Last week in Miami, two of the WNBA’s biggest stars said the players and league should meet for a marathon labor negotiation.
As Tuesday’s league-imposed deadline for a new collective bargaining agreement in order to start the season on time came and went, they did just that.
The sides gathered at a midtown Manhattan hotel in the early evening Tuesday for a meeting that went well past midnight into Wednesday. The negotiations began shortly after 5:00 p.m. Eastern on Tuesday and were still going as of 2:00 a.m. Wednesday.
With reporters from Front Office Sports and other outlets staked outside of The Langham hotel, just blocks south of the NBA league office, few details trickled out of the lengthy session.
The league had said that its deadline for starting the season on time was March 10—Tuesday. But that deadline had only been communicated in recent weeks, and leagues have a history of imposing aggressive deadlines on unions only to retract them when negotiations come down to brass tacks.
The divide between the players and owners has remained the same for over a year: how to share the enormous amount of new money flooding into the WNBA. The league eventually conceded to players on sharing a percentage of revenue, but the sides remained far apart in recent weeks on how to calculate that revenue, and what percentage of it would go to players.
The main figures on both sides were present at the luxury hotel Tuesday night. Breanna Stewart, Alysha Clark, Nneka Ogwumike, and Bri Turner represented the players union as they have throughout talks, and were joined by lawyers and administrators from both sides, along with billionaire Liberty owner Clara Wu Tsai.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
