Skylar Diggins, as she points out in a money diary for Wealthsimple.com, is the highest paid player on the Dallas Wings.
Which puts her – to little surprise – far under players much younger and less accomplished than her on the Dallas Mavericks.
And it’s not just because of the difference in revenue between the two branches. She breaks it down simply:
Players in the NBA get about 50% of the revenue. For women, the percentage is in the twenties. So before we even talk about base salary or anything like that, we don’t even get paid the same percentage of the revenue that we bring in, which is kind of unbelievable. People try to hijack this issue and say that women’s basketball may not be as interesting a game, because they disparage women in sports, period. But we don’t even make the same percentage of revenue! And jersey sales…we don’t get any of it. The men do. And I have had a top-five jersey for three or four years in the WNBA.
Diggins is far from the first WNBA player to bring up this point – but it’s hard to get in that many words on Twitter, which is where many of the players are left trying to explain the differences to people who didn’t follow their collective bargaining very closely.
The agreement runs through 2021, with both sides able to opt out in 2019. (Here’s a good breakdown though of why increasing salaries is a little more complicated than just writing a new number on a piece of paper.)
