Diary of a WNBA negotiator

Summary

Podcast Summary: Planet Money – "Diary of a WNBA Negotiator"

Air Date: May 9, 2026
Hosts: Erica Barras, Emma Peaslee
Featured Guests: Alicia Clark, Brianna Turner

Episode Overview

This episode of Planet Money goes behind the scenes of one of the most historic collective bargaining negotiations in professional sports: the 2026 WNBA collective bargaining agreement (CBA). Through the eyes and diary entries of Alicia Clark, a three-time WNBA champion turned union negotiator, and supported by teammate and "hidden figures" math whiz Brianna Turner, listeners are taken inside a tense, high-stakes negotiation that will transform the economics of women’s professional basketball.

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Main Themes and Purpose

• Union Empowerment: Examining how WNBA players, led by Alicia Clark, took the lead in reshaping the league’s pay structure through sophisticated negotiation.
• Economic Context: How economic forces, revenue growth, and historic gender pay gaps informed negotiating demands.
• Negotiation Tactics: Real-time insight into strategies and obstacles at the bargaining table, from bluffing and stalling to holding the line for a fair deal.
• Historic Outcome: Understanding why the resulting agreement was not just a WNBA milestone, but a groundbreaking moment for women’s sports overall.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Alicia Clark’s Background and Motivation

• Clark’s reputation as a “tough, gritty winner” stemmed from a decorated career (00:11–00:56).
• Her lived experience through every tier of the league—rookie, bench player, starter—made her an ideal negotiator.
  • “I just knew that my lived experience would be so crucial and beneficial to this negotiation.” —Alicia Clark (05:32)

2. The Growth and Changing Landscape of the WNBA

• Initial low salaries and lack of amenities for WNBA players contrasted sharply with the NBA (06:29).
  • “Our practice court was a church gym.” —Alicia Clark (07:02)
  • “Adults, professional athletes sharing a hotel room.” —Alicia Clark (07:13)
• The league’s profile recently soared, highlighted by viral moments, new stars like Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, rising attendance, massive media deals, and greater sponsorship revenue (08:20–09:05).
• Despite these advances, salary and benefits had not kept pace with rising league revenues (09:12–09:28).

3. Strategizing for Negotiation

• Guided by Nobel laureate Claudia Goldin (11:00), players sought a fair revenue share.
  • “What you guys are fighting for is more than fair... It’s embarrassing what they’re paying you.” —Claudia Goldin via Alicia Clark (11:35)
• Goldin’s math established a rational benchmark: WNBA players, by revenue proportion, should earn about a quarter to a third of NBA salary—but actually made around 1/80th (12:21–12:47).

4. The Push for Revenue Sharing

• Players’ demand: a 40% revenue share, knowing NBA analogs get around 50%. The league countered with increased fixed salaries, not true revenue sharing (13:45–14:09).
• The players, aided by visual tools (pie charts, graphs), grasped how the owners’ proposals would shrink their share even as total revenue grew (14:38–15:40).

5. Negotiation Tactics: Bluffing, Pauses, and Deadlines

• The league’s claims of “hundreds of millions in losses” if players' terms were accepted sounded like classic bargaining “bluffs and puffs” (16:19).
  • “What they offered in the beginning was embarrassing. ...We have this amazing staff of advisors that are giving us facts, not, like, feelings.” —Alicia Clark (16:56–17:20)
• The league used delays (over six-week silences), sudden deadlines, and repeated stalling (17:35–18:48).
  • “They wasted six weeks and then all of a sudden created this false timeline...” —Alicia Clark (18:37)

6. Inside the Negotiation Room: Player Perspectives

• Personal routines: training in the mornings, negotiating into the early hours; camaraderie in downtime—playing cards, watching the Oscars, cheering together (19:03–23:19).
• “Hidden figures” (math/tactics) by Brianna “Breezy” Turner:
  • “I got real familiar with the charts... lots of charts.” —Brianna Turner (20:41)
  • Argued for housing benefits and financial protections for transient, often-traded athletes (21:33–21:47).

