The Living Legacy of A'ja Wilson
Overworked and underpaid!
On Wednesday night A’ja Wilson made history. Again.
Coming off an injury that benched her for one game (the first game she has missed in three seasons), A’ja Wilson broke the record for single-season scoring with 956 points, a title previously held by Jewell Loyd, who scored 939 points last season. This makes Wilson 44 points away from reaching 1,000 points in a single season which her 27.3 ppg avg (points per game average) will certainly allow.
*edit* A’ja Wilson just became the FIRST WNBA player to hit 1000 points in a single season. She scored 29 points against the Connecticut Sun tonight, securing the 25th win for the Aces this season!!!
It would be silly to try and explain the impact Wilson has made on basketball, the WNBA, and women’s sports in one substack post, but I will try. She is a 2x WNBA MVP and 2x Olympic Gold medalist. A product of Dawn Staley’s University of South Carolina Gamecocks, she led them to their first NCAA championship in 2017 and again in 2018. That same year she was the first overall draft pick for the Las Vegas Aces (where she earned the title of Rookie of the Year) and again, helped her team win back-to-back championships in 2022 and 2023 (and my fingers are crossed for a threepeat). She’s the all-time leader in points and rebounds for the Aces. She once scored 53 points in a single game. As of February 2024, she’s a NYT Bestseller. This week’s broken record was a drop in the bucket.1
In addition to her dominance on the court, there has been an outpouring of love and praise for Wilson’s character by her teammates in last couple of weeks. Her kindness, leadership, acceptance, and commitment to her team have time and time again been the topic of post game interviews and press conferences. While there has been buzz about Wilson since she joined the league, as we get closer to the end of the MVP race her teammates are rallying for her harder than ever. Kelsey Plum spoke highly of Wilson during a post game interview: “She’s just a light, just like the type of human being she is. Y’all, we really need to cherish what’s happening live. I mean unanimous MVP, but, unanimous MVP as a human being…we gotta celebrate legends as they play.”2 During the press conference afterward this interview, KP doubled down on her thoughts with Wilson by her side.
The bond between these two runs deep. They have been teammates since Wilson got drafted and have been together through high highs and low lows. After a rough game two of the 2023 finals, Wilson pulled Plum aside telling her to “get her shit together.” Wilson said, “I’m gonna always push KP’s buttons…I want her to be the best, and if that means setting a bar so high that I know she probably can’t get to it…I’m going to [hold] her to that standard…We’re in this together…You’re not alone.”3 This “team first” mentality Wilson promotes is not just reserved for Plum. Even when Wilson is praised for her accomplishments, she would be remiss if she didn’t credit her team for her success. After Wednesday’s record breaking game, Wilson and teammate Alysha Clark got tearful talking about their mutual respect on and off the court. Wilson reminded reporters that she would get zero points, “without them passing me the basketball,” to which Clark responded by doubling down on Plum’s earlier sentiments about Wilson.
Everyone understands the feeling of watching history in real time, and when I watch A’ja, I get that feeling. Not only because she is unblockable, but because you can see the chemistry she has created with her team. Wilson’s love for and dedication to her team is undeniable and infectious, and vice versa. Wilson measures her success by theirs and continues day in and day out to keep her team at the top. She’s not just a good player, she’s a good person.
Despite how moved I felt by these interviews, I had a nagging feeling about how Wilson was being recognized outside of her teammates. Wilson’s success seems undeniable, but beyond (well-deserved) accolades and awards, what does Wilson tangibly receive? Certainly a high salary, no?
Despite A’ja Wilson being on the higher end of WNBA salaries, when compared to athletes of the same caliber, Wilson brings home a fraction of what they make. As a matter of fact, no single WNBA player comes close to even the lowest salaried players in the NBA. By like, literally millions of dollars. After a few google searches4 I became suddenly super passionate about how salaries work in sports, looking at how salaries are determined in each league and the differences athletes at the top of their game are making. Walk with me.
