Unsolicited Advice: The WNBA has a leadership problem

Summary

Fixable Podcast Summary

Episode: Unsolicited Advice: The WNBA has a leadership problem

Hosts: Anne Morriss & Frances Frei
Date: October 20, 2025

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Overview

In this "Unsolicited Advice" edition of Fixable, leadership experts Anne Morriss (CEO and bestselling author) and Frances Frei (Harvard Business professor) take a deep dive into the ongoing leadership crisis in the WNBA. Sparked by explosive criticisms from player Nafeesa Collier and mounting player injuries, the episode scrutinizes WNBA Commissioner Kathy Engelbert's handling of issues and offers actionable, unrequested advice for league leaders. The hosts tackle the WNBA’s failure to address officiating, player relations, and the collective bargaining impasse—using the league’s moment of turmoil to illustrate universal lessons in crisis leadership and organizational trust.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The “Inciting Incident”: Nafeesa Collier’s Exit Interview

[03:13]

• Nafeesa Collier, elite player and key figure in CBA negotiations, publicly blasted league leadership and Commissioner Engelbert after the season ended.
• Frei: “She unburdened herself of all of her views of leadership. And so it was an explosive interview that really took to task the WNBA leadership and specifically the commissioner of the WNBA, Kathy Engelbert.”
• This event crystallized years of simmering tension between players and leadership.

2. Escalating Player Injuries and Officiating Problems

[04:19-06:06]

• Physical play, inadequate officiating, and lack of response have become top concerns—cited by coaches, fans, and especially players.
• Star players, including Caitlin Clark and Collier, sidelined during playoffs at the league’s peak moment.
• Frei:** “It’s super dangerous out there, and the commissioner ... isn’t doing enough to protect players.”** [04:19]
• Anne notes the experience as a viewer: “It was. It's just a huge amount of variability. So suddenly this like, who's on the court calling the game becomes very meaningful in the outcome of the game, which degrades the quality of the experience for the players and the fans and everyone who. Who's watching.” [10:49]

3. Commissioner Engelbert’s Leadership Response: Silence and Dismissiveness

[07:42-09:47]

• Frei describes Engelbert’s public reactions as “playfully dismissive” and emblematic of a larger leadership issue—a lack of genuine engagement and accountability.
• Frei: "Every time anyone has complained about the officiating, the response has been silence or dismissiveness. Every single time. ... Besides the fines for daring to say [anything]." [08:44]
• No real steps to repair relationships, just vague assurances:
  "There was a statement put out ... didn’t deny anything ... said that she was disheartened ... she will continue to work ... vague and more of the same.” [09:16]

4. The Power of a Good Apology & Trust Repair

[10:16-14:14]

• Morriss and Frei stress that admitting failure is critical:
  “When you want to repair a relationship, you should begin with an apology ... it just tells people that they're no longer being gaslit.” —Frei [10:24]
• Elements of a good apology:
  1. Own it
  2. Fix it
  3. Stop it
• Morriss: “We got it wrong and everybody lost. Let's name it.” [13:10]

5. Learning from Other Leagues and the Need for Transparency

[11:18-12:17]

• Suggest looking to NBA, college basketball, and soccer for best practices:
  • Transparency in officiating reviews and public accountability.
• Adopt proven systems rather than relying on a mysterious “black box.”

6. Commissioner Engelbert’s Track Record: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There

[17:50-22:51]

• Engelbert’s prior success at Deloitte (a corporate environment) hasn’t translated to a player-driven sports league.
• Morriss: “What got her here is not going to get her there ... this is a crisis moment and the opportunity is going to require you to engage with urgency, curiosity, empathy around the stakeholders and take accountability for decisions you made that have brought you to this point.” [20:26]
• Frei: “There has been no evidence that she has the desire, much less the capacity, to lead differently.” [21:02]

7. The Collective Bargaining Agreement: Opportunity and Risk

[29:18-39:16]

• Explosive league growth has led to higher stakes and tense negotiations.
• Frei urges Engelbert:
  “I will be the person who, if it's a jump ball between owners and players, I'm on the side of players. I believe that they are the value creation engine.” [31:26]
• Compensation comparison: WNBA players get less than 10% of revenue (vs 50% for NBA players):
  • Frei: “NBA players get paid every year more than they did the year before because the league is growing ... It's 50%. So in the NBA, 50% of basketball related revenue goes toward compensation of the players. ... No one has estimated [WNBA] to be above 10%.” [38:15]

8. Guiding Principles for Change

[34:56-40:45]

• Keep it Simple, Transparent, Fair:
  • Frei: “Just look at the comps ... No black box. Simple, transparent, fair.”
  • Be guided by these values especially in CBA talks.

