’re truly serious (we’re not) about becoming a more equitable society. Once Griner returns home, is she simply supposed to continue playing under the same financial considerations that led her to seek higher compensation in a country particularly hostile to a person like her? And once her theoretical next WNBA season finishes, is she then expected to find another international club that’ll pay her the wages she’s prohibited from earning in her home country, as if she won’t carry the mental wounds from this experience for the rest of her life? If she never wants to touch a basketball again or venture outside the United States even for leisure once this phase of her ordeal is over, could you blame her?
As you’d expect, some of the NBA’s most prominent names have rallied to Griner’s defense in public interviews and on social media. And while the kind words and thoughts and prayers coming from them aren’t nothing, they feel specifically hollow considering the distance between their experiences as a professional athlete and hers. There’s probably nothing that can make Griner whole after this, and it definitely isn’t something as intangible as a thought or a prayer. Griner’s detainment isn’t some petty misunderstanding gone wrong that can be treated as an isolated incident. There’s only one way to correct systemic problems like these, and that’s with intention.
So here’s an idea: In the NBA’s next collective bargaining agreement, let’s make the league salary cap an even $100 million in perpetuity. That’s a nice round number, over four times the cap amount when the WNBA was founded in 1996, and a more than adequate amount to construct a potentially historic roster. And regardless, the NBA’s salary cap never surpassed $100 million until 2018; historically, these franchises have never had this much money to give their employees, and it’s not like instituting a permanent $100 million cap would remotely resemble a return to the NBA’s leaner years either. If the NBA players and governors agreed to relinquish their roughly $50 million split in revenue this year and the next few and endowed the WNBA’s operating costs instead, they would generate a degree of funding that would immediately boost both the W’s pay and prestige.
Or, an alternative (and my preferred option): Thirty-nine NBA players are guaranteed salaries exceeding $30 million this upcoming season, with that number guaranteed to grow as the salary cap continues increasing this decade. In a show of solidarity and actual, tangible investment in the WNBA, what if the NBA’s $30 Million Man Club (I just made that up; y’all can have it on the house) pledged to donate no less than 25 percent of their salary to further underwrite the women’s league through their 2030 season? The NBA’s top stars all staking a direct financial claim in the W could instantly accelerate the growth of their league, and especially if they opt to take a more hands-on approach. NBA players like Kevin Durant are already investing their money in women’s sports ventures, and I’m sure that’s included the occasional, undisclosed gift to the WNBA. If that’s indeed the case, let’s go ahead and formalize it, because what better example of female allyship could there be than their male analogues acknowledging the inequitable pay gap even given the distinguishing variables, expressing their clear displeasure with the status quo, and using their obscene wealth to be the change they’d like to see in the world?
The time is right now. The resources exist right now. Once Damian Lillard’s contract extension takes effect, he’ll be earning two hundred seventy-six times the WNBA supermaximum contract! (I checked the calculator at least eight times to be certain.) If that’s the ratio we’re working with, the men will be signing near trillion-dollar contracts from the NBA by the time we get our first multimillionaire out of the women’s league. And I don’t mean to distinguish Lillard’s contract as singularly excessive, but it is the purest distillation of just how financially stable the NBA has become in the 26 years since founding the W. Plus I’m tired of hearing outrageously wealthy folk pass the buck, or lament that they can’t do it all on their own because what’s going to be left for me and my family at the end?
As NBA athletes, the fate of the WNBA is now part of their legacy. Each and every NBA player should feel a sense of responsibility for the future of the women’s league, whether or not they realize it. The kind words and the cute interactions make for likable content, sure, but allyship isn’t merely attending a couple of WNBA games and solidarity isn’t having your social media manager tweet FREE BG! 💯 every few days. These young men are the beneficiaries of a broken, biased system that is rooted in bygone notions of inherent male superiority, and to pretend otherwise is naive at best … and sociopathic at worst. And it’s past time we have these conversations, because not having them is exactly how men have historically kept women financially subjugated. For two leagues that are predominantly Black and brown, and in a country that pays Black women 64 cents to every dollar paid a white male, the NBA is uniquely positioned to make one of the boldest statements regarding women’s and civil rights that this nation — this planet — has ever seen.
