WNBA Players Are QUITTING To Play In Europe!

With the WNBA season ending for many teams, there are already so many players heading overseas to play during the off-season. But with all of the drama currently surrounding the WNBA, on top of the low-paying salaries, some of these players are questioning if they'll even return. What's up you guys, I'm Rachel Demeta and welcome to the Courtside Club. During her exit interview, Storm player Gabby Williams warned the WNBA, if you want to keep international players, you need to do better. So here's what she had to say. The W thinks that they don't have to pay us more in order for us to be here. And I think I didn't express that when I first talked about prioritization, you know. Our commissioner talked about us being able to, you know, make 700,000. That's actually, that's not true at all. There's not one player who makes that. And we were promised, you know, team marketing agreements and legal marketing agreements, but they've fallen quite short. So it's still not enough for us international players to want to stay here. And that's a choice of the players. If I make a choice to make more money, whatever, and then, you know, teams are mad that I don't come back. But that's how it is. So yes, it just, the WNBA, you know, if you want us to be here, you have to pay us more. It's business. It's how it works. And that's, that's all that I mean. Since that interview, less than a week later, Gabby is already in Istanbul, where she will be playing for the off season. And from the sounds of this interview, it seems like she's probably going to make more money overseas in Euroleague than she did during this WNBA season. Now Gabby Williams is a player who came on my radar during the Olympics. She played for team France and this past season she played for the Seattle storm. Now it's not out of the norm for WNBA players to play during the regular season and then during their off season play overseas. This is something that has been happening for like the entirety of the WNBA. It even went as far as to one year in 2015, Diana Taurasi played in Russia and did not play in the WNBA. And it was never outright stated that she didn't play in the WNBA because Russia basically put that in their contract that if she went there, she couldn't play. But that was pretty much what everybody thought happened because Russia paid Diana Taurasi at that time, $1.5 million salary to play in Russia. Now at the time in the WNBA, the salary, like the highest salary in the league was $107,000. So obviously that's a huge jump. Diana took that offer. She played overseas and at that time she was also like hands down the face of the league. The WNBA was not as popular as it is now, but that was an opportunity that Diana took. And I feel like with the growing popularity of the WNBA and with players able to, you there could be a world where more of these private owned Euroleague teams, I could see some of these teams going after some of our star players in the WNBA. And if the money makes sense, if the business aspect makes sense, we could, we could lose more players to playing overseas. Like Gabby kind of alluded to here, the commissioner told her that she could make $700,000 playing in the WNBA through marketing. I don't know what Kathy was talking about because even the highest paid pay player in the WNBA currently makes a little over $200,000 in salary. And then I don't know what the WNBA does with their marketing dollars, but it's definitely not going to equate to 700,000. And even our biggest star in the league, Caitlin Clark is only making a base salary of around 76 or $78,000 for this first season. She signed a four year, just over $300,000 rookie salary. So Caitlin's rookie salary is as little over 300,000 for four years. And that's all that she's going to make in the WNBA. Now I feel like there could be a team overseas who would love to snatch Caitlin Clark away from us and give her a crazy offer. I mean, ice cube was about to give her 5 million to play in less than 10 games in the big three. So the money is there. And if these owners are smart with it, I could definitely see more WNBA players going overseas and possibly not returning. There has been so much discussion about the discrepancy between the WNBA salary and the NBA salary, because as we all know, NBA players make millions and millions of dollars. And I actually made an entire video about this at the beginning of the season where everyone was like up in arms when they saw what Caitlin would be making during her rookie season. So if you guys want like a full breakdown, definitely go check out that video. When we look at the numbers, I'll just do like a really quick scenario for you. When we look at the numbers and when we look at what the WNBA has earned over the past years and the entirety of the WNBA, the numbers actually make sense. It's actually not that unfair what the players are paid. Now that might all change because of this season. But in the past, the only like on record revenue that I could find of the WNBA is 60 million. Now there has been rumors, there has been reports, there has been many things that say that the WNBA was projected to make $180 to $200 million in revenue for the 2023 season. But those numbers were never confirmed. I cannot find a source that like confirms those numbers. The only ones I can is 60 million. Now the NBA in 2022 made around $10 billion in revenue. So if you do the math there, that is about 166 times the amount of money that the WNBA makes. Now if you take Victor Wenminyama, who was an NBA star coming into the league, he just finished up his rookie season, he's going into his next. If you look at his rookie salary, which was around $55 million for four years, and then you look at Kaitlyn Clark's $300 and I think it was $38,000 salary that she signed for four years, that is about the same amount more. It's around 162 times more that Victor made than Kaitlyn. So if you do the math on just that, just revenue, just what these leagues are taking in, it kind of makes sense as to why WNBA players actually don't make that much money. Because we haven't been paying attention to the WNBA as much as people are now. It has been a growing league and it has gotten better definitely over the years. I feel like the 90s it peaked for a bit and then it went down and up and it went down a little bit more from COVID and now it has been slowly growing again until obviously like we've covered in the Clarkonomics video, there was a huge boom this season. There was a huge boom in merchandise and television viewership and sold out arenas and all of these things, which I feel like the WNBA could have capitalized on it even more and if there wasn't