9. How To Move Forward: Leadership Recommendations

[40:52-44:41]

• Frei’s summary for the commissioner:
  1. Take a beat, listen, and believe the feedback.
  2. Decide if you want to be the one to repair the relationship.
  3. If yes, start with an apology.
  4. Be guided by “simple, transparent, and fair.”
  5. Shift phase two of leadership from league professionalization to championing players.
  • “If you want to be the one who does it, start with an apology and then be guided by simple, transparent and fair. ... If not you, they’ll find someone else who does.” [40:52]
• Morriss: Make this a moment of redemption and global leadership:
  “I want the league to treat this as the crisis it is with the very real stakes that, to its credit, it has created. ... This league has a chance to show us how to do better here. And I think doing it better means doing it differently.” [42:03]
• Advice for players:
  Frei: “If someone comes to you as a different version of themselves, please be open to receiving them ... interact with whatever version of Cathy comes forward in good faith.” [44:21]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On officiating and injuries:
  “So many people who came to the league excited to see the gorgeousness and the artfulness ended up seeing, like a street brawl and then their beloved players injured. Chaos ensued.” —Frances Frei [06:30]

• On apology:
  “If you repair a relationship, you can actually have more trust than if you, than what you started with. But if you don't attempt to repair a relationship, oh my gosh, it, the pace at which it unravels just accelerates.” —Frances Frei [09:51]

• On transparency:
  “What won’t work is 'trust us.' ... You’ve lost all ‘we’ve got this’ privileges.” —Frances Frei [14:01]

• On growth challenges:
  “This is in many ways a classic story of a sleepy industry that got onto a rocket ship of growth ... Individuals don't necessarily evolve at the same pace of the external context.” —Frances Frei [29:18]

• Guiding CBA principles:
  “Be guided by simple, transparent, fair. ... Don't conjure fairness on your own. Just look at the comps.” —Frances Frei [34:56]

• On acknowledging mistakes:
  “I'm not going to try to do it alone. I'm going to bring all of my friends with me who care about a great outcome here, and we're going to get this done in the next three weeks.” —Anne Morriss [43:29]

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:13] — The “inciting incident”: Nafeesa Collier’s exit interview
• [04:19] — Players’ safety and officiating as crisis points
• [07:42] — League’s dismissive response, lack of trust repair
• [10:16] — The case and structure of a real apology
• [11:18] — How officiating is handled in other leagues
• [17:50] — Kathy Engelbert’s background and strengths/weaknesses
• [21:02] — The need for new leadership approaches
• [29:18] — League’s explosive growth and negotiation stakes
• [34:56] — Simple/transparent/fair: New guiding values
• [40:52] — Summary advice to the league and moving forward
• [44:21] — Advice to players: leave space for growth and redemption

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Tone and Language

The hosts’ tone is conversational, slightly irreverent but deeply sincere, using clear analogies and accessible language. They intersperse humor and optimism (“It’s a can-do energy!”) with sharp critiques, and refrain from technocratic jargon.

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Takeaways

This episode urges the WNBA—and any organization in crisis—to:

• Own and apologize for missteps, specifically around player safety and lack of transparency
• Adopt best practices from comparable industries rather than “reinventing the wheel”
• Prioritize transparent, fair negotiations and involve a broad, invested coalition in leadership decisions
• Seize crisis as a chance for redemptive, transformative leadership

Both the diagnosis and the prescription here are clear: to avoid a disastrous breakdown, the commissioner and league must pivot from defensive management to empathetic, player-forward, and radically transparent leadership—starting today.

Transcript

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[Anne Morris]

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[Anne Morris]

You're listening to Fixable, a podcast brought to you by ted. It's hosted by me, Anne Morris, and.

[Frances Frey]

I'm your co host, Frances Frey. I'm a Harvard Business School professor and I'm Ann's wife.

