LAS VEGAS — Stepping up to the podium Friday evening, Commissioner Cathy Engelbert did not look like she’d gotten much sleep. It had been a rough week. Lynx star Napheesa Collier called her leadership “tone-deaf and dismissive,” and all the league’s biggest names — from Fever star Caitlin Clark to MVP A’ja Wilson — backed Collier.
Collier’s statement and follow-up reports painted a rough picture of the commissioner. She didn’t text her stars to honor their retirements or check in on active players’ torn ligaments. She didn’t properly value Caitlin Clark’s contribution to the league.
So when she wearily took the podium before Game 1 of the Finals, Engelbert said she had to do better. She cared about the players, she said, was working to repair relationships, and even bowed to Collier’s demands for changes in officiating (a task force is forthcoming). She also denied saying that Clark owed the league for her sponsorship deals and said she had no intention of resigning.
Still, the question remains: Should she resign? And also: What good would it do if she did?
On the bright side, her departure might get the league out of this particular cycle:
- Commissioner says something that deeply upsets the players.
- She apologizes.
- She creates a task force to address the issue.
The worst example came last September. Engelbert was asked in a CNBC television interview about the toxic and hateful rhetoric that had followed the league’s rise, particularly around the entrance of Clark and Angel Reese.
“The one thing I know about sports, you need rivalries,” she said, going on to talk about how fans don’t want everyone being nice to each other all the time.
She later apologized to players, who had been sharing their experiences with harassment for much of the 2024 season.
She then created a task force campaign to combat hate — but trust had been lost. The WNBA, made up mostly of Black women, has always been about “giving voice to the voiceless,” as Wilson put it at Finals media day.
To lead in this league, you need to be able to answer a question about racism with an answer about racism — not about business strategy.
After all, Engelbert’s CNBC interview came two years after Reese taunted Clark and became a target for harassment and racism. She had plenty of time to prepare — not just a statement, but a genuine, thoughtful position in keeping with the spirit of the league.
The same is true for officiating. Engelbert earned some credit for publicly recognizing that the league has fallen short, but she also spent most of this season downplaying concerns rather than getting ahead of them.
At the end of the day, she comes out of this mess looking like that most frustrating of combinations: a sharp businessperson short on people skills.
Throughout her tenure, she’s helped steer the league from financial precarity to raking in nearly $1 billion in expansion fees through the end of the decade.
And yet, despite all her savvy, this fact remains: For every dollar that comes into the league, less than 50 cents goes to WNBA teams themselves.
That’s because NBA owners, who still own a majority of the league, are not about to give up their controlling stake at a moment when it’s paying dividends.
This is one of the primary financial dilemmas facing the league, especially when it comes to players getting their fair share.
“When an outside source owns the majority of your league, it’s either not going to get there, or it’s going to take a very long time for [us to be] making the kind of money we want to make,” Collier told the Sun-Times in July, referring to the impact of the league’s ownership structure on player wages.
No commissioner’s business acumen — not Engelbert’s nor her successor’s — is going to solve that conundrum. Whoever comes next will still be reporting up the same food chain, with the NBA sitting at the top.