The NBA and WNBA, like most professional sports teams, have a salary cap, which is a restricted amount of money teams can spend on player salaries. Based on the CBA (Collective Bargaining Agreement) signed in 2020, team salaries in the WNBA increase by 3% each year.5 For the 2024 season, the WNBA salary cap was set at $1.46 million, which means a full team cannot distribute more than $1.46 million amongst their 12 players (this does not include hardship player contracts).6
While at first $1.46 million sounds like a hefty amount of money, it’s actually quite restrictive. Trading has to happen within this salary cap, meaning that when a team trades a lower salaried player, they must receive a player with an equal or less than salary. This is why trades don’t happen that often near the trade deadline—it’s quite literally a budget issue. Sure, to mere mortals who make minimum wage, over a million dollars hardly seems like a salary pool to complain about. But, when you begin to look at the salary caps in the NBA (or other major and premier league sports teams for that matter), the inequalities become clear. The NBA’s salary cap for their 2023-2024 season was $136 million…and yes…that is almost 93 times the amount of money that the WNBA gets per team.7
TLDR; Salary Caps in the WNBA vs. NBA are vastly different and players in the WNBA make nothing close to players in the NBA.
Let’s leave the salary cap abstract behind and look at the actual salaries players receive. To avoid making a false equivalence, I will only compare salaries of players that are in their same year of playing. Take the first draft pick rookie salaries For her WNBA first season, Caitlin Clark’s salary is $76,535.8 Comparatively, NBA 2023 first draft pick Victor Wembanyama made $12,160,680 in his rookie year.9 So there’s that.
Now fine, the devil on my shoulder wants to play advocate for a second. But Zelda, it says, A’ja Wilson is not a rookie! No she is not, she is actually a 2x championship winner with six years of experience in this league. So what is A’ja Wilson, a league-changing, once in a generation player, making? As of the 2024 season, Wilson was salaried at $200,000.10 In her sixth year of the WNBA, she is making almost $12 million less than a first year rookie in the NBA.
Although I would love to talk about the inequity in sports salaries across the board (think LA Dodgers player Shohei Ohtahni who just signed a $700 million deal and joined the MLB the same year Wilson joined the WNBA), I will stay in the realm of basketball.11
Let’s look at someone who is an equal to Wilson, someone with the same experience and who plays the same position. The best center in the NBA right now is the Denver Nuggets’ center, Nikola Jocik. He has been playing in the league for a bit longer than Wilson has been in the W, so to make this comparison fair (since clearly this league values equality and fairness), I will be comparing his 6th year salary (2020) to A’ja’s 6th year salary (2024). In 2020, Jocik’s salary was $29,542,010.12 He now earns the 3rd highest salary in the NBA, tied with LeBron James at $47,607,350.13
Believe me, I am not in the school of thought that working class people are meant to feel sorry for professional athletes: They are living the dream and don’t necessarily have to worry about rent each month. The level of wealth some athletes acquire through brand deals and sponsorships is also significant, but isn’t a part of my argument. Although there are big brand deals that stop us in our tracks (i.e. Caitlin Clarks $28 million Nike deal), these deals don’t happen for every player. The deals that star rookies like Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark have made this year rare and it would be unfair to compare rookies like AR and CC to their fellow rookies who earn about $30-$36 an hour. A’ja said it herself, basketball is a team sport. Although some players are able to make money off the court, that should not diminish the need for more equitable salaires. Just as she believes her teammates deserve the same recognition for their performance on the court, I believe they deserve more monetary recognition off of it. Male athletes have set a precedent for what their skill and talent is worth monetarily, so why are their female counterparts still not earning even close that?
In their podcast, A Touch More, Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe really get at the issue that women in sports face.14
BIRD: “It's like from now on, when I talk about investing in women's sports, this is what I mean. I mean, stop doubting it, and start looking at the potential and make projections based on that. Like enough of the doubt, enough of the like, ‘Well let's circle back on this in a year or two or three and see if it's still happening.’ We’re already past this point... So now investing means investing in the projection of, the potential.”
