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Former Phoenix Mercury star and future basketball Hall of Famer Diana Taurasi has always stood up for players’ pay in the WNBA. This has become a matter of public interest in recent months, with the league’s collective bargaining agreement currently being negotiated. In an effort to minimize the WNBA and women in general, some have spun the narrative to be about equal pay for men and women. That is a false narrative, and it’s certainly not something the WNBA is pursuing.
The NBA generates roughly $10 billion in revenue each year, as opposed to $226 million for the WNBA. These numbers are not lost on leadership representing the women in the current CBA negotiations. The people in charge are well aware of the numbers and what is and what isn’t realistic to expect from the league. Video clips and statements like those from an upcoming Taurasi documentary are not helping the players’ cause, though. They are only providing firepower for the under-endowed, overly machismo characters who don’t watch the league, and don’t want anyone else to either.
In clips released from the documentary, Tauarasi is explaining the struggles of player salaries and the need to seek basketball employment abroad during the offseason. The former UConn standout supplemented her WNBA salary with paychecks from the Russian pro league from 2005 until 2017. In 2014, after winning three WNBA titles, a league MVP, and making the All-WNBA first team squad nine times, Taurasi was making $107,000 per year to play in the W, and $1.5 million per year to play for UMMC Ekaterinburg.
In the documentary, Taurasi says, “The f***ing janitor at the arena made more than me.”
While this statement is not intended to be taken literally, but with a dash of hyperbole, it has ruffled some feathers. For starters, she is obviously not talking about 2024, when she made $235,000, because there aren’t many, if any, janitors in the entire world making that kind of money. Assuming she was talking about earlier in her career, the statement is a little more accurate, but still exaggerated.
As a rookie in 2004, Taurasi made $42,000. The average pay for a janitor in 2004 was about $28,000. It’s an even bigger gap than that. Janitors work 50 weeks a year, assuming two weeks of paid vacation. This equates to $600 per week. WNBA players from the preseason until the end of the playoffs were working for six months (26 weeks). This means Tauarasi, as a rookie, was making $1,615 per week to play basketball, or two and a half times what the janitor she referenced was making.
Stop listening to anyone who says the WNBA lost money last year, so players shouldn’t get raises. These people are not economists; they are anti-woman. They believe a woman’s place is in the kitchen, not on a basketball court, so pay no attention to their drivel. The league just signed a lucrative TV deal, and the expansion fee for a team (and there is a waiting list for billionaires to get one) is $250 million and likely going up due to the demand.
There’s significantly more money coming into the league now than ever before, and the players just want a fair share of it. The league may have lost money in the past, but it’s not up to the 2025-26 players to pay for the 2003-04 season. Speaking of 2003, that was when the Mohegan Sun group purchased the Orlando Miracle for $10 million. They just sold the team to Boston Celtics minority owner Steve Pagliuca for $325 million. Has the value of each franchise gone up by a factor of 32.5, and if so, shouldn’t salaries as well?
A rookie in 2003 made $30,000 per year, and today they get $78,000. That’s a big jump, but it’s nowhere near the jump in team values over the last 20 years. There may be a lockout coming, and it’s impossible to know how long it will last. The league wants players to play only in the W, and forsake all other leagues, but in order to do that, they’d better start paying these players what they make in the WNBA and abroad combined.
As far as Taurasi’s quote, you’d be a fool if you believed she literally meant she was making less than janitors. She was venting her frustration, and her frustration was just. Every player in the WNBA is about to get paid like never before, and the league is only growing more each year. It’s likely that 20 years from now, what Taurasi made in her entire career, and what players will be making each year, will be the same number. Until then, don’t apply to be a janitor in Arizona just yet.
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