The WNBA released its 2025 schedule Monday afternoon. The slate for opening weekend and the timing for some of the league’s marquee matchups were the big news, but there were also some noteworthy numbers if you dug deeper into the news release.
Let’s start with the total prize pool. The league announced the prize pool for the Commissioner’s Cup will be $500,000 this season, matching last season’s number. It is also in line with how much the league has put up for grabs in every edition of the Cup since it began in 2021. (By comparison, each player on the winning NBA Cup team this month will get $514,971). So why does that number raise an eyebrow? It’s lower than what the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement calls for.
The CBA, ratified in 2020, says the WNBA has the right to create a competition or tournament during the regular season and that any “special competitions or tournaments shall include a minimum aggregate player prize pool of fifty thousand dollars ($50,000) for the 2020 season and seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars ($750,000) for each subsequent season hereunder.”
There is currently only one such competition during the WNBA season: the Commissioner’s Cup. But the prize pool doesn’t match what the CBA calls for. So, where is the other $250,000?
The original goal when that CBA was written was for the WNBA to have multiple competitions, according to league sources. The CBA says they could have been held during training camp, the regular season or in the playoffs. But that plan changed, and the league has launched just one. The remaining money that was supposed to be for these new competitions was reallocated elsewhere around the league, those sources said.
Then there is the other part of the players’ compensation for the Commissioner’s Cup. The WNBA also said Coinbase, the cryptocurrency marketplace that sponsors the Cup, will give out $120,000 in cryptocurrency as an additional prize pool; that also began last season when Coinbase gave $120,000 in total to two finalists. It does not count as part of the league’s official prize pool.
That money will be doled out, according to a WNBA spokesperson, by the company. Coinbase will give $5,000 worth of Bitcoin to each player, directly into their accounts. The value of that crypto can, of course, fluctuate.
If members of the Minnesota Lynx and New York Liberty — the 2024 Commissioner’s Cup finalists — kept their Bitcoin since playing in that game, it would be worth roughly $7,900 (assuming they received it right around the day of the game). But the price of Bitcoin has varied during that time, and how much that allotment is worth to each player is not uniform. According to CoinMarketCap, Bitcoin was worth $61,789 the night of the Cup final, dipped to as low as $53,991 on Aug. 5, was as high as $99,006 on Nov. 22 and is worth $95,579 at the time of this writing.
Still, the idea of getting paid in cryptocurrency brought back some difficult memories for women’s sports fans. In 2021, the NWSL made Voyager its official crypto brokerage partner and said the company would fund crypto accounts for all players. A few months later, Voyager filed for bankruptcy and the players were out of any crypto they had earned, according to a Sportico report.
In the WNBA’s case, the crypto prize package would at least likely put money into the players’ hands compared to previous prize pools. In 2022, the WNBA said it would donate a total of $2,500 per regular-season Cup game to organizations and charities chosen by each team, and another $15,000 after the Cup final. The next year, it said there would be at least $165,000 in charitable donations.
(Photo of WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert presenting the Commissioner’s Cup trophy: Catalina Fragoso / NBAE via Getty Images)
