NEW YORK — The WNBA considered terminating the Liberty franchise. All because the owners of the team regarded their players the same way as their NBA counterparts.
Joe and Clara Wu Tsai chartered flights for the team for away games through the second half of last season, which prompted a league-record $500,000 fine and the removal of Liberty exec Oliver Weisberg from the league’s executive committee, according to a new bombshell report published Tuesday by Sports Illustrated’s Howard Megdal.
The flights, as well as the Tsai’s team bonding trip with the Liberty to California’s wine country in September 2021, were violations of the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement and represented a competitive advantage for the Liberty. Even more, when the league weighed punishment for the CBA violations, it discussed suspending the Tsais as owners, losing “every draft pick you have ever seen” and even terminating the franchise completely, per Megdal’s reporting.
Joe Tsai purchased the Liberty in January 2019 from Knicks owner James Dolan. The approval of that sale came seven months before he went from minority owner of the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets to majority shareholder.
It’s a ridiculous notion from the outside looking in. The Liberty, much like any team any given season, were fed up with their last set of travel delays midway through the season and had ownership willing and able to rectify their situation via charter flights — which, to no one’s surprise, not all WNBA owners support because of what that cost would look like in the long term.
Joe Tsai, after his last Twitter statement on trying to find charter flights for all WNBA teams in October, did in fact find a company willing to provide flights for the league and said he found a way to get the perk comped for teams for three years. The response wasn’t overwhelmingly positive from fellow owners, some of who didn’t want players to get used to it, while others argued players would just want the cost of flights to go to salary increases for players, per the report.
Tuesday’s stunning report drew quick reaction from players around the league.
“Then it’s simple. Don’t fine them all and just give in to us chartering,” newly signed Minnesota Lynx Angel McCoughtry said on Instagram. Diamond DeShields, who won a WNBA championship with the Chicago Sky last season and was traded to the Phoenix Mercury in February, replied with a similar resolution to McCoughtry’s. “How bout let’s all charter 1 flight and just see what happens lol,” she wrote on Instagram.
The face of the Liberty’s franchise, Sabrina Ionescu, who has praised her team’s owners last year and through this offseason, chimed in on Twitter. “What a joke,” she said in response to the league’s reported punishment options. She took to her IG stories after and wrote “Lmao no comment.” And the Liberty’s 2021 Rookie of the Year, Michaela Onyenwere, posted a series of thumbs down emojis in the comment section of the report as shared by WSLAM on IG. She also wrote in an IG stories post, “for trying to treat us well. yikes.”
The details of the league’s $500,000 punishment of the Liberty were confirmed by the WNBA, per the SI report, with information on the possible termination of the franchise reviewed in a communication between the team and the league by the sports media company.
In any case of haves vs. have nots, there will always be critics. No one will ever be happy. And there should be a divide with this recent report. The CBA is agreed upon so that the state of the league remains equal among all teams. No team above another with how they travel or how they are regarded. And a team’s ownership having more than enough money to eat a fine — which was originally floated at $1 million until Commissioner Cathy Engelbert reportedly made a deal with Joe Tsai — opens the door to the possibility of any team’s owner in the league doing the same simply because they can.
But in the broader case of the country’s longest standing professional women’s league, chartered flights or even team dinners in Napa — which, for the record, was not hidden; the players gleefully shared the outing on social media and talked about it with members of the media after — should not be this controversial.
WNBA players are arguably the best women’s basketball players in the world and it’s the most competitive league to get into. There are only 144 spots up for grabs. Making players — many well over six-feet tall — cram into packed commercial flights the first few years of the league’s existence made sense because the league was still brand new. But 25 years in, and with owners with deeper pockets and connections willing to use their resources to improve quality of life aspects for world class athletes? Charter flights should at least be the norm.
This is not to say the league hasn’t made advancements in improving quality of life aspects for players. The CBA, ratified in 2020 and running until 2027, was groundbreaking for exactly that. It provided paid maternity leave, child care stipends, upgrades in flight seating from economy to premium economy, mental health resources, private hotel rooms when traveling and significant increases to the maximum base salary ($215,000) and the salary cap (30% increase) — all of which were championed by the players, themselves.
Still, the most recent public raising of just how little is able to be in invested in player salaries (see: Liz Cambage) is jarring when considering there are those who can and want to pay players what they and their jobs are worth, and thus what they can and should be entitled to, like charter flights. Just ask Las Vegas Aces owner Mark Davis, who, according to Megdal’s reporting, has been pushing for way higher salaries for WNBA players since before he took over the Aces. He learned only after gaining ownership that he could not shell out big bucks to players, only his coaches. He recently handed out the league’s first million-dollar head coaching contract to Becky Hammon.
