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Tanzina Vega: This weekend we learned that 31-year-old WNBA star Brittney Griner was detained in Russia since February. The seven-time all star for the Phoenix Mercury has played for the Russian team during the WNBA off-season since 2014. Now, this is a common practice for women basketball players whose salaries in international leagues can be more than four times higher than what they earn in the US. Like so many others, we're going to be keeping our eyes on the outcome of Griner's detention at this tense time.

Her vulnerability in this moment is a reminder of how top athletes in the WNBA face a very different landscape than their male counterparts in the NBA. According to a sports illustrative report, the New York Liberty were fined $500,000 last year due to a violation of the WNBA league's collective bargaining agreement. They chartered flights for the second half of the season. Why is that a violation? Because it exceeds the permitted compensation to players. That's something. We wanted to talk with an expert.

Howard Megdal: My name is Howard Megdal. I'm the editor and founder of The Next women's basketball newsroom and The IX women's sports newsletter.

Tanzina Vega: I asked Howard, what are the rules around chartered flights for the WNBA?

Howard Megdal: Well, the rules that are designed through the collective bargaining agreement, which was signed by the players in the league in January of 2020, do not allow for charter flights to take place. They have to be commercial flights in all 12 teams. As a result, individual teams are not able to deviate from the collective rules of the league.

Tanzina Vega: Why? Not why can't they deviate? I understand how collective bargaining works, but why is this part of the collective bargaining agreement?

Howard Megdal: Simply put, you have 12 different ownership groups with different levels of both the ability, and in some cases, the willingness to be able to spend. The league has to create these rules in such your way that the teams are able to invest in a level they're able to do it. Now, the league can design collective bargaining rules in a way that allow for teams like New York that are willing to spend as much as they want, but that could price some owners out of the league as well. That is the balance, and it's not an easy one, that the WNBA has tried to strike with this most recent CBA.

Tanzina Vega: One more beat on this. I get that, that's really helpful. There's an equity consideration here, which means that even if you have it to spend, you're not allowed to spend it. This is maybe a bad analogy, but I'm thinking of it here a little bit like there's a cap on how much you can give to a presidential candidate, an individual can give because presumably, we don't want only the rich people to be able to influence politics. Of course, it's laughable in certain ways. [chuckles]

Howard Megdal: That it is. [chuckles]

Tanzina Vega: Help me to understand, is that equity consideration about who has the capacity to own a team or is it about the presumption that flying on a chartered flight will be more comfortable, better for the athletes and therefore actually affect the outcome of games?

Howard Megdal: I think very much the former. I don't think there's anybody who would dispute on the player or the management side that charter flights are something that would be a better experience for the players. I think a lot of this comes down to something as simple as, well, if you price certain owners out and others don't come in to the void, do you run the risk of the WNBA having fewer teams?

Now, NWSL, the National Women's Soccer League has gone through something similar over the past few years. They have year-by-year increased the standards and the minimums required of ownership. Sometimes that's meant owners have sold, sometimes that's meant owners have stepped up, as of the case right in our market with Gotham FC, but the Boston Breakers are a team that doesn't exist anymore as a result of that. It is a complicated equation that the league has to figure out.

Tanzina Vega: What is it that happened with the Liberty and their flights?

Howard Megdal: In late July, the Liberty ran into some real flight problems coming home from a road trip. Ultimately, the team made the decision unilaterally to charter flights, which they then did for the entire second half of the 2021 WNBA season. They did so, flew in the face of the collective bargaining agreement. It was eventually flagged to the league and the league responded in mid to late September by essentially threatening them with various different potential consequences to get them to stop. That ultimately led to what was a $500,000 fine against the New York Liberty.

People have different opinions, of course, about how much or how little that is, but it was a fine for and not just charter flights, but several things that went above and beyond what were effectively permissible benefits to be paid to the players without flying in the face of what are these limits that an individual team can spend on its players.

Tanzina Vega: Did the flights offer an unfair advantage?

Howard Megdal: Well, that's a very interesting question. They operated in a way that violates the rules. You can certainly make the argument that being able to fly directly, being able to fly without being subjected to the arbitrary nature at times of planes getting canceled and things getting rerouted makes a difference. Now, you can also look at the record, by the way, and the Liberty struggled quite a bit in the second half. If you're talking purely in terms of results, it's hard to make the argument that there was a demonstrable effect.

Certainly, the players would say, and I think any of us would say that being able to fly directly and just operate onto the tarmac and get on your flight and go is a massive advantage over sitting in an airport and wondering whether you're plane's going to take off.

Tanzina Vega: Right, and being able to fly with all the members of your team, not to have to split up over multiple flights. There's all kinds of reasons why. Tell me if I'm wrong, does the NBA charter planes for their away games?

Howard Megdal: The NBA charters planes, the NBA has chartered planes. As I understand it, the final team that didn't stopped doing so in 1993. This has been the norm for the NBA since before the WNBA was in existence.