[Anne Morris]

Today we are very excited to share another edition of Unsolicited Advice with you. These are episodes where we give advice to people who definitely didn't ask us for it. In the past, we've given unsolicited advice to companies like Amazon and Boeing, job seekers in a tough job market, and even to the Democratic Party.

[Frances Frey]

And who gets the gift of our largess today? Ann.

[Anne Morris]

Frances that is really the question. Today's winner is an organization you have been thinking a lot about over the last few weeks. The wnba.

[Frances Frey]

Last few weeks, last few years, last few decades.

[Anne Morris]

Yes, yes, yes. This organization has taken up a lot of space in your heart and in your mind, and I'm excited to really get into this conversation with you today.

[Frances Frey]

I literally can't wait.

[Anne Morris]

All right, so Coach Francis is in the house with us today. I think longtime listeners will know that one of your earliest professional aspirations was to coach basketball after playing it in college and falling in love with this sport at a very early age. A lot has been going on in this league, particularly in the last few weeks.

[Frances Frey]

Screenwriters would call it the inciting incident. And the inciting incident was the exit interview, which is the last interview after you lost your last game, was the exit interview of Nafeesa Collier. And she unburdened herself of all of her views of leadership. And so it was an explosive interview that really took to task the WNBA leadership and specifically the commissioner of the wnba, Kathy Engelbert. Yes.

[Anne Morris]

And Nafisa has a special role. She is at the very top of the list of fantastic players.

[Frances Frey]

You know, very top of the list. She's also one of the small group of players that is negotiating for the collective bargaining agreement.

[Anne Morris]

She's the de facto voice of. Of the players right now.

[Frances Frey]

She's the person who took the microphone, and it is fair to say the world listened.

[Anne Morris]

Which brings us to this conversation. What are the problems the WNBA needs to solve right now?

[Frances Frey]

Players are getting hurt and they need the league to do something about it. It's super dangerous out there, and the commissioner, Kathy Engelbert, isn't doing enough to protect players. At the same time, the players in the league are also negotiating a collective bargaining agreement, and they have a deadline at the end of October. The parties are still so far apart, they've made almost no progress, and they're doing it without a foundation of trust.

[Anne Morris]

So let's dig in, Frances. All right, Frances, let's start with the officiating issue. The thing that confuses me as maybe an armchair fan is that this problem has been flagged again and again by lots of different stakeholders. Coaches, players, fans. This is a huge conversation on WNBA Twitter, and yet there has been no meaningful response to it. So what's going on and how do you fix that?

[Frances Frey]

Yeah, the WNBA has prided itself on being a physical league. The players often refer to the physicality. In fact, what they'll say to rookies in a. In a modestly hazing sort of way, is, oh, well, you're about to start playing with grown ass women. You were playing over there with college kids, but now you're going to start playing with grown ass women.

[Anne Morris]

What does that mean? Translate that for me a little bit. Like, I. I'm allowed to push People around on the court, you're allowed to.

[Frances Frey]

Touch people in a way you're not. So hand checking. If I'm dribbling the ball and you're defending me in college, you're not allowed to touch me. You would like that. Anne Morris, your dance base. My dance space.

[Anne Morris]

I like sports. I like sports with nets between me and the other player.

[Frances Frey]

Right.

[Anne Morris]

I didn't go anywhere near basketball.

[Frances Frey]

It's been true for decades, but it didn't get out of hand until. And the out of hand started last year. But this year, what really got out of hand is players were getting injured as a result of all of this.

[Anne Morris]

Escalating physicality, including star players, particularly Caitlin Clark, who had. Who were part of the explosion of excitement around this league.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah, so many people who came to the league excited to see the gorgeousness and the artfulness ended up seeing, like a street brawl and then their beloved players injured. Chaos ensued.

[Anne Morris]

Yeah. We get to the playoffs, which are happening right now, and some of the league's best players, Nafisa Collier, Caitlin Clark, they're on the sidelines, unable to play when the spotlight should be brightest.

[Frances Frey]

Yes. They and many more are on the board. And if you look at how the injuries occurred, you can't help but think it was all avoidable.

[Anne Morris]

Okay, what part of the story are you holding the league accountable for?

[Frances Frey]

So, number one, the officiating, everything goes up to the commissioner. It's not like people were not complaining about the officiating. It was the number one issue last year with Caitlin Clark. And then at the beginning of this year, she went out on injuries after being brutalized, and then so did many of her teammates, and then so did other players.

