WNBA Lockout Odds: Will The 2026 WNBA Regular Season Start On Time?
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Now that the 2025 WNBA Finals are set at US betting sites, with the second seeded Las Vegas Aces making the club’s third trip in four years and squaring off against the No. 4 seeded Phoenix Mercury in the league’s first-ever best-of-seven series, it’s worth wondering what will happen once the confetti settles, and the league year ends.
That’s because the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement is scheduled to wrap up on Halloween, with players looking to drastically overhaul the league’s revenue sharing and baseline pay structure ahead of the next round of expansion. That will add the Portland Fire and Toronto Tempo in 2026, with three more teams in Cleveland (2028), Detroit (2029) and Philadelphia (2030) slated to join in coming years.
Given the uncertainty surrounding the league’s immediate future, the team at Bookies.com broke down the odds of the first-ever WNBA lockout, with the tea leaves indicating such an outcome is more likely than not right now.
| WNBA Lockout Odds | Line | Implied Probability |
|---|---|---|
| Yes | -150 | 60% |
| No | +150 | 40% |
What To Know About WNBA CBA Talks
With less than a month to go until the CBA expiration date, it seems like little ground has been made on the topics that need to be addressed to keep the league open once the calendar flips to November. That’s the takeaway from multiple players who have addressed the subject with members of the media, such as Kelsey Plum of the Los Angeles Sparks and Napheesa Collier of the Minnesota Lynx.
“There’s been multiple proposals that have gone back and forth, and neither is close,” WNBPA first vice president Kelsey Plum told The Athletic. “It feels almost the more that we have presented, the further away we are, which is just unfortunate. But at the end of the day, I think it’s just about the principle of not budging. And we have leverage, we have unity, we have a common goal, particularly in salary, and we’re just not where we want to be.”
All of this dates back to the decision by the WNBA Player Association to opt out of the current CBA last year, which dates back to 2019, long before the current wave of support for professional women’s sports leagues.
Looking back, the league has seen its share of labor acrimony, with the 2003 season being pushed back after the second round of CBA talks dragged on past the deadline, lasting through April of 2003, though there was no complete work stoppage that go-round.
Based on the quotes from WNBA veterans like Chelsea Gray of the Las Vegas Aces, it seems like such an outcome might be inevitable this go-round, as there appears to be little common ground between players and Commissioner Cathy Engelbert.
“Not great, not where we thought and wanted to be at this point in time,” Gray said, per The Athletic. “We’re not where we should be or we thought we would be when we decided to opt out. … It’s not anywhere where we thought it would be. It’s market share, it’s salaries, it’s player safety, it’s everything. I wouldn’t say that we’re where we want to be for maybe one thing.”
Among the topics that players are honing in on this time are revenue sharing, with more of the dollars and cents brought in by the WNBA’s influx in popularity going to the women that make the games happen and less flowing up into the owner’s box, while other topics like guaranteeing charter travel, player safety and maternity leave are other subjects that are expected to be sticking points for the union, according to multiple media reports on the subject.
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Where Do We Go From Here?
Given the lack of movement from either side in CBA talks to this point and the immediate deadline to reach an agreement and avoid a lockout, we’re setting the odds of a work stoppage at 60% (or -150), as there doesn’t appear to be much consensus from either the players or owners right now.
While the WNBA has never had a lockout, we can use the NBA’s 2011 version as a blueprint for what’ll go down once the league doors are locked at the end of the month, with the two sides engaging in a 161-day lockout 14 years ago, lasting from July 1 to Dec. 8 that year.
During the NBA’s last lockout, teams weren’t allowed to sign, trade or contact players, while players couldn’t access league facilities, with coaches and trainers being off-limits as well. Back then, the sticking point in CBA talks for the men’s league was revenue sharing as well, with owners wanting the players to see their share drop from 57% to 47%, while players countered with splitting the pot, 53%-47% in their favor.
As a result of that stalemate, the league locked its doors until early December, when a new CBA was signed off on that gave the players 51.2% of revenue sharing, compared with 49% that eventually went to the league’s owners, with a flexible salary cap and stiffer luxury taxes attached to keep teams’ spending in line.
That year, the NBA’s regular season dropped from 82 to 66 games, with all preseason games canceled, though the league year was able to start on Christmas Day, with LeBron James and the Miami Heat winning that year’s title over the Oklahoma City Thunder.
While we’ll have to wait to see if Engelbert and the WNBAPA can avoid such an outcome in 2025, we can at least use the NBA’s last lockout as a blueprint of what the coming weeks and months might look like, should a deal fall by the wayside once the Oct. 31 deadline passes.
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