7. Ultimatums and the Power of ‘BATNA’

• Players prepared for worst-case outcomes by saving money in case of a strike—a critical part of their “Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement” (BATNA) (27:12–28:03).
  • “Every meeting ... tell your teammates to save their money. ... We want to be prepared.” —Alicia Clark (27:48)

8. The Breakthrough

• After lowering revenue share demands from 40% to 20%, the players delivered their own ultimatum: agree or we walk (28:14–28:41).
  • The league finally offered a comprehensive deal: a $7 million cap starting in 2026, and a 20% revenue share growing each year, with important ancillary benefits, including guaranteed housing and payments to retired players (30:12–30:41).
  • “[2:22am] we agreed. Underline, exclamation point. And put a big heart.” —Alicia Clark’s diary (30:48)

9. Aftermath and Legacy

• The agreement was heralded as the first comprehensive revenue share in U.S. women’s professional sports (31:30), with salaries for the lowest-paid player in 2026 surpassing what the highest-paid player made in 2025 (31:54).
• “This deal is gonna change the lives of so many players... you’re gonna see the results... for decades. So congratulations on an amazing transformational deal.” —Alicia Clark (31:07)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “Our share should grow as the business grows because we’re the reason the business is growing.” —Alicia Clark (02:26)
• “If the business grew, our share stayed the same.” —Alicia Clark, on the old CBA (13:41)
• “If two players have max salaries, that’s 40% of the cap right there. Then you’re leaving 60% of the cap for 10 people... trying to figure out math.” —Brianna Turner (21:07)
• “We really just got this done.” —Alicia Clark (30:41)
• “Now, the player’s math, built on the math of a Nobel laureate, is embedded in the pages of every WNBA player's contract.” —Erica Barras (32:02)

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Important Segment Timestamps

• Alicia Clark’s journey & early salary realities: 00:11–07:31
• League’s revenue & culture shift: 08:02–09:28
• Claudia Goldin’s advisory role & pay gap math: 11:00–12:47
• Revenue sharing explained: 13:00–14:09
• Bargaining tactics (bluffs, stalls): 16:19–18:48
• Inside negotiations, “hidden figures” math: 19:03–23:19
• Players discuss striking as a BATNA: 27:12–28:41
• Deal reached, players’ emotional reactions: 30:01–31:07

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Tone and Style

Throughout the episode, the language is frank, insightful, often emotional, and celebratory. The speakers maintain a tone of determination mixed with the candid, sometimes gritty humor and camaraderie characteristic of both athletes and activists.

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This episode serves as both an inside look at union negotiations and a landmark in women's sports economics, capturing the personal stakes, strategic calculations, and transformative outcome of the WNBA’s historic new agreement.

Transcript

[Erica Barras]

This is Planet Money from npr.

[Emma Peaslee]

There's this player in the wnba, her name is Alicia Clark, who has kind of a reputation.

[Alicia Clark]

I think my teammates would describe me as a tough, gritty, winning like a winner.

[Emma Peaslee]

Can you go into winner a little bit? Like, what does that mean?

[Alicia Clark]

I'm gonna be in the right position at the right time. I'm gonna be prepared to. Yeah, I just wanna win at all costs. And whatever that looks like, whatever I need to do is what I'll do, so. And I have a track record of winning.

[Erica Barras]

Yeah, she's understating it a little bit, actually. When we were talking to her, the only time she seemed kind of bored was when she was listing her accomplishments

[Alicia Clark]

going back to high school. Like, I won a state championship.

[Emma Peaslee]

She went on to win championships in college and in overseas leagues, then in

[Alicia Clark]

the wnba, winning three championships with three of the. How many teams have I played for?

[Emma Peaslee]

So just to be clear, we're talking to a three time WNBA champion.

[Alicia Clark]

Yes.

[Emma Peaslee]

Awesome. But recently, she took part in a competition that had higher stakes than any game she's ever played.

[Erica Barras]

Alicia knows long, grueling workouts. She's learned dozens of defensive schemes and offensive plays. She's used to practicing, preparing, strategizing. But this was a totally different kind of endurance challenge, because instead of running

[Emma Peaslee]

drills, she was studying contracts and labor law.

[Alicia Clark]

You know, taking the time to sit down and go through this 300 page document and read. And if it was something I didn't understand, I googled it. And I'm like, okay, what does X, y and Z mean? Oh, okay, got it. And so then I would go back and reread a section and then if there were questions, hey, I saw this. What exactly does this mean?

