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The WNBA continues to trail most professional sports in the United States when it comes to player salaries and compensation. This is something that the 150-ish WNBA players have been fighting to change for quite some time.
The league average in 2022 is just $102,751 for WNBA players. Compare that to the NFL average of $2.7 million (median is $860K), $4.41 million in the MLB, $3.5 million in the NHL, and the average NBA salary is a whopping $9.662 million for the 2022-23 season.
In the WNBA the range of salaries is $117K to $215K for the highest-paid players. Las Vegas Aces point guard Kelsey Plum wants to change that. She believes the athletes deserve more money. And she’s not arguing they deserve NBA-sized salaries. Instead, she has a very reasonable argument for why the players deserve more:
Kelsey Plum was a guest on The Residency Pod where she laid out an obvious and easily fixable discrepancy between the NBA and WNBA. In the NBA, players take home around 50% of shared revenue and in the WNBA players only take home 20% of shared revenue.
Total revenue for the NBA hit $7.4 billion in 2022. Over in the WNBA, total revenue hit $60 million in 2022. So not only are the players taking home 30% less than their NBA counterparts it’s 20% of a much smaller pie. Which, again, Kelsey Plum isn’t arguing for NBA salaries she just believes the league should pay out 50% of shared revenue the same as the NBA does.
Kelsey Plum currently makes $200,000/year as a point guard for the Las Vegas Aces. She is the second-highest-paid player on the team just behind A’ja Wilson who earns $202,155. Kelsey’s been in the WNBA for 5 seasons with a career average of 12.4ppg but she put up an average of 20.2 points/game in the 2022 season.