WNBA players unanimously approve new 7-year collective bargaining agreement

The NBA has very rigorous definitions for what counts as league revenue and what doesn't. They don't really care about expenses, because those aren't part of the CBA. So as just one example, if an NBA owner also owns the arena, when he sells tickets, it doesn't matter what he/she charges the team to play there, because the amount of revenue is what is important. But if the WNBA owner sells tickets, the sharing is based on profit, so they can then charge the WNBA team what they want to offset the revenue and show a loss on paper. What they end up paying to the IRS is secondary for a lot of this, and they have armies of accountants to deal with that.

A case like this I think mostly comes from "who has the most power?" (there's probably "takes a loss on one business venture because it helps my taxes more than scaling down profits on the other" side of it too) So, the (men's) NBA Players Association is powerful enough that, say they get to a point of threatening not to play when their CBA expires, and they want to come back and to negotiation a new rev-share split and owners start claiming poverty, could ask for an audit of their books related to running the team and have that audited by a 3rd party. If there's a bunch of dumped losses unrelated to team operations/salaries showing up there just to drive now profitably and then hamper negotiations on a new CBA, the union is gonna say "hey that's not our problem" and then it drags out there's a risk of missing games and stuff that has a significant cascading impact at the scale the NBA operates at. The WNBA players are not in the same position. There's fewer teams and a shorter schedule and less star-power right now at the average, so they would have a hard time threatening to miss a portion of the season just over demanding a similar audit (they were never going to get that this time around). For the owners, it's a hit, but in general, the scale of how bad it would hit them isn't as large of a threat. The players just don't have that leverage yet. Elsewhere, like the NFL are able to keep their players (with an extremely weak union) largely in check by *"we're the NFL and we'll have a season without you because there's no shortage guys who will play football and people will still watch. You need us more than we need you."* MLB, on the far extreme of the other hand, would grind to a halt if the players decided they wanted it to - it's a star-driven product, and while things aren't perfect they are the best example in major sports of a players' union looking out for and consistently winning for their players.

There is creative accounting in Hollywood but on a movie the size of Star Wars it was never possible get the on paper profits anywhere near zero. Alec Guinness's share of the profits amounted to something like $95M since he negotiated a 2-1/2% share of the profits.

She was first team all-WNBA, 4th in MVP voting, 7th in scoring, and the league leader in assists in her one full season.

Something something about show me you you've never seen a wnba game without telling us that. > She’s barely a league average player her first two years if that. Umm, The woman finished 4th in MVP voting.

A big part with that loss, though, is that the WNBA operates using a lot of NBA infrastructure that is more expensive to use, but also sets it up well for future growth. For example, the teams wouldn't be renting out NBA arenas if they weren't associated with the NBA. However, because of that, when the league gains popularity, that means they can suddenly sell 20,000 tickets to a game because they have the infrastructure in place. Another big part of that loss is that the investment structure for WNBA is really convoluted with different stakeholders inequitably sharing both losses and gains. Even within stakeholder groups crazy stuff happens. Sometimes the same ownership group also owns an NBA team, while the WNBA owners and NBA owners are technically separate stakeholders in the WNBA, which means the same voter will have conflicting incentives in how to spend money and what to do. Because of this, there is some accounting tricks that may be making the losses look larger than they actually are. Since 2023, the league made almost $1 billion in expansion fees alone ($50 million each for Golden State and Toronto, $75 million Portland, $250 million each for Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia). The league's new TV deal covers the new salary cap on its own before ticket and merch sales are factored in. Finally, as you noted, the primary way these owners make money is taking an operating loss on the team in exchange for a large increase in team value. The owners could pivot to maximizing profitability today and be profitable, but it would sacrifice a lot of future growth.