THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
THE TRANSATLANTIC MAGAZINE
Happy Spring! The season where we’re still a month away from the NHL and NBA playoffs, neither of which has (so far in history) extended into actual summer. But just wait. Honestly, Tampa Bay vs Las Vegas in June was never on my hockey bingo card.
While we’re on the subject of hockey, my last column about politics and sport proved particularly accurate in its perpetuation of the now more widespread than ever belief that President Trump possesses an amazing Reverse Midas Touch. Everything he embraces turns to ...how to put it politely? Pardon my French: “Les joueurs de hockey Américaine ont marché dans de la merde!” And the magic rubs off. Take Jack Hughes, the scorer of the winning overtime goal against Canada. He should be an American hero in the order of Mike Eruzione or Jim Craig from the 'Miracle on Ice' 1980 team. Instead, Hughes is now threatening to sue the Hockey Hall of Fame in Toronto because they have “his” puck on display. Hughes forgot to dig the puck out from the goal, nor did he try to get his hands on it after the game. Now, after the IIHF donated it to the Hall, he wants it “for his father”. At least Trump and Kash Patel gave the players back the medals they put around their own necks.
Meanwhile, there was much less publicity afforded to Venezuela’s victory over the USA in the final of the World Baseball Classic (WBC). There was also no “Pete Hegseth, Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, your boys took a hell of a beating” moment – borrowing from a Norwegian commentator’s exultations when his team beat England in a FIFA world cup qualifier in 1981. The WBC, which is a good idea which went through its germinal stages when I worked for Major League Baseball in the early Nineties, has grown into big event, though still hampered by the timing of its spring training, scheduled before many of the countries have begun seasonal play and after the end of play in the Caribbean leagues.
The WBC also has a lot of artificial nationality, even more than rugby which at least requires you step off an airplane in your new home country. This is to expand the nations pool, which ought to have a positive effect on the growth of the sport worldwide, but when you look carefully, you’ll see that baseball and rugby are remarkably similar in their worldwide reach (which will come as a great surprise to your Brit friends who assume all major sports originated in England). The two sports share a small group of elite “top tier” nations, some of which are not independent states. Baseball’s is the USA, Japan, Cuba, Canada, Dominican Republic, South Korea, Venezuela, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Taiwan, Australia and Colombia (Nicaragua and Panama, Italy and the Netherlands might be considered fringe contenders). Rugby’s is New Zealand, South Africa, France, Ireland, England, Australia, Argentina, Wales, Scotland, Italy, Samoa, Fiji and Tonga (Japan, Georgia, Spain, USA and Canada might be considered its fringe). Puerto Rico is of course a US commonwealth, while England, Wales and Scotland are all part of Great Britain (and the UK), and Ireland – for rugby’s purposes – includes Northern Ireland, which is also part of the UK. All clear?
In rugby, players change nationalities all the time, often playing internationally for more than one country in their careers. In the WBC, the rosters of the bottom tier teams were filled with ringers with modest ties to countries like Israel, Britain or Italy. In rugby the movement of players from Pacific Islands into Australian and New Zealand sides has in part fueled some of the exodus of Antipodean players into the Northern Hemisphere.
But the reality was, even in America, the semifinals and finals of the WBC produced considerable interest, and the matchup should have been a headline writer’s dream. But of course none of the US journalistic world really wanted to make much of that – not least when Venezuela won. They weren’t even invited for McDonald’s in the under-construction White House ballroom.
It took a long time, and the establishment of a new league, to deliver a new Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) between the Women’s National Basketball Association and their Players Association which will guarantee the new season starts on time on May 8th. The players had opted out of their existing agreement 17 months ago. They showed up at their All-Star game wearing tee shirts reading “Pay Us What You Owe Us”. When the deal expired, at the end of the 2025 season, Minnesota Lynx star and players association vice-president Napheesa Collier called out WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, saying, “We have the best players in the world. We have the best fans in the world. But right now we have the worst leadership in the world.” Collins also claimed Engelbert had told her the players should be “on their knees thanking their lucky stars” because the league put them into position to make big money on sponsorship deals. Yet WNBA star Caitlin Clark, the most prominent face of the league, was among many whose college earnings, supposedly from their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL) rights, had far outstripped their WNBA incomes.
Negotiations continued, and as Engelbert made clear, the new CBA was “transformational”. Of course the former CEO of Deloitte said a lot more in corporate word-salad, but her words were echoed in plainer English by another WNBA star and players association vice-president, Breanna Stewart, whose definition of “transformative” was “a deal where everyone gets exactly what they deserve”. Some wags might wonder if that applies to, say, Clark’s nemesis Angel Reese or her “enforcer” Sophie Cunningham, but I doubt it was meant to extend to on-court antics.