[Emma Peaslee]

She was doing all of this studying because for the first time in her life, she was going to be negotiating the contract for all the players in the wnba.

[Erica Barras]

And look, it's normal for players to be involved in collective bargaining when union workers sign a new contract with their employers. Some of the actual workers have to be part of the negotiations. So Alicia was going to be one of the players negotiating over things like parental leave, 401k, matching housing, stipends, and most importantly, pay.

[Emma Peaslee]

What was not normal was how potentially historic this new contract could be. The WNBA has seen astronomical growth since the players got their last contract six years ago. And the players were saying, wait a minute, this is our moment. We want our fair share.

[Alicia Clark]

Our share should grow as the business grows, because we're the reason the business is growing.

[Erica Barras]

All Alicia and the other negotiators had to do was get the league to agree. Hello and welcome to Planet Money. I'm Erica Barras.

[Emma Peaslee]

And I'm Emma Peaslee. Alicia Clark and the other players had a once in a generation opportunity to change the future for all of women's basketball and maybe all of women's sports. And it came right down to the buzzer.

[Erica Barras]

Today on the show we go courtside to one of the most important union negotiations in professional sports history and learn what it's like to be a rookie doing high stakes bargaining. From bluffs and puffs to strategic silence and something called Batna and the Ringer Economics Swish

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[Emma Peaslee]

is a forward for the Dallas Winks, but over her time with the WNBA she has been in pretty much every position being cut from her team twice, being a bench player, getting the minimum

[Alicia Clark]

WNBA salary, being the like middleman in terms of I'm not the superstar, but I'm not a rookie.

[Erica Barras]

Then being a starter, winning all those championships. She says that's why she stepped up a couple years ago to help negotiate this contract.

[Alicia Clark]

I just knew that my lived experience would be so crucial and beneficial to this negotiation.

[Emma Peaslee]

Alicia is the oldest player in the league. 38. And when she first started thinking about these contract negotiations two years ago, she knew what she did not want. The kind of contract she had back when she was a rookie. What was your salary?

[Alicia Clark]

My salary? Oh, I think I wrote it down. Let me check. Hold on.

[Erica Barras]

You're pulling out like a red diary notebook, deal.

[Alicia Clark]

Yeah, I am. I am.

[Erica Barras]

Yes. Alicia Clark starts flipping through a real old school diary during the contract negotiations. She was making entries multiple times a day in her careful cursive writing.

[Alicia Clark]

This is. This was my handy dandy notebook.

[Emma Peaslee]

Do you normally keep, like a diary or a.

[Alicia Clark]

No, I am like a diary, like, journal person. Just. Cause I like to remember stuff and I have so many thoughts.

[Erica Barras]

She finds the page she was looking for.

[Alicia Clark]

So my first contract, I think, was $36,400.

[Emma Peaslee]

That was during her first WNBA season in 2012.

[Alicia Clark]

I looked at it, I was like, okay, I'm making $36,400 for five months. Like, that's decent. And I'm like, I'm not gonna look at the rest of the months of the year. We'll figure that out later. But for these five months, I was just like, this is what professional athletes are making. Or at least the women professional athletes.

[Erica Barras]

Nothing they had was like what the men had.

[Alicia Clark]

Our practice court was a church gym.

[Emma Peaslee]

Alicia says they flew economy in middle seats. If you were a rookie, didn't matter how tall you were. And when they traveled, most players had

[Alicia Clark]

roommates, adults, professional athletes sharing a hotel room.

[Erica Barras]

Did you say anything about it? Like, I know you were like, well, this is good, but were you. Did it occur to you be like, wait, should I get more?

[Alicia Clark]

Oh, no. There was. There was no thought or even opportunity to get more. That is. That's just what you got.

[Erica Barras]

At the time, the WNBA was not turning a profit, which is typical for a new league. Many professional sports leagues don't make money for a while. Alicia says when the WNBA players asked for more money, they were always told the same thing. No one comes to the games. The revenue just isn't there.

[Emma Peaslee]

In the beginning, the NBA owned the WNBA. They're still majority owners. And in their 2002 negotiations, the NBA commissioner threatened to cancel the upcoming season if they couldn't reach an agreement.

