Napheesa Collier is a smooth, coolheaded forward for the Minnesota Lynx. She is not the most famous player in the W.N.B.A., but she is one of the best. Before injuring her ankle, in early August, she was the front-runner for Most Valuable Player. (She has been the runner-up for the award two years in a row.) And the Lynx was the winningest team in the league during the regular season, and the favorites to win the championship, until Collier was knocked out of the playoffs. During Game Three of the semifinals, against the Phoenix Mercury, she tore ligaments in her ankle after hard contact sent her sprawling. The Lynx lost that game, and then, with Collier in a boot on the bench and her coach suspended for excoriating the referees in her defense, came up short in the decisive Game Four, too. Collier had finished the regular season with historic efficiency, becoming the second W.N.B.A. player to shoot at least fifty per cent from the floor, forty per cent on three-point shots, and over ninety per cent from the free-throw line. Her hallmark is her reliability, not her explosiveness. She does not seem like the kind of person who would burn a league down.
But on Tuesday, at the start of her exit interview, that was exactly what she appeared to be doing. She sat at the podium with papers in her hands, and, in the course of four minutes, read her prepared remarks. She said that the league office paid lip service to players’ health, that it ignored increasingly urgent concerns about referees losing control of games. It seemed not to care about the quality of the product on the floor. And worse: Collier recounted a conversation with Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner, in February, during which Collier asked how the league planned to address the fact that Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Paige Bueckers, some of the most popular players in the league, with huge and rabid followings, were making so little money. (Clark, whose value to women’s basketball is incalculable, earns less than eighty thousand dollars a year.) Engelbert, according to Collier, had responded that Clark should be grateful to the W.N.B.A. for her millions of dollars in off-court earnings, because the league gave her a platform. Collier also claimed that the commissioner went on to say, “Players should be on their knees thanking their lucky stars for the media-rights deal that I got them.” Collier pulled no punches. “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,” she said.
Every argument has a rational, emotional, and rhetorical component. Collier excelled on all fronts. She spoke bravely while pointing out the obvious. It’s no secret that the W.N.B.A. has a refereeing problem. Players and coaches have been calling it out for years, though you didn’t have to take anyone’s word for it; you only needed to watch almost any game to see the amount of contact and notice how rarely the referees succeed in ratcheting down the competitive physical intensity. So far, the league’s response has been not to fix the issue but, instead, to levy fines against players and coaches who criticize refs. It wasn’t a shock, either, to hear of the widening rift between the league office and the players. The league and the W.N.B.A. players’ association remain deeply divided on compensation, and the collective-bargaining agreement is set to expire on October 31st.
The smartest turn in Collier’s speech was to invoke the names of Clark, Reese, and Bueckers—three players with disparate and sometimes misaligned fan bases—pitting Engelbert against not only the players but the world. Her comments about Clark got the most attention, as they were surely designed to. Shortly after Collier spoke out, Engelbert said in a statement that she was “disheartened” by Collier’s characterization of their conversation, though she didn’t deny anything specific. Then, in a press conference before the start of the W.N.B.A. Finals on Friday, Engelbert pushed back against Collier’s description of her comments about Clark needing to be “grateful.” “Obviously, I did not make those comments,” Engelbert said.
Except it wasn’t obvious. That, after all, is the way many people in leadership positions in sports—and especially in the N.B.A., which owns a substantial portion of the W.N.B.A.—talk about women’s professional leagues for years, justifying low salaries and poor playing conditions. It sounded plausible because it was plausible. And Clark’s fans, who have often noted the exceptionally high level of physicality directed at Clark and who’ve been aghast at the league office’s reluctance to single out her unique star power, had good reasons to believe that the league was self-sabotaging. After Collier’s comments, Clark was one of the many players who backed her up. “I have great respect for Phee,” Clark said, of Collier, “and I think she made a lot of very valid points.” Clark pointed out that the introduction of name, image, and likeness (N.I.L.) rights in college sports has made it possible for players to cultivate huge followings that they can then carry over into the W.N.B.A.—not the other way around.
Collier said that league leadership, in an effort to avoid accountability, has tried to “suppress everyone’s voices by handing out fines.” She continued, “I’m not concerned about a fine. I’m concerned about the future of our sport.” That’s when it became clear that Collier wasn’t lighting a match. The match had already been lit; smoke was going up. She was sounding the alarm before it was too late, and showing herself to be the kind of person who could lead the way out.
Collier, as it happens, is not just a perennial M.V.P. candidate; she is a vice-president of the players’ association—and a co-founder of Unrivaled, a three-on-three basketball league that competes during the W.N.B.A.’s off-season. (Her husband is the current president.) In 2026, roughly a third of W.N.B.A. players will compete in it. Unrivaled was not meant to challenge the W.N.B.A.’s status as the world’s premier basketball league; it sometimes had the feel of an exhibition, despite being somewhat successful. (The glitziest stretch last season was a one-on-one tournament, which Collier won.) But it does offer more money: this year, Unrivaled paid players an average salary of two hundred and twenty thousand dollars—close to the top salaries in the W.N.B.A. It also offers players equity, along with better amenities, perks, and an aggressive television deal.
