WNBA All-Stars Get $2K and a First-Class Flight to Vegas. That’s It?
A total of 22 players will take the floor this Saturday for the WNBA’s 2023 All-Star game in Las Vegas, and, as is standard across professional sports in the U.S., they will be compensated for their participation. In the WNBA, that means a $2,575 bonus and a first-class flight—an upgrade from the league’s standard regular-season player travel policy of premium economy “or similar enhanced coach fare.”
The payout is equal to less than 3.5% of the $74,305 Indiana Fever star Aliyah Boston—the top pick in this year’s draft class and just the eighth rookie in league history to earn an All-Star starter slot—will make in her first year in the WNBA. To compare, the NBA’s $100,000 All-Star bonus for players on the winning team is about 10% of the first-year rookie salary of this year’s top pick.
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“To pay the players $2,500 really undervalues the asset,” Terri Jackson, who has served as the WNBPA’s executive director since 2016, said in a phone interview. “We resist, at times, the comparisons between what our members make and what individuals in other professional sports—the guys in the NBA—are making because we don’t want to compare our business to theirs, but at some point, it does become relevant. We negotiated hard for increases in all of the bonus amounts [in the CBA] but in our attempt to right-size the business model and do that course correction, we, the players association and the league, just didn’t finish the job.”
While Jackson did not name a specific amount, she said she would like to see “significant increases” to the W’s All-Star bonuses.
The WNBA, for its part, points to the mutually agreed-upon nature of the current payouts as outlined in the league’s most recent collective bargaining agreement, which was signed in 2020. It also emphasized the $500,000 awarded to the champions of the Commissioner’s Cup—an in-season tournament introduced in 2021. The same amount is earmarked for the postseason bonus pool as of last season, marking a 50% increase. It also noted a spend of what it says is more than $4.5 million to expand charter flights for 2023 to include all postseason games, starting with this year’s WNBA playoffs, and a small number of regular-season contests.
“The WNBA and WNBPA mutually signed a groundbreaking Collective Bargaining Agreement in 2020 that saw player pay triple through base salaries along with bonuses, prize pools, league-level and team-level marketing deals and increases in other family and maternal benefits,” a WNBA spokesperson said in a statement. “What made this CBA historic was also the fact that the league and players understood that we needed to work together to help grow and transform the economics of the WNBA. We are just under half-way through the eight-year deal and are beginning to see that transformation taking shape.”
The Las Vegas Aces’ A’ja Wilson and New York Liberty’s Breanna Stewart, both of whom are MVP favorites, will captain this weekend’s pair of competing teams. The $2,575 is the standard prize awarded to each participant, and there are opportunities to earn a little extra. The player who shines the brightest at Michelob Ultra Arena as MVP, for example, will take home a check twice as big, as will the three-point and skills competition winners.
The All-Star honor can also prove lucrative in other ways. Adding accolades to a players’ resume can serve as leverage for future salary bumps, or it could mean unlocking a bonus built into a footwear or apparel contract, for example.
“Off the court, being an All-Star means increased visibility and marketing opportunities both around the event and into the future,” Excel Sports Management agent Erin Kane, who represents players including All-Star starters Arike Ogunbowale and Napheesa Collier, said, emphasizing an “uptick in earning potential” that comes with All-Star status.
While the terms of the W’s prizes were established in the CBA just three years ago (which was hailed as a significant marker of progress at the time), they already feel antiquated. When the agreement was being negotiated in 2019, the league made a little more than $100 million and had just begun to really build business opportunities around the All-Star game. As the event becomes increasingly commercialized and the WNBA’s business continues to grow at an expedited pace, the All-Star game payout for players now accounts for a significantly smaller share of overall revenue than it did when the terms were decided.
This year, the WNBA is reportedly projected to earn between $180 million and $200 million in combined team and league revenue, which would mark its best financial year to date. And 15 of its partners—including American Express, Nike and Dick’s Sporting Goods—will activate at All-Star weekend, where seemingly every element is branded. The game is sponsored by AT&T and the three-point contest by Starry. Kia’s name is attached to the skills challenge. The W’s second-annual fan festival, WNBA Live, is backed by presenting sponsor U.S. Bank.
As more proof of its growth, the two-day WNBA Live event will occupy a whopping 75,000 square feet at Mandalay Bay Convention Center, already having rapidly outgrown the 15,000 square feet it commanded last year in Chicago. And the game itself will air on ABC in primetime for the first time ever.
“The whole wraparound of resources [being invested by and into the league]—I want to see that the players benefit,” Jackson said. “They’re doing the work. I want the league to rethink what bonuses need to be and what it looks like when a player is named an All-Star or WNBA champs. I don't think we have fully course corrected there.”
Even merit bonuses, earned by players on teams that make the WNBA postseason and to award recipients (which include MVP, first and second team honorees and Rookie of the Year, among four other categories), are fixed throughout the duration of the CBA, which is set to run through the 2027 season. The WNBPA has the option to terminate the agreement at the end of the 2025 campaign, which it is widely expected to do.
Bonuses are just one area of investment the players association wants to see reflect the current state of the WNBA. Travel has been another very public sticking point between players and the league and pay continues to be a conversation.
This weekend’s events are a microcosm of the broader WNBA players’ dilemma: Revenues are growing, but the player cut of that success is shrinking. Salaries are a poignant example. Though the CBA outlines a 3% salary boost each year to account for inflation, those increases aren’t keeping pace with revenue growth. According to an analysis by Bloomberg, base player salaries as a percentage of total league revenue dropped from 11.1% in 2019 to 9.3% last year.
But without a new CBA, neither the league nor its owners are obligated to adjust the terms to better align with the revenue increases. That’s where Jackson hopes corporate partners can step up to bridge the gap, as they have in leagues like the NWSL—the money Ally Financial put into the Challenge Cup player prize pool forced the league to increase its other bonus payouts to keep up.
The union itself says it has seen an increased willingness among partners to fill the gaps at events like All-Star, where brands including Morgan Stanley, Google and Def Jam have helped the union elevate the player breakfast it provides the morning of the game—which Jackson says was born out of necessity a few years back—and introduce new concepts like the lounge it’ll open this year as a place of both refuge and reward for the W’s stars during the weekend.
Now, she says, it’s the league's turn to push.
“If I’m engaging in conversations with the corporate partners, I'm saying, ‘We need you to step up to the plate, we need you to sponsor more of these bonuses and categories and be the storyteller of who these players are—the names behind the bonus,” she said. “Her name becomes more recognizable across households and your brand will become associated with a demographic as diverse as the women of the W. I think the ceiling is just so much higher than what [the WNBA is] doing.”
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