[Erica Barras]

But over Alicia's Career women's basketball has changed a lot. It started slow. More people going to games, more television stations showing them. During the height of the pandemic, they were one of the only sports on television and. And ever since, women's basketball has gone bonkers.

[Emma Peaslee]

Remember when Caitlin Clark broke the NCAA all time scoring record? Here comes Clark.

[Erica Barras]

How will she go for history? She got so popular, she was invited on Saturday Night Live.

[Alicia Clark]

Here to comment is Caitlin Clark.

[Erica Barras]

Thanks for having me.

[Emma Peaslee]

When Angel Reese's first preseason game with the Chicago sky wasn't televised, a fan streamed the game from their phone and it got 500,000 views. And off the court, angel is a regular at the Met Gala.

[Erica Barras]

So now money is coming in from skyrocketing ticket prices and advertising revenue. The league is projected to get $3.1 billion over the next 11 years from a new media rights deal.

[Emma Peaslee]

And the players have gotten better deals as things have changed. They got rid of the roommates recently. They've been flying charter, they got parts

[Erica Barras]

parental leave, and they got somewhat higher salaries. Last year, the minimum salary, like for a rookie was around $66,000. And for the first time, the players did get a bonus because the WNBA made enough money to trigger it.

[Emma Peaslee]

But going into contract negotiations this year, with the WNBA pie growing exponentially, Alicia was on a mission. Can you tell us a little bit about what was on your wish list?

[Alicia Clark]

Yeah, I mean, everything. We were like, where do we start?

[Erica Barras]

Literally everything needed to be thrown. Thrown out and started over again.

[Alicia Clark]

No, literally. That's literally what we said. We were like, this all needs to be scrapped and we need to like

[Erica Barras]

redo this entire cba, the entire collective bargaining agreement. And if you're gonna ask for more of everything Alicia learned, you have to be able to explain why when an

[Emma Peaslee]

organization is making a profit, there are no rules that say management has to take this much and labor gets this much. You make it up. And when you're getting ready to negotiate, one thing you look for are comps in your industry, like other plumbers or teachers or whatever make this much money. So we should make that much.

[Erica Barras]

But there was no comparable professional women's basketball league in the country. And just asking for the same as what the men make. The average men's salary is around $10 million. Just wasn't going to work because despite all the growth of the wnba, it's still doesn't bring in nearly the kind of money the NBA does. The new pie is not that big.

[Emma Peaslee]

So it was going to take some complicated math to figure out a fair Comparison. And that was a first big challenge for the players as they prepped to start bargaining with the league.

[Alicia Clark]

Mind you, Claudia Goldin is on our side.

[Erica Barras]

You heard that right? Planet Money fam. The Claudia golden, the Nobel prize winning economic historian and labor economist. 2023 Prize in the economic sciences was awarded to Claudia Goldin. The prize motivation reads for having advanced our understanding of women's labour market outcomes. When the WNBA players asked Claudia after she won the Nobel to help them negotiate their pay, she said, okay, but for no pay. So she was one of the people advising the player side.

[Alicia Clark]

Did you get to meet her via Zoom?

[Erica Barras]

Via Zoom. What was that like? Can you describe it? What did she tell you?

[Alicia Clark]

I mean, just basically like, what you guys are fighting for is more than fair. And she was like, honestly, it's embarrassing what they're paying you guys. So just to know, like to have confidence that what you're fighting for is more than fair and they have it.

[Emma Peaslee]

We exchanged emails with Claudia. She didn't want to come on because she wanted the focus to be on the players. And she said the math she was doing for them was, was not actually complicated. It was simple. It's all laid out in an op ed she wrote last year for the New York Times. Claudia wanted to find what a reasonable gap between the NBA and WNBA salaries would be by comparing their revenue. So she looked at what the W and the NBA each bring in from advertising, streaming, and game attendance.

[Erica Barras]

She accounted for the fact that the NBA season has more games, the games themselves are longer, and there are fewer WNBA teams. Then she crunched all those numbers and estimated that the average WNBA salary should be about a quarter to a third of the average NBA salary. In reality, Claudia calculated it was more like 1-80th.