[Dana]

And.

[Frances Frey]

And every single time it was brought up to her, to her, I mean, Kathy Engelbert, the commissioner, she was like, playfully dismissive. Oh, you know, I only ever hear losers complain about officiating. Or she would say, we're going to take a look at that. And so there was dismissiveness and a lack of transparency each time it was brought up. But I would say officiating is probably the tip of the spear in terms. But it's, I think, also just emblematic of a larger problem.

[Anne Morris]

And what is that larger problem?

[Frances Frey]

That leadership does not take the concerns of the players, that management does not take the concerns of the employees for the rest of us, nearly as seriously as it needs to.

[Anne Morris]

So, for instance, what's been the response to Nafisa's calling out the commissioner and to this critique at the end of the season, which we heard from a lot of different corners.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah. So every time anyone has complained about the officiating, the response has been silence or dismissiveness. Every single time. There has never been an action with.

[Anne Morris]

It besides the fines for daring to.

[Frances Frey]

Say for the fines. And those have been pretty sure and pretty certain. When the fines come. That's the only response that has.

[Anne Morris]

That has happened in the publicly, just to be fair, that we have that we know about in the public domain.

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Yeah.

[Frances Frey]

The response to Nafisa, there was a statement put out by the commissioner that didn't deny anything that was said, but said that she was disheartened to hear. To hear it and she will continue to work with all the fibers of her being to make the league better. So it was a nothing spec. It was vague and more of the same.

[Anne Morris]

Certainly was not an apology, much less a good apology.

[Frances Frey]

No evidence of an apology. And so then no evidence of a. And if you, you know, the reason we need a good apology is you, you have to repair. If you repair a relationship, you can actually have more trust than if you, than what you started with. But if you don't attempt to repair a relationship, oh my gosh, it, the pace at which it unravels just accelerates.

[Anne Morris]

What do you do going forward if you're the league to, to, to signal. We hear you. We're going to take this seriously.

[Frances Frey]

Well, like everything, when you want to repair a relationship, you should begin with an apology because it just tells people that they're no longer being gaslit, that you're no longer making us feel like, are we seeing this weird thing? And I remember, Ann, when you were sitting next to me watching a game and you turned to me and said, I get it. I see the officiating problem. And once you saw it, it's all you could see.

[Anne Morris]

Yep, yep. And I think where, and again, I say this as not a former basketball player, I stayed very far away from the sport. But the, the. It was. It's just a huge amount of variability. So suddenly this like, who's on the court calling the game becomes very meaningful in the outcome of the game, which degrades the quality of the experience for the players and the fans and everyone who. Who's watching.

[Frances Frey]

And so if as a league you wanted to improve the officiating, what you would do is look, well, how have other sports improved officiating? You'd look first to basketball, so that's NBA or college. And then you'd look at soccer and other sports that have officiating that matters. And what all of them have done is added transparency and accountability. And so step one is to own the fact that there is an issue and address it by trying to cobble together best practices. And for sure, there's gotta be reviews. Just like there's reviews and statistics for players. Well, there's reviews and statistics for officials in other leagues. It's clearly time to do that in the wnba. So that's what I would say is the first one is, let's go learn from everyone else who's in a somewhat similar experience.

[Anne Morris]

What's interesting to me about this whole story is none of it is unprecedented. You know, I think we can learn from other sports, we can learn from other basketball leagues. We can learn from organizations that have lost and rebuilt trust with key stakeholders. But it does feel particularly ripe for an apology moment. And we know what a good apology looks like. And it starts with owning it. Right. So there is an own it moment. We. We miss this. You know, we see it now, and we are so sorry for the. The cost of getting this wrong to the stakeholders we. We care the most about, including number one players, but also, you know, fans and owners. Everybody lost. We got it wrong, and everybody lost. Let's name it.

[Frances Frey]

I believe if the league came out and did that today, the commissioner would have a chance of saving her job. That's how much I believe. It's not too late for an apology, but without an apology, it would be very difficult for the commissioner to keep her job. Because if you don't acknowledge what everyone else is seeing with increasing clarity, it kind of doesn't matter how good you were in everything else. We just think you're out of touch.