RAPINOE: “…It's always like, men get invested based on their potential…‘This is what we think you could do for us and so this is what we're gonna pay you.’ With women coming out of college…they're like ‘Well, I don't really know what you're gonna do.’ [Then] You catch lighting in a bottle…you win…and then they're like, ‘Well I mean are you gonna do it again though? Cause now we didn't pay you before because…we didn't know so like we can't really take that leap of faith’...And then you do it and they're like ‘Well you're probably not gonna do it again, right?’ This is what we mean when we talk about [investing in] women's sports.”15
To Megan’s point, A’ja Wilson has shown her potential. Year in and year out Wilson has brought greatness to her team and the W. The awards and love for Wilson are evidence of the potential she has already exceeded. And yet her dominance still doesn’t cancel out the reality that women's sports are not invested in the same way as men's sports.
And while I’m on my soapbox, another thing: I do hate that I continue to place “women’s” before sports because I shouldn’t have to. There shouldn’t have to be a gender identifier in front of the word “sports” for people to care about and invest in them, but the leagues are so unequal in how they invest in their players, that there must be a distinction. There is a difference in pay, in post-career support, in investment. Because when we talk about high athlete pay, it is never in reference to female athletes and it is especially never in reference to leagues that were created by and predominantly made up of Black women.16
While A’ja Wilson’s salary ranks higher than her teammates, on the larger scale of professional athlete salaries she is nowhere close to her counterparts. It’s not as though WNBA players are asking to be paid $55 million a year like Steph Curry, but instead to be invested in by receiving equitable shares in the revenue they are bringing into the league (think jersey sales and TV contracts).17 There is a recent new media deal that has the potential to shift these things for the WNBA, but I wonder how it will actually impact the current generation of greats, like A’ja.
I’ll leave you with this; my hope is A’ja receives much more than trophies and words of congratulations in the coming year. In her six years in the league, she has changed the game completely and will continue to do so. The MVP race was over at the beginning of the season, so my hope is that she and her teammates, whom she credits so much of her success to, receive the monetary recognition they deserve. It would be a shame if the conversation about Wilson when she retires is how underrated she was during her prime?
While I await MVP results, I remember Sue Bird’s MVP analysis: “A’ja started the season this way and never fell off…don’t forget the first part of the season.” I can only hope investors, owners, and networks apply the same thinking to women’s sports as a whole: They started this great and have yet to fall off.
I promise I did not just take the first number I saw; I actually analyzed a lot of primary sources (salary numbers, stat numbers, etc.) and secondary sources. I am a historian if nothing else.
The CBA expires in 2025 however there is a new media deal that is in talks that could change a future CBA. There is also an expansion happening with the inclusion of the Golden State Valkyries in 2025 and the unnamed Toronto WNBA team in 2026. Their addition will add 4 more games to the next season. Signing this new deal would require full league cooperation since the players are part of a union, the WNBPA (which drew up the original CBA), so I wonder how the expansion teams may affect that.
“WNBA CBA and Salary Cap Explained”, Her Hoop Stats. Hardship Players get signed when a team has 4 or more players out on injuries. If their salaries bump them over the cap, that is okay because of the hardship exception.
Official release, “NBA salary cap for 2024-25 season set at $140.588 million,” NBA, June 30, 2024. The WNBA doesn’t even have the opportunity to compete with NBA in tickets sales, viewership, or annual revenue, so arguments about how much revenue the WNB brings in aren’t valid.
I did the research for this but didn’t include much of it because I wanted to keep this basketball centric BUT Shohei Ohtahni, of the Los Angeles Dodgers signed a $700 million contract for his career with the team which will be allotted to him slowly over time. His salary is $20 million until 2034, where he will begin making $68 million. Ohtani joined the MLB in the very same year that Wilson joined the W, and like Wilson, has been the “pinch” or “clutch” player that all the teams want. While I know they play different sports, they are at the same place in their careers and the difference in numbers are honestly mind boggling!!!! (Again, I know Baseball salaries are way different but like….money is money….)
This is a total cash salary, not cumulative of included benefits and bonuses. “Nikola Jokic,” Spotrac.
A Touch More Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird’s podcast that was born out of IG Live videos during the pandemic. The podcast was launched by Togethxr, a women’s sports media company, which is cofounded by Sue Bird, Alex Morgan, Chloe Kim, and Simone Manuel. Togethxr and A Touch More are my newfound obsessions and dream places to work. Sue, Megan, if you’re reading this, take a chance on me!!!!
The league also has a high percentage of queer Black women.
I love her SO MUCH