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Mechelle VoepelESPN.com
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- Mechelle Voepel covers the WNBA, women’s collegiate basketball and other collegiate sports for espnW. Voepel began covering women’s basketball in 1984 and has been with ESPN since 1996.
CHICAGO — The WNBA will use charter flights for all of its league finals games this year, increase bonus pool money for the playoffs and move to 40 games for the 2023 regular season, Commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced Sunday before the All-Star Game.
Engelbert addressed a variety of issues, including how bringing Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner home from Russia — where she has been jailed on drug-related charges since February — remains her top priority. The players wore Griner’s number on the back of their pre-match shirts on Sunday and spoke about her frequently throughout the weekend. Griner was named an honorary All-Star starter.
“Obviously we’re thinking of Brittney Griner,” Engelbert said. “She is always with us.”
Engelbert also spoke about the future of the league in terms of broadcast and streaming opportunities and how the US Supreme Court’s recent Dobbs decision overturning Roe v. Wade could impact the WNBA’s expansion plans.
The move to charters for the WNBA Finals is significant as travel remains an ongoing concern for the league’s players and coaches. All-Star Team Wilson and Las Vegas coach Becky Hammon mentioned this as an important topic in their pre-game press conference.
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In Engelbert’s first year as commissioner in 2019, she secured charter flights for playoff teams that needed to cross multiple time zones with a day or less turnaround before their next game. This was also implemented last year; There was no travel for the 2020 playoffs as the season was played at a single venue in Bradenton, Florida due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Engelbert said the playoff bonus pool this year will increase to $500,000, which is double what each player who wins the championship will receive.
“I’m confident in how we’re doing at the league level,” Engelbert said of the decision to go to the Finals charters, which was discussed with the players’ union, and the bonus pool expansion.
The same applies, she said, to increasing the regular season to a record 40 games. The league has played 36 games this year, the most it has ever played in a regular season.
The most recent collective agreement from 2020 provides for a maximum of 44 games that Engelbert would like to achieve at some point. However, there are biennial challenges at either the Summer Olympics or the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Championship that affect the WNBA’s schedule. That could mean the league might not be able to stick to 40 (or more) games a year.
The World Championships will be held in Australia this September, requiring a compact WNBA roster. Neither of these events are scheduled for next year, making it easier to accommodate 40 games.
Engelbert was asked because she’s often concerned about expansion — the league has 12 teams, and she hopes to increase that by at least 2025 — and how the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision might affect which cities the WNBA might add.
“Obviously we remain committed to gender and health equity, particularly in communities of color, and to access and reproductive health care,” Engelbert said. “We will certainly continue to stand up for women’s rights, reproductive rights, choice and all of that. We will evaluate things like that when we look at cities.”
As for media rights, Engelbert said it was a top business priority.
“There’s a lot of upheaval going on in the media landscape today,” she said. “We need to find the right package broader for the WNBA. We need to make it easier for fans to watch our games and know where our games are.
“We’ve got 160 games on national platforms this year, a record for the WNBA, which is great. We’re getting known, but I think our fans are frustrated, ‘Where are you finding these games?'”
Engelbert also addressed fans’ frustration at not being able to see Saturday’s All-Star Skills Challenge and 3-Point Shooting Contest in person. Engelbert said Wintrust Arena, which hosted Sunday’s game and was the regular home of Chicago Sky, was unavailable on Saturday, so the events took place across the street at McCormick Place, where fans weren’t allowed.
You could watch outside on a big screen.
Engelbert said the hope for 2023 and beyond is to be more responsive to fan requests and to be able to announce the location of the All-Star Game sooner. The league only officially announced in late April that Chicago would host this year’s game.
“I think we’ll be announcing the All-Star location much earlier next year,” Engelbert said. “We will not announce it today. We are not able yet. But we went to all our teams and cities and asked who would like to host it over the next three years. It was the first time we’d actually asked that after ’23, ’24, ’25.”