[Anne Morris]

Yeah. And what we know about a good apology, you gotta own it, you gotta fix it, and you gotta stop it. You gotta convince us that you have a good plan going forward for how you're gonna fix the problem and how you're gonna continue to incorporate feedback into this problem as you get there. And this doesn't seem difficult. It's just the willingness to do it.

[Frances Frey]

And we know it's not difficult because we see it done in all of these other contexts. But what won't work is trust us. We have a black box that does it. We've got this. You've lost all. We've got this privileges.

[Anne Morris]

Yep. Yep. Great. And who should make that apology?

[Frances Frey]

The commissioner. Because the buck stops there.

[Anne Morris]

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[Anne Morris]

I want to talk about leadership broadly here and where is the opportunity and where we go from here. And we could spend this entire episode on a critique of the commissioner. But let me complicate this a little bit, please. So you know, in preparing for this episode, I spent a little bit of time learning about Kathy and learned a lot of things that I did not know that I think are gonna be relevant to the advice we might give her. So she had this pretty amazing career. She spent decades at Deloitte. She became the first woman to lead Deloitte us. It's a hundred thousand person organization. She clearly led it into a new era of competitiveness, was very successful. She, you know, had some, some basketball in her blood. She herself played in college. Her father was drafted by the Detroit Pistons. You know, it seems like these, the relationship skills that she clearly had that worked in that corporate environment did not transfer particularly cleanly into this ecosystem with a bunch of stakeholders and dynamics that were new to her probably I'm guessing there. I think she, in the last, you know, few years as she's been in her role and leading the league through Covid and I think a professionalization push and expansion and increasing interest. I think there were, there were clearly things that she did that were quite helpful to getting us to this moment where there's a high quality problem around how to keep the momentum going. So I want to, I want to bring some kind of can do energy to coaching her through this moment because this is clearly a person who, who with some experience sitting at the head of the table in, in difficult, complex, high pressure leadership roles and in the past has found her way through them and through them quite successfully. But this is a moment where what got her here is not going to get her there. And where I would start with her is that this is a crisis moment and the opportunity is going to require you to engage with urgency, curiosity, empathy around the stakeholders and take accountability for decisions you made that have brought you to this point. And if we look at her public statements, there Seems to be a distinct lack of accountability for how she finds herself in the middle of this burning building.

[Frances Frey]

I think you said it beautifully. If I had a highlighter, what got you here won't get you there. I think the hiring of Kathy was a great decision. I think Kathy's performance was great performance in the professionalization period of it. And it's not to say that she couldn't be the one that lets it go in the explosive growth that leads through the explosive growth, but she would have to lead differently. And there has been no evidence that she has the desire, much less the capacity, to lead differently. For example, she has never really developed relationships with players, and players are at the center of where the issues are right now. So I have no idea. But I bet she's got really good relationships with owners. I bet she has a really good relationship with the NBA, who has a partial ownership stake in the league without seeing any of that. I bet she's great at it. And I think that was what was necessary before the bridge.

[Anne Morris]

The other stakeholder I put on the list is I think she has succeeded in some really new and exciting media rights deals. I bet she navigated that.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah, I would push back a little bit. 10 years, $2.5 billion. It is 10x more than it was before. That's a long time to lock something in on the dawn of explosive growth. I have a feeling people are gonna be very sad in like, three years at how little and how long that is.

[Anne Morris]

But. So we'll give them, you know, maybe not an A plus, but reasonable people could disagree. Nobody is disagreeing about relationship with players, to your point. Nobody is really that coaches and coaches.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah, the players and the coaches, which is, you know, and coaches are employed, are closer to employees than they are to management in. In this league. Let's be super honest. They. They're the ones that get fined for saying things about officiating. She's finding players, she's finding coaches. Now could she learn how to develop relationships? She seems awfully smart and has developed relationships with others. So to me, I don't see it as much of a capability issue as a desire. And she has. But it is really hard to change when you don't think you have a problem. And there isn't any evidence. We don't know what goes on behind the scenes, but there's no evidence that she thinks she has a problem. And so I have seen very few people change without acknowledging the problem.

[Anne Morris]

Yeah, I think her public statement, which was received as kind of a bland and neutral document. I saw a spark. I had a spark of optimism because I think there was a newfound humility in it that I hadn't seen before and there was not a flurry of of five.