In June 2014, Dave Chappelle visited the Late Show with David Letterman to promote his return to stand-up comedy, and notably an extended ten-show residency he’d booked at New York City’s Radio City Music Hall. Chappelle was resurfacing after a decade-long exodus, the disappearance prompted by his frustrations regarding his wildly popular television show and the direction he saw it heading as he filmed its third season. Leaving Chappelle’s Show meant Chappelle was walking away from a $50 million contract, a decision mocked and ridiculed by damn near everybody at the time. I mean, people in my circle insisted he must be doing crack, or cocaine at minimum, because who in their sober mind turns away fifty million dollars?
Their conversation felt very offbeat in real-time, and it’s somehow even more awkward on the rewatch. There’s a palpable tension in the room, a respectful awareness they’re the chosen audience for Dave’s comeback interview that clashes with their desperation to laugh at Dave Chappelle, Funnyman again, and it’s obvious early in their chat that both host and subject are delighting in the crowd’s restlessness. The two banter for nearly ten minutes — on Radio City, stand-up comedy techniques, Chappelle’s children, their middle names — before Letterman gets to steering the conversation towards Chappelle’s hiatus. Finally, mercifully, Letterman asks the fifty million dollar question:
“Do you regret saying I don’t want this enormous sum of money?”
“Well, okay, look, Dave,” Chappelle starts playfully — the audience chuckling nervously in the background, unsure if it's the setup for a joke or a sincere moment of reflection.
“It’s very hard to go through something like this ‘cause no one’s really done it before. So there’s not too many people that don’t think I’m crazy, right?” The audience chuckles again.
“So, I look at it like this: I’m at a restaurant with my wife. It’s a nice restaurant; we’re eating dinner. I look across the room, I say, ‘You see this guy over here across the room. He has $100 million, and we’re eating the same entree.’ So, okay, fine, I don’t have $50 million or whatever it was. But say I have $10 million in the bank. The difference in lifestyle is minuscule.
“The only difference between having $10 million and $50 million … is an astounding forty million dollars.”
The crowd erupts — at long last, Chappelle supplies their moment of levity. Letterman gives a toothy smile at the punchline and quietly chuckles. But Chappelle just stares blankly at Letterman; he never laughs, never smiles, never makes it clear whether that was a joke, a sincere moment of reflection, or both? A few seconds pass, the applause and laughter begin to fade, and Chappelle sips from his Late Show coffee mug as he finishes the bit with a quick postscript.
“Of course I would like to have that money!”
I try to reserve my empathy for the non-wealthy, but I don’t want to undersell the financial concessions it would take to overhaul the modus operandi of both the leagues in question. I can imagine it’s easy to get used to always making money all the time, and the concept of forfeiting profits while the NBA is this lucrative would be a tough sell to pretty much everyone involved on the men’s side. That’s why I find that Chappelle anecdote so instructive here, because at its core is the basic human dichotomy of want versus need, of knowing when enough is enough, of putting things in the proper perspective.
One of the most talented women to ever touch a basketball has unwittingly become the eye of a political firestorm primarily because her earning power is five times lower in her home country than it is in a place widely recognized as her home country’s primary antagonist, and her only path to freedom is likely to involve a prisoner swap with Russia for a notorious arms dealer nicknamed the “Merchant of Death.” No, sacrificing tens of millions of dollars isn’t ideal — in fact, some might call it crazy! Of course you would like to have that money! But solidarity requires sacrifice, and rarely does sacrifice come comfortably or easily. So long as WNBA players can earn exponentially more abroad than in the United States, it is possible this can happen again, and this cannot happen again.
When the WNBA announced its most recent collective bargaining agreement in 2020, it was roundly praised by the men (on Twitter, where else?), and now that it’s failing their players in a nightmarish fashion for the whole world to see, I need them to keep that same energy. Put your money where your mouth is, like the elders once said. It’s fine to have faith these things will work out on their own, but James 2:17 says faith by itself without works is dead. Maybe they should consider that scripture the next time they send their thoughts and prayers.