The reality is that the WNBA has established itself as a force in the America sporting scene. Led by Clark, whose celebrity began in college at Iowa, Stewart (a four-time NCAA champ at Connecticut) and fellow UConn stars A’ja Wilson and Paige Bueckers, the league has seen meteoric rises in attendance, TV ratings and advertising spend, much of it aimed at young women. Clark is front and center: she reliably broke crowd records everywhere she went. But the league was established as a spin-off, teams mostly located in existing NBA cities, with names chosen to reflect the established men’s teams (the Connecticut Sun, celebrating both the UConn women's success and the Mohegan Sun casino, being the major exception), and it was run as a monopoly by the NBA, not by individual billionaire owners. The league took the risk, but the players made it pay off.
“We opted out [of the contract] because what we were giving to the league and what we were getting back don’t match,” said Alysha Clark, a member of the players association executive committee. In fact, because salaries were low, and the league season was short (these are related issues) many WNBA stars played in the winter off-season in other countries, primarily Europe, including Russia, where Brittney Griner wound up in prison for carrying medical marijuana in her luggage.
One of the key elements of the negotiations between players and league was the prioritization rule, which forced veteran players to choose between playing in the WNBA or in full seasons overseas. It didn’t seem like a big point, but it reinforced what was possibly the most crucial negotiating point of all: Unrivaled, the 3 on 3 league founded by Collier and Stewart which debuted in 2025 and grew massively in 2026. The prominence of Collier and Stewart, who like Wilson and Bueckers are UConn products, says something about the way UConn produces women from its program and also the way the program’s growth in Connecticut presaged the current boom. With 3x3 basketball now part of the Olympic lineup alongside 5 on 5, this was not some sort of bizarre experiment.
Unrivaled reflected something my brother and I used to discuss when the NBA players were having contractual problems with the league. It seemed to us the players could do better forming their own barnstorming league, hiring a promoter to book arenas around the country and choose however many teams of say, ten players each (you could even pick sides like in a playground, or a fantasy draft) and eliminate the middleman (i.e. the league). The 3x3 league isn’t quite that, but they played their first two 14-game seasons out of an HQ in Miami, expanding into games in various cities, including a record 21,490 crowd in Philadelphia. The team names include the Laces, the Lunar Owls and the Vinyl (at least it’s not the Latex) as well as the champions, Mist. The six-team league will be expanding to add the Hive and the Breeze, but is also talking about affiliating teams to specific cities or areas. This approach was tried by the nascent Premier Lacrosse League, which is similarly going to experiment with actual locations; they basically replaced Major League Lacrosse as the top outdoor league. Of course basketball has a far bigger reach than lacrosse.
Unrivaled’s teams have six players each, and pay an average $222,222 salary for the short season, enough to obviate much foreign play for WNBA players. It was powerful motivation, firstly for a change in the prioritization rule (the new one will supposedly reward players for staying at home, rather than penalize them for playing abroad), and more importantly as proof of the drawing power of the women’s game’s stars. Many of the league-friendly (and largely male) press poo-poohed the new CBA, because some of the final deal wound up not far off what was originally on offer, but that ignores both the concept of negotiation and the importance of smaller issues to the women’s league. Many smaller items were intended to place the WNBA players on the same level of respect from their owners as NBA players receive. Not that the overall salaries would be anything like those of NBA players, who play far more games in a far more popular league, but to reflect their position as top-flight fully professional athletes. In fact, flights, specifically charter flights rather than commercial, was a major issue. Anyone old enough to remember the days when NBA players flew commercial, in coach, will know many of the legendary stories. The Celtics were forced to march around Cleveland airport while waiting for their flight to New York, which was repeatedly delayed by storms, searching for non-hotdog meals. They delighted in recounting how as the exhausted team dragged themselves into the arena, Larry Bird told his teammates he wanted to take out their frustrations on the Nets. He then went up to Bernard King and said “Don’t take this butt-whooping personally, but I’ve been eating hotdogs all day,” leaving King perplexed then, and during the whooping of butt which took place.
It is hard to look at the new CBA as a defeat, however. The players got revenue-sharing; their 20% looks paltry next to the NBA players’ share of roughly 50% (which is about the same as the NHL or MLB), but it doubled the previous level and ensures a team salary cap which rises from $1.5 million to $7m per year, and a maximum salary (with star exceptions like the NBA’s) of $1.4m. Other side issues, like improved refereeing and unique ones like family planning and maternity care, were bigger to the players than many of the press think.
It’s a huge step forward in perception: if you present your players as major leaguers, they may be perceived as such. It says to fans of both sexes that this is a big league product, and it says to younger fans of the female persuasion that this is something aspirational. And things like attendance and jersey sales will soar, as well as the league’s and players’ popularity.
The deal came just in time: the training camps open in mid-April, just a week after the WNBA draft. Because of the uncertainty around the new CBA, fully 80% of the league’s players are unsigned. Other women’s pro leagues, like the Professional Women's Hockey League or the National Women's Soccer League will certainly take note, hoping to join the new boom in women's sports – but they may well look too at the example of Unrivaled – though there don’t seem to be many outlets for seven a side football or 3x3 hockey (except for overtime). In fact, Unrivaled uses something called Elam Ending for its games. After three seven-minute periods, the clock stops, and in the final period both teams chase a target which is the leading team’s score plus 11 points.
Imagine that on ice: the Overtime Hockey League has a certain ring to it.