[Frances Frey]

Well then there might be Let me another another data point that might add to that interesting optimism. The league put out a schedule of when they award different MVP and you know, most valuable player and the best this, the best that they're on October 1st which has passed the all defensive team was supposed to be announced. This is a league that runs on clockwork and silence. So we're recording this on October 3rd. Still no word about it. That in and of itself is conspicuous but one of the things might be is that she calls the players to tell them that they've gotten she either shows up or calls them. One of the players very likely on the all defensive team is Nafeesa Collier. So maybe this is your newfound humility or newfound trying to figure out what to do differently and it might take more than 48 hours to figure out what to do differently and it should.

[Anne Morris]

Take more than 48 hours and it.

[Frances Frey]

Should take more than 48 hours.

[Anne Morris]

So let's say Kathy were part of this conversation. Frances, what coaching would you give her?

[Frances Frey]

I would ask the way I know that someone gets it is I ask them to describe the perspective of someone else in their own words. So I would ask her to articulate the player's point of view, the player's concerns with enough vivid detail that I believed she got it. So I would and I think that role playing that's like the sanding that would then we could go into how to co create the solution. But number one is I would make sure she could talk about the players at least as well as the players could talk about the players.

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[Dana]

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[Dana]

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[Anne Morris]

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[Anne Morris]

So let's say you're a reformed commissioner of the WNBA now and you are now coming back to the table after walking through the fire of one of the most important players in the league calling you out as being a terrible leader. You've heard the critique, you've thought about it, you totally understand how she got there, and now let's go have the most important conversation. So let's go there.

[Frances Frey]

If I may, I'd like to zoom out for a moment. So this is in many ways a classic story of a sleepy industry that got onto a rocket ship of growth due in part to some of the things it had done, but in much larger part out of luck. And now that the league is moving really quickly, it may well have outpaced the capacity of some of the people that had been there before. And we see this in organization after organization. Individuals don't necessarily evolve at the same pace of the external context. And that means whenever you get a suddenly bigger pie, the stakes become really high. And that's what has happened here. There is fighting over who should get which portion of this bursting piece. So that's one issue is value creation and value capture, which is always an issue, but is particularly an issue when things explode.

[Anne Morris]

And the distribution here, the main point of friction is between the league and kind of people with an ownership stake in the league, owners, equity holders, and then the players.

[Frances Frey]

That's exactly right.

[Anne Morris]

Yep. Yep. This biggest confronting, I would begin with.

[Frances Frey]

The collective bargaining agreement. And I would begin with waxing poetic about the value creation and the role the players have in the value creation of the league and how it has changed dramatically in the last 24 months so that we are in a new normal that none of us anticipated. And it is wildly exciting. And here are all of the reasons that it's because of the players. And then say, and thus we need a collective bargaining agreement that allows the players to capture as much of that value as possible. And I will be the person who is the intermediary between owners and players, by the way. That's what the commissioner's job is. I will be the person who, if it's a jump ball between owners and players, I'm on the side of players. I believe that they are the value creation engine. And I am going to gnaw off a limb to make sure that they get their fair share.

[Anne Morris]

All right, so can I offer a couple observations on this? I love where you're going. I think it's. Now this is a walk the talk moment. And she has this incredible opportunity because they're in the middle of this negotiation.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah, that's actually. It's unbelievable that she can walk the talk in public.

[Anne Morris]

Who gets that opportunity? It's a huge opportunity in the kind of never waste a crisis moment that this is. I, as a casual sports fan, you and I, women of a certain age, have lived through a number of breakdowns in these conversations in professional sport. I remember the baseball one vividly, which totally destroyed value for everyone. I don't know that the sport ever recovered from it. There was a major hockey one in my lifetime. Can you think of others? Yeah.

[Frances Frey]

And what you're referring to is when the breakdown is so much that there's a lockout.

[Anne Morris]

That there's a lockout and the game stops and everybody loses. Yes. So if there is this gravitational pull towards these talks devolving into an unproductive place. And I think it is an extraordinary opportunity for professional sports, period, to show people how to do this in another way. And I think there's. Given that everyone's paying attention and that the commissioner has now been humbled and that the world is paying attention to this game for the first time and that this is a national treasure of a league that the nation is invested in preserving. You have a theater that is built to change history that you have never had before. And so what does it look like to do something differently here?