[Emma Peaslee]

And part of the reason that gap existed is because of the WNBA's previous collective bargaining agreement. The players salaries were not tied to revenue. They grew at a fixed rate. That did not account for the incredible growth of the league.

[Erica Barras]

So that is the pot of money that Alicia and her negotiating team decided to zero in on revenue. They wanted what's called revenue share, which Alicia says she didn't really understand in her rookie years.

[Alicia Clark]

Like, you know what revenue is and you know, like, obviously revenue share is like, okay, you're sharing in the money that you're that's coming in. But like, what does that actually look like in the terms that they have?

[Emma Peaslee]

The players did have an opportunity for some rev share from an earlier contract. That's how they got those bonuses last year. But the way the agreement worked. Their salaries and their share of the revenue didn't grow at the same pace as the WNBA's overall revenue.

[Alicia Clark]

If the business grew, our share stayed the same.

[Erica Barras]

So they sent their first proposal to the league in February of 2025. And what they asked for was 40% of revenue to split between players. We know now they were willing to settle for less. But negotiators usually start out with something called an anchor number to influence the direction of negotiations. By the way, NBA players get about 50% of Rev share using a different system.

[Emma Peaslee]

In response to the WNBA players proposals, the league did eventually offer some big jumps in salaries. And at one point they said they'd increased the max salary from about 250k to more than a million. But they were still insisting on a fixed rate system. They were not budging on the players rev share ask.

[Erica Barras]

So they're going back and forth and Alicia and the other negotiators are following along with help from, you could say the Claudia golden team, the math team.

[Alicia Clark]

I'm a visual person, so I needed to see, like, you can tell me something, but I'm like, let me just see. And so they created like pie charts for us. Like, hey, I love pie charts. You know, it's amazing. And so it was like, hey, here is what happened, right? Like, here's the revenue, here's their estimated. What they're saying, what they're offering you is this piece, okay?

[Emma Peaslee]

But they told the players, now watch the pie. As the years go by, look at the revenue the league is projecting.

[Alicia Clark]

Here's what they're projecting the league to make over, you know, the next five years. And here's what happens to your share that they're offering you over those five years. And when you see it, you're like, what? Why is that getting smaller?

[Erica Barras]

Why isn't it getting bigger with the increased revenue?

[Alicia Clark]

And it's like, exactly. So in our revenue model, here's what it would look like. That was really eye opening because, you know, they're like, oh, there's million dollar contracts. There's this, there's average salary of this. And the players just see the numbers and everyone's just like, but look at the salaries. And it's like, look at this pie chart. Look at this chart. Look at how this.

[Emma Peaslee]

Look at the graph. As the negotiations move forward, Alicia and the other players on the committee had to pay the closest attention to every detail. This was a game they were only just learning to play. And with any game, there are lots of techniques we've actually Been looking at

[Erica Barras]

a list of, quote, hard bargaining techniques on a Harvard Law School post about negotiation tactics, things negotiators might use in a situation like this. Now, a source with the league told us, quote, we did not rely on negotiating tactics or anything of that nature. But we think that some of the experiences Alicia told us about sound a little like some of the tactics on the list.

[Alicia Clark]

They said they would lose hundreds of millions of dollars if they did it our way. That was their whole spiel. I mean, they said it in the. In. In the media all the time. We would lose hundreds of millions of dollars if we did it the way the players want to do it.

[Emma Peaslee]

To us, that sounded a little like a technique the Harvard Law School calls bluffing and puffing. Their post says these kinds of exaggerated claims and misrepresentations can throw negotiations off track.

[Erica Barras]

And Alicia said it really helped to have their own math in their pocket, especially when they thought the league was seriously lowballing them.

[Alicia Clark]

What they offered in the beginning was embarrassing. I was like, this is actually embarrassing. And the fact that you put it in writing is even more embarrassing because I'm like, we have this amazing staff of advisors that are giving us facts, not, like, feelings. And, you know, we're all in our feelings about stuff, et cetera. But let me show you what is actually here. That's where the confidence was gained.

[Emma Peaslee]

Another negotiating strategy it seemed like the players might have encountered. This one is on some other lists of labor negotiating tactics, is what you might call a strategic pause. Like a pause in conversation. Or in this case, a pause in the whole negotiation.

[Alicia Clark]

Yeah.