Tanzina Vega: Clearly, the WNBA does not have the same kinds of resources. Talk to me a bit about the owners of these teams. What are some of the big differences team to team, not only on the issue of flights, but what does it mean to be a WNBA team with a lot of resources versus one with fewer?

Howard Megdal: Well, let's talk about that in two parts because there are two different ways to look at that. One is what is the revenue that's coming in to the WNBA? For instance, if you look at a media rights deal, the NBA will get exponentially more to broadcast its games from its various broadcast partners than the WNBA does, which has a media rights deal signed in the middle of the last decade that does not reflect even the WNBA audience of today let alone what many of us believe the WNBA audience will be tomorrow as their ratings continue to grow.

The other side of that is, you have different owners who think about it in different ways. You have owners who do have the resources to make a real investment but continue to view WNBA teams as dollar in, dollar out in a way that, quite frankly, men's sports has not been hamstrung by by people who look to invest today with the idea that it will grow the league tomorrow. We are increasingly, in women's sports, seeing people start to think in terms of investment, not in terms of dollar in, dollar out. The net result of that, of course, is internal arguments between different owners in the WNBA.

Tanzina Vega: It's a collective bargaining agreement. That means it's an agreement and there was bargaining. Is it possible to simply re-up the agreement, change some of these rules? If that happened, would it be fair acknowledging that it's likely that there would be inequities in this likelihood of flight chartering?

Howard Megdal: Well, it depends on what you mean. If you have a CBA that lifts the ability of the league to restrict that, there would be inequalities. If you stop talking about a scenario in which the league goes to the players and says, "Look, we know the CBA isn't up until 2027, would you be okay with it if we chartered flights?"

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Howard Megdal: WNBA is not going to stop them, right?

Tanzina Vega: Yes. I'm feeling like, yes. I feel like that's an easy yes. [chuckles]

Howard Megdal: I am very confident in saying that the players would not stand in the way of that at this point. It's really more a question of can you get-- Again, it's the peculiarity of the WNBA ownership structure as well, which is that there is a significant portion of the WNBA. It was 50% after the recent to capital raise, it's still approximately 42% is owned by the NBA owners as well, many of whom do not also own a WNBA team. They have both less skin in the game and less willingness or eagerness to be able to put new investment forward. It is a very complicated thing to get the league to invest more.

From Kathy Andover's perspective, this is a January 2020 agreement that dramatically increased things ranging from the max salary, which went from $119,500 to $215,000 overnight to even the salary cap of the teams, which went up by approximately 30%. There have been significant jumps, and that's, by the way, the reason why the players overwhelmingly agreed to this as well. There are people who are critical of the players, unfairly, in my view, who say, "Well, this is what you agreed to, you have to live with it." Not understanding that there are, A, changing circumstances on the ground, and B, that ultimately labor has to agree to the best deal it can get, not the best deal ultimately for the lead long term.

I don't think that is a fair criticism in all of the players, but that is the reason why players like [unintelligible 00:10:47] and Sue Bird and Layshia Clarendon agreed to that deal. Not because they didn't understand the import here, but by simply trying to improve in incremental ways the lives of the players who make this league run every day.

Tanzina Vega: From the outside, should I be reading this as a set of experiences, a narrative, a reality that is rooted in gender inequity or is this just how the business cookie crumbles? Is this just the reality is that indeed these leagues are in very different fiscal standing?

Howard Megdal: Boy, I love that question. The reason why I love that question so much is because it is very much how the business works because of inputs that are built into systemic inequalities. Let's talk about the way in which women's sports coverage and women's sports live coverage have been systematically undervalued again and again and again, the fact that the WNBA rights were essentially a throw in on NBA media rights deals for the longest time.

We're seeing this play out at the NCAA level with the investigation and subsequent report going a long way towards making it clear that when the NCAA said that women's basketball was not a moneymaker. It was as a result of thousands of different decision points that led to women's basketball not being a moneymaker.

You look at things as simple as the ratings of the WNBA compared to the ratings of major league soccer. There's no disparagement of major league soccer, but a men's soccer league in this country that gets comparable ratings to the WNBA, before you get into the reasons why, and the huge disparity in coverage, and the fact that every time there is free media and additional surrounding ancillary programming that is boosting the NBA, that is not boosting the WNBA, but those ratings are still fairly equal to one another. Major league soccer got dramatically more in their media rights deal than the WNBA did.

Well, when that rights deal comes up for renewal in a couple of years, we're going to hopefully get more accurate sense of just what the WNBA is worth on the marketplace now, number one. Number two, if that money flows more freely, then we're having a very different conversation about something as simple charter flights. Yes, it's business, but yes, and it is absolutely business based on inequality in input after input

Tanzina Vega: Howard Megdal is editor and founder of The Next women's basketball newsroom and The IX women's sports newsletter. Thanks so much for joining us, Howard.

Howard: It's my pleasure.

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