[Frances Frey]

I have goosebumps when you said that, by the way.

[Anne Morris]

The predictable thing is everyone protects their interests and we can't agree. So what does it look like to do something differently? I want Kathy to show up not just alone as a representative. I want her to show up. She and her colleagues have built this extraordinary network of equity investors. There's like Magic Johnson and Tom Brady and Sue Bird. You know, I was looking at the list. Alex Rodriguez, Martha, Leslie, like all of these, all of these players who have been here before. Like, let's get everyone involved in showing the world a different way to get through these moments.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah. And here are the. If I could give guiding principles because we fall back on how complicated everything is, here would be my.

[Anne Morris]

So complicated.

[Frances Frey]

So complicated. Here would be my guiding advice. Be guided by simple, transparent, fair. Simple, transparent, fair. And if you're wondering what's fair, just look at the comps. It's like, am I being paid fairly? I look at the comps of other leagues. Don't conjure fairness on your own. Just look at the comps. And so simple and transparent and fair. No black box. Simple, transparent and fair. And I, you know, it's really hard to get any numbers out because they. There isn't much transparent, which is also.

[Anne Morris]

A dumb fucking feature of all of these negotiations and all these other sports too.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah.

[Anne Morris]

That nobody has accurate data that is it profitable? Is it not profitable? Is it a sleight of hand on the accounting? And we can have.

[Frances Frey]

It's our own separate thing on the red herring of profitable or not. And the. And the asset appreciation. Not even going to go there. But just to say there is a way to take all of that complexity and describe it in an elegantly straightforward, simple, transparent and fair way. And by the way, here's like the secret. I don't even think the Players are asking for that much. Like I'm going to just give you an example. The players today, each team pays the players $1.5 million. In total, the whole team $1.5 million. The estimate of how much a team is worth is $300 million. They pay $1.5 million. You and I love the phrase 10x. Imagine if it 10x, it would be $15 million on an asset of 300 million. They're not even asking for that much. That's the tragedy in all of this.

[Anne Morris]

The other thing I'm stuck on is that there is this model in the NBA that is tested, well established for the sharing of so called, what is it? Basket related revenue. Yeah. Basketball related income. So this is tickets, sponsorships, like merchandise sale. We have this model in this other league and I totally understand they're not the NBA yet in terms of profitability. They're still, we're still getting there, whatever there is. Because again to your point, how do you do this differently from the past from other leagues? Like let's open this black box. So we're all, look, we're working with the right data.

[Frances Frey]

Yeah.

[Anne Morris]

So we have this framework that works. Okay, so then why don't we understand there's this debate is how fast are we going to get there? Fine. There's lots of precedent for like contractual terms that allow for uncertainty. So let's get there over time. You know, let's get there at a reasonable pace. Let's hit these milestones and then that will trigger. This is, this is not complicated from a legal standpoint. If we can't agree on certain aspects of reality, then we put frameworks in place that allow.

[Frances Frey]

And here is, I'll give you an illustrative example on the fair part of it. The simple, transparent and fair. So NBA players get paid more than WNBA players. They should. NBA players get paid every year more than they did the year before because the league is growing. If the league was shrinking every year, the NBA would be paid less than it was the year before. So that is, it is built in as a percentage of revenue. And in fact it's a simple, transparent and Fair number. It's 50%. So in the NBA, 50% of basketball related revenue goes towards compensation of the players. And that's. So that's a comp, that's something that you can look at if you look at the WNBA first. It's hard to calculate it, but no one has estimated it to be above 10%. And the more pristine the economic excellence, it's closer to 7%. So we're not.

[Anne Morris]

Which is a number that has gone down over time, not up.

[Frances Frey]

It's a number that has gone down, not up. So that we are in a single digit down, not up compared to the NBA who's a part owner of the league. That's the part that it isn't even. It's not discussed in an adult to adult way. Instead it's masked with words like, it wouldn't be sustainable for us to do that. Do you know what I want to do with when somebody says that it wouldn't be sustainable? It's like when somebody says you need more executive presence. And I want to.

[Anne Morris]

Well, that word, I mean that word now has become triggering. Triggering and weaponized. Yes.