so much drama in the league and the players weren't saying like, I've been over all of it. My channel is not going to turn into a drama channel. I'm not going to just constantly be complaining about things that the WNBA has done wrong this season, but they've definitely done a lot of things wrong and I feel like the viewership, the numbers, all the things could have been even higher than they were, but we have seen that boom. So with that, more money should come and these players should be able to make more money. With that, we also saw a video this week about how Caitlin Clark actually was advocating for actually not even her own teammates, but for other teams players because of all of the eyeballs that the Indiana Fever were bringing in. So let's look at this clip from Alison Barber, who was the president of the Fever. Here's all you need to know about Caitlin Clark. When we would go to away games, they always sold out. Unbelievable. So Atlanta would normally have 3,000, 4,000 people. Now they have 17,000 people and they sold 1,000 standing room only tickets. So when we walked into the arena, people were on that third balcony looking down at the tops of our players' heads to watch. It's really hard to take in. After a few away games and all of the sellouts, Caitlin asked the WNBA if they would pay spot bonuses to the away team players. She said, we're making all this new revenue and I would like the away team to benefit from that. Could they get a spot bonus? So that's the heart of Caitlin Clark. When I saw this video, it made me happy because I'm very glad that this is now public knowledge. Caitlin never talked about this through the entire season and I'm glad that Alison came out and told us what was going on behind the scenes. But at the same time, it also made me sad because like we've talked about in many other videos, Caitlin Clark seems like this entire season, she was the solution for so many things, but so many players, coaches, media people, so many people were also painting her out to be the problem. She could never do enough. She could never speak out enough. Her fans were the issue. Fever fans were the issue. There was all of this just nonsense about things that Caitlin was doing wrong when in my personal opinion, she was doing nothing but going out there and playing great basketball every night and ignoring the hate that was coming to her from all sides. Not only from fans, but from competitors, coaches, all of these people. And so the fact that she was getting all of that, yet all of these eyeballs were coming to the league because of her. They were turning, the Indiana Fever was turning away games into home games every single time that they were on the road. You even had Dallas Wings players saying like, it kind of sucks seeing so many Indiana Fever and 22 jerseys in the stands, but it's also cool to see a lot of people in the stands like Indiana Fever was turning away games into home games. And so it's kind of sad that through all of that, Caitlin was still advocating for players on the other team to get bonuses because she saw the kind of money and eyeballs and viewership that all of this was generating. And so again, I'm glad that this is finally out there and it had its little viral moment so people can see. People don't always share all of the good things that they're doing and Caitlin by no means had to do this. I'm maybe kind of glad that some players didn't get bonuses because of how poorly she has been treated this season. But the reason that these spot bonuses were not granted to opposing teams or whatever was also because of the CBA that is in place in the WNBA. Now from my understanding in a couple years, the CBA will be renegotiated again. So it will be interesting to see in a couple years if the viewership continues to trend in this direction. And you know, I don't know if it will continue to only be kind of a Caitlin Clark, Indiana Fever fan base that's really spiking up all the viewership or if it will be a little bit more widespread with other teams. But if this all continues to grow, what kind of salaries will we be seeing in the WNBA? And will it be enough to keep players here full time? What Gabby Williams, to get back to the original point of this video, what Gabby Williams is saying about the WNBA I hope is another wake up call for them because this season has been nothing short of a mess. Not only with the drama, the social media, the commissioner not saying the right things, coaches getting fired, the refereeing, like it has been a mess. The statement from the WNBA PA that leaked the defensive player of the year and rookie of the year awards to all the fans trying to do like a clap. Like there have been so many things and I could have made a million videos about it and I'm sure all of those videos would have done really well and gone to a million views and all the things. But the WNBA has been a mess this year and has been so unprofessional and they need to step it up and they need to step it up quick. And they also need to, I don't know if an apology is warranted to Caitlin Clark or they just need to in general do better. I went into this season being really excited about it, excited to see the growth and so many things have put such a sour taste in my mouth. There are certain teams now that I don't even want to watch, I can't even support, I don't even want to be one of the viewers watching their games just because of all of the pettiness and drama surrounding everything. And so they need to tighten up, they need to do it quickly and we'll see what happens. But you guys let me know in the comments below, do you think that there is a case to be made of why some players would want to go play overseas instead of playing in the WNBA? Will we see any players, maybe like Gabby, just stay over there and say, hey, I'm done with the mess, I'm getting paid more here, getting treated better, maybe I should stay? Or do you think that this was a growing pain year, the WNBA is going to do better and will be good? You guys let me know in the comments below and of course thumbs up this video if you enjoyed it. Click that little subscribe button because I upload new videos every single week. With that you guys, because WNBA season is coming to a close, I'll probably be changing up some topics here too, getting a little bit more into college hoops, covering some NBA topics as well. If there's anything else that you guys want me to cover, definitely let me know in the comments below also. But it's not going to be all WNBA coverage moving forward into the fall and winter. So hope you guys are cool with that. Appreciate all the love and support per usual. And with that, I'll see you guys next time. Ooyina.