[Erica Barras]

Alicia says in December, 10 months into the negotiation, after the players sent a new proposal, the league went silent, waited more than six weeks to respond. Our source on the lead side says this was not a negotiating tactic and that the union's prior proposal did not warrant a response. Regardless, after what seems like a dramatic pause, the league invited the players to come to their headquarters in New York. This was now February.

[Alicia Clark]

And so we were like, okay, they're calling a meeting. Like, surely they're gonna come with something, right? And they showed up with nothing.

[Erica Barras]

Why call a meeting then?

[Alicia Clark]

That's what we were trying to figure out. Like, you had people dropping everything to come to New York to be here for this, and you guys don't even show up with a proposal.

[Emma Peaslee]

Next, the league made a move that, to us, sounds kind of like what the Harvard Law School list calls threats and warnings.

[Erica Barras]

After the six weeks of silence and the big nothing of a trip to New York, Alicia Says the league gave the players a suddenly urgent deadline. If you don't sign a contract by March 10, the season will be in jeopardy.

[Alicia Clark]

They wasted six weeks and then all of a sudden created this false timeline that we all of a sudden all had to be. Had to jump on. And it was like, okay, well, where was this sense of urgency when you wasted these six weeks?

[Emma Peaslee]

For the record, our person on the league side says it was not a threat or warning. Either way, by now they were way behind schedule and the start of the season was looming. So in March, both sides agreed to get together in person in New York again.

[Erica Barras]

Alicia packed a bag, thinking, it's just

[Alicia Clark]

for a few days, you know, I was like, what can we get in this carry on?

[Erica Barras]

And in that carry on was her trusty diary.

[Emma Peaslee]

This meeting seemed for real because they had blocked off the entire third floor of the Langham Hotel on Fifth Avenue in New York. There was a conference room with a big rectangular table. And Alicia said the first meeting between the players and the league was very

[Alicia Clark]

passionate because at this point we were so pissed off at how. At how they were moving.

[Erica Barras]

In her diary, she wrote down what she heard the league say after they all sat down.

[Alicia Clark]

This is from March 10th. Okay, let me double check my. Yeah, it was like, we're putting forth a proposal now. We'd like to walk out tonight and get a deal done on day one. We were like, I'm sorry, what?

[Emma Peaslee]

That didn't happen. Instead, for days, they went back and forth with proposals covering not just rev share, but all the other little details, like when the season should start, how many training staff should there be, should the players be provided with cars?

[Erica Barras]

Alicia and the other players on the exec committee quickly settled into a routine. They did their workouts in the morning, and then in the afternoon, they negotiated, and Alicia kept hiring entries.

[Alicia Clark]

We met today at 12:45 to go through the proposal the league sent. After 5:00am we went through Rev Share housing.

[Emma Peaslee]

They did make some progress right away with the help of an aptly nicknamed player who was on the negotiation team.

[Alicia Clark]

Breezy was working on her charts with the numbers and salaries and, you know, that's why we called her Breezy. Hidden fans figures Turner.

[Brianna Turner]

I got real familiar with the charts.

[Emma Peaslee]

That's Brianna Turner. She's a forward for the Las Vegas Aces and the WNBA Players association treasurer.

[Brianna Turner]

I was just all in the Excel and like the Google sheets and had my notes and was just making lots of charts.

[Erica Barras]

Breezy on the court, hidden figures in

[Emma Peaslee]

the negotiation room because she'd take whatever proposal the league was offering and stick it in her spreadsheet and see what it really meant.

[Brianna Turner]

The chart I was making was just like, looking at like, a $5 million salary cap. Like, I think the league came back with like the maximum salary being like 20% of the cap and thinking like, okay, if two players have max salaries, that's 40% of the cap right there. Then you're leaving 60% of the cap for 10 people. They're just like, trying to figure out math.

[Erica Barras]

We see you hidden figures.

[Emma Peaslee]

Brianna also got into it with the league when they proposed cutting housing out of their package. They were saying, basically, you're making more money. You can pay for your own housing. But Briana argued, in the more transient and sometimes fickle world of professional sports, that could leave players without a place to live.

[Brianna Turner]

So it's like, what happens? You get cut or you get traded,

[Erica Barras]

then you're on the hook for rent in a city that you don't even live in anymore.

