New York Liberty forward Breanna Stewart will start her ninth WNBA season Saturday, when the reigning league champions host the Las Vegas Aces.
She was the No. 1 overall draft in 2016. Now she’s a six-time All-Star with three championships rings — she was WNBA Finals MVP of the Seattle Storm’s title runs in 2018 and 2020 — and two season MVP honors, and the 30-year-old Stewart has been around the league long enough to watch her peers fight for visibility. She has seen only a small uptick in player salaries over the years amid the WNBA’s meteoric rise in popularity.
Stewart has been a part of negotiations for two collective bargaining agreements as a member of the Women’s National Basketball Players Association. A third round of negotiations between the union and the league is ongoing, with this one perhaps the most important of Stewart’s career. By the end, she hopes to see player salaries grow to unprecedented numbers.
“It’s been going up incrementally,” Stewart said. “But hopefully with the new TV deal that’s coming, it’ll really kind of boost itself into a category of its own.”
That’s what WNBA players were hoping for when they opted out of the current CBA two years before its expiration. The WNBA is bringing in more money than ever from sponsors and ticket sales, and it will bring in much more from its 11-year media rights deal, worth around $200 million per year starting in 2026.