The WNBA season could span the length of Major League Baseball’s if the league gets its way in the ongoing collective bargaining negotiations.
Front Office Sports writer Annie Costabile reported Thursday that the WNBA is proposing an expansion of its regular season from 44 to 50-54 games as part of CBA negotiations with the players union, a move that would necessitate shifting the start of training camps from April to March and the WNBA Finals from October to November. No WNBA season has ever begun before May 6 (2022) or run later than October 21 (2012).
Depending on how late into November the Finals would last, a WNBA season could conceivably run even longer than Major League Baseball’s late March-early November schedule.
In its earliest days, the WNBA schedule was limited to the summer months, running from mid-June to Labor Day.
As previously noted, any change to the WNBA calendar will put the league in conflict both with the NCAA women’s basketball tournament and the new “Project B” barnstorming tour. The NCAA tournament usually runs through the first week of April, meaning that any potential draftees would have to arrive after training camps — and potentially regular season games — were already underway.
Project B, which has already secured commitments from prominent WNBA players, is set to launch in 2027. Per Costabile, the league already has a Tokyo event scheduled for March 26-April 4 of that year. WNBA prioritization rules subject players competing in other leagues to stiff penalties — including full-season suspension — if they fail to report to training camp on time.
The WNBA and its players union are currently in the midst of stalled collective bargaining negotiations. The CBA, which was originally set to expire in October, officially lapsed last week after two ultimately fruitless extensions. While the owners have not imposed a lockout and the players have not yet gone on strike, the sides agreed last week to a moratorium on league business.
There has never been a strike or lockout in the history of the WNBA, and there is only one occasion in league history where any games were lost as a result of collective action by the players — when players refused to play games as part of sports-wide wildcat strikes during the tumult of August 2020.