[Brianna Turner]

Like, you're just expecting these landlords to be nice when, like, realistically that's not the case.

[Emma Peaslee]

Brianna says she addressed the full room.

[Brianna Turner]

What happens in LA in 22 8? And they're like, what do you mean? And I was like, the Olympics, like, do you think housing costs are gonna rise that summer? And they were just like. You can just tell they hadn't considered that before.

[Emma Peaslee]

The days were marathons ending at 1 or 2am for the players and 4 or 5am for the staff every single night.

[Brianna Turner]

I was just praying the security would kick us out. I was like, please cook us out of this building. Please get us out of here.

[Erica Barras]

They weren't really bothered by the quick moving parts of the negotiations. They're used to a fast paced competition, and it was the slow moving parts that frustrated them the most when they were benched but still in the game. Like when just the lawyers were in the room talking without them. What did you do when you waited?

[Brianna Turner]

I feel like I did everything and nothing. Like, I was just scrolling, watching stuff on my laptop, making my little charts, getting fresh air.

[Emma Peaslee]

They played card games, went on walks. Everyone had shows they were watching. And sometimes they all watch things together, like the Oscars. Alicia says they were watching when the first woman cinematographer won for Sinners.

[Alicia Clark]

We were all like, let's go. Like, women are up, let's go. This is a sign, like, just, you know. And then, like when Michael B. Jordan won for best actor, like, erupted. We were all in there, like, hooting and hollering like, it was just so dope it was a good time.

[Erica Barras]

Did anyone from the hotel come in and be like, why are you all screaming so loudly?

[Alicia Clark]

No. So they like came running. They're like, what? Wait, what happened? And we were like, oh, sinners just won an Oscar. And they were like, we thought maybe like you guys were cheering because a deal was being done. And we were like, oh, we didn't think of how that might come off.

[Erica Barras]

Yeah, no deal. By day six, the hotel had given the players cozy blankets and pillows so they were comfortable. But the negotiations were stalled, especially on the most important stuff, the money.

[Alicia Clark]

Alicia's journal entry, I even jotted. I was like, there wasn't an in person. No in person convos for the group have happened since last week. And it was like us being there was the whole point. So we could sit in front of you and negotiate and talk about these things, but you're not even allowing us to do that.

[Emma Peaslee]

Alicia says the players had lowered and lowered their rev share ask from 40% all the way down to 20. But they couldn't go any lower and still represent what the players said they wanted.

[Alicia Clark]

And I'm like, why do we keep allowing them to, like, blow through what we're asking? Like, we've asked for a response. And they keep being like, okay, maybe a little bit later. In a little bit, in a little bit. And I'm like, at what point are we going to put our foot down?

[Erica Barras]

That's when Alicia and her team of negotiators started really considering their own hard bargaining tactic. Maybe the biggest, hardest bargaining est tactic yet. That's after the break.

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[Erica Barras]

Sitting at that big rectangular negotiating table in their Fifth Avenue hotel, Alicia Clark and Briana Turner were thinking more and more about a hard bargaining tactic of last resort, one they really didn't want to use, but they had also planned

[Emma Peaslee]

for see, a few months earlier, Alicia and Brianna and the whole negotiating team had gone to the other 150 plus players in the league and asked them basically, hey, what do you want to do if they don't give us what we want?

[Erica Barras]

They were basically asking the players for their version of what experienced negotiators call batna best alternative to a negotiated agreement. Meaning what will you do if you don't reach a deal?

[Emma Peaslee]

And what the players said we walk. They authorize the strike if necessary. And Alicia says, this was a long time in the making.

[Alicia Clark]

Every meeting that we had as Player Leadership Executive Committee over the course of these last 18 months, it was save your money. Tell your teammates to save their money. Be sure you're saving your money. Be sure you're saving your money. We don't know what's going to come, but we want to be prepared and

[Erica Barras]

so jump forward to March. Six days into their negotiations, they're sitting around the hotel lounge wrapped in blankets, waiting and waiting for a satisfying response to their proposal.

[Alicia Clark]

I think the morale was like an effort type of feeling, to be honest. Like you're either about to come to this table and negotiate like you should have been, or we're walking like we're not going to continue wasting our time sitting here.