[Frances Frey]

Like can't use that word anymore. But don't look for a new word. Instead look for simple, transparent and fair. I was saying to Kathy what you should be doing in these 48 hours of private time that you have. Convince yourself why 50% isn't the right number and get as close to 50% as you can. And to your point, you don't have to get there overnight. Give us a five year plan how we're gonna get and nobody's gonna care. This is where I think you're gonna find the players so willing to be partners in the value creation and value capture plan. But what you can't do is be utterly dismissive in a complicated, not transparent and what appears to be unfair way.

[Anne Morris]

Excellent. Francis, we are close to our time on this conversation, so will you summarize what our advice to the league is?

[Frances Frey]

Yeah. So my advice to the league is take a beat, listen to the chorus of comments around you and believe them and then think, do you want to be the one who repairs the relationship? You might not want to be, in which case hand the job to someone else, but if you want to be the one who repairs the relationship. This is a player issue. Everyone that's arguing is arguing on behalf of players. So if you want to be the one who does it, start with an apology and then be guided by simple, transparent and fair. But I want your next phase of leadership to become. If you were professionalizing the league in phase one, in phase two, it's the champion of the players. Do you want to become a commissioner that is a player's champion in phase two? Because if not you, they'll find someone else who does. And I'm not saying you don't have the capacity to do it. I'm just showing you have. I'm just saying you haven't yet shown the willingness to do it.

[Anne Morris]

Yeah. I want the league to treat this as the crisis it is with the very real stakes that to its credit, it has created. Which this is a league with a lot to lose right now. And I think it is an opportunity to show the entire world how to do these things. How to do these things, because the world doesn't know. There is just a pattern of these conversations going poorly and these moments not turning into your point moments where relationships get repaired and emerge even stronger than where they started. So this league has a chance to show us how to do better here. And I think doing it better means doing it differently. And I want Kathy, after a moment of reflection, so I think she appropriately is being silent right now to show up, take ownership, bring a whole bunch of people with her, signal that we are going to channel this into an amazing outcome in this agreement where players finally are feeling seen and heard. And I am finally, on behalf of this league, taking responsibility for how this conversation and relationship has broken down, in particular over the course of the last year. So here is the plan. Here is the plan. Here's how we're going to fix the officiating and incorporate feedback, player safety into it. Player safety. And here's how we are going to get to the finish line on this agreement where everyone feels really good going forward. I want the bar to be even higher now as opposed to, you know, incrementally muddling our way to the finish line. I want to say no, we're going to be wildly successful. I hear you. I get it. Finally, I get it. And I am sorry it took this long and this many swings and this many injuries to get my attention. But I am here. We're going to get there. I'm not going to try to do it alone. I'm going to bring all of my friends with me who care about a great outcome here, and we're going to get this done in the next three weeks. Okay, Francis, final advice to the players in this situation.

[Frances Frey]

If someone comes to you as a different version of themselves, please be open to receiving them through their redemptive offering. So my advice to the players is interact with whatever version of Cathy comes forward in good faith.

[Anne Morris]

I love that. Create the space for grace and redemption in this story if the league and if Kathy seeks it out. If you want to be on Fixable.

[Frances Frey]

Please call us at 234- FIXABLE. That's 234-349-2253 or email [e-mail].

[Anne Morris]

Fixable is a podcast from Ted. It's hosted by me Anne Morris and me Frances Frey. This episode was produced by Rahima Nassa from Pushkin Industries. Our team includes Constanza Gallardo, Banban Chang, Daniela Balaurasso and Roxanne Hylash and our.

[Frances Frey]

Show was mixed by Louis at Storyyard.

[Dana]

Morning Zoe Got donuts.

[Jeff Bridges]

Jeff Bridges why are you still living above our garage?

[Dana]

Well I dig the mattress and I want to be in a T mobile commercial like you teach me.

[Jeff Bridges]

So Dana oh no, I'm not really prepared. I couldn't possibly at T Mob we'll get the new iPhone 17 Pro on them. It's designed to be be the most powerful iPhone yet and has the ultimate pro camera system.

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[Dana]

Impressive. Let me try. T Mobile is the best place to get iPhone 17 Pro because they've got the best network.

[Anne Morris]

Nice.

[Jeff Bridges]

Jeffrey, you heard them.

[Dana]

T Mobile is the best place to.

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[Dana]

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Dude, my work here is done.

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