[Emma Peaslee]

That's when Alicia and the players instructed

[Alicia Clark]

their lawyer, tell Them. If they don't come back tonight, we're walking. And that was like, the first real time that I was like, buckle up.

[Erica Barras]

And this time, it was the players who gave the league a hardball deadline. You have till 9:30pm and this is a huge deal.

[Emma Peaslee]

It's a nuclear option. The players are going to lose their salaries, potentially lose a whole season.

[Erica Barras]

The league, for their part, is going to lose even more money if there's a strike because there will not be games. And if it goes on long enough, they could fully lose fans, lose momentum. That pie could start getting smaller instead of continuing to grow.

[Emma Peaslee]

9:30pm rolls around. Still no deal. But 20 minutes later, the league says, basically, hold tight. They're formatting and printing something up. At 10:55pm they meet like, one of.

[Alicia Clark]

So I hate when, like, people walk into a room and don't speak. So I said to them, good evening.

[Erica Barras]

Alicia has notes in her journal.

[Alicia Clark]

He literally was like, we're. What did he say? Contemplating an agreement for the first time for the shared basketball revenue systems, the rev share. I put big effing deal about them wanting to move to our system. Proud of this group.

[Erica Barras]

For another 24 hours, they went back and forth on details. And then on March 18, day eight, at 2am Alicia and Briana and the rest of the players are scattered around the conference room lying in their blankets.

[Alicia Clark]

I open up my laptop to start watching my show. Not even two minutes later, they come. Everybody in the room.

[Brianna Turner]

Everyone gets to the meeting room now. And we're like, oh, that's for serious voice.

[Emma Peaslee]

The league side starts talking.

[Alicia Clark]

You guys will have a $7 million cap starting in 2026. Your shared basketball revenue will be 20%. You know, it'll grow the 20% over the course every year.

[Erica Barras]

Alicia and the other players are looking at each other.

[Alicia Clark]

We were just kind of like, so does that mean you guys are accepting it? Like, what is. They're like, yes, we accept this deal. We accept this agreement. And we were like, okay, you could just say that, like, what?

[Emma Peaslee]

They had secured their 20% revenue share.

[Alicia Clark]

Holy crap. We really just got this done.

[Erica Barras]

She recorded her final diary entry from the negotiations.

[Alicia Clark]

I literally put in, like, huge things across the bottom two. 22am we agreed. Underline, exclamation point. And put a big heart, like, that's. That's what I put.

[Erica Barras]

I'm out.

[Emma Peaslee]

Peace.

[Alicia Clark]

Yeah, like, we did it.

[Emma Peaslee]

Oisha gives a weepy toast to both sides.

[Alicia Clark]

I'm gonna get emotional because this deal is gonna change the lives of so many players. Moving forward and everyone that spent time away from family and friends, you're gonna see the results of this for decades. So congratulations on an amazing transformational deal. Thank you for everybody's hard work and thank you for believing in this league and believing in us as athletes. So cheers.

[Erica Barras]

Cheers. This agreement was a big deal at the draft a few weeks later. The WNBA commissioner called it the first comprehensive revenue share model in the history of women's professional sports. And the ref share is just one of the big changes. The players secured housing for everyone and even one time payments to retired players so they get a cut too.

[Emma Peaslee]

And salaries overall are way higher. The lowest paid player in 2026 will make more than the highest paid player in 2025.

[Erica Barras]

So now the player's math, built on the math of a Nobel laureate, is embedded in the pages of every WNBA player's contract. Alicia gets to keep her reputation as a winner. And as for Brianna, also known as

[Emma Peaslee]

hidden figures, have you done anything for yourself to celebrate?

[Brianna Turner]

Like I got myself a new financial advisor, a new finance team.

[Emma Peaslee]

That's awesome. This episode was produced by me, Emma Peaslee, with help from Willa Rubin. It was edited by Marianne McCune. It was fact checked by Vito Emanuel. It was engineered by Jimmy Keeley and James Willis. Alex Goldmark is our executive producer.

[Erica Barras]

Special thanks to Aaron Drake, Dave Berry and Nola Aga. I'm Erica Baris.

[Emma Peaslee]

And I'm Emma Peaslee. This is npr. Thanks for listening.

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