On Saturday, Indiana Fever All-Star guard Caitlin Clark received her eighth technical foul of the 2026 WNBA season, triggering an automatic one-game suspension. On the call for ESPN, Ryan Ruocco playfully reminded the audience to still tune in to ESPN when the Fever host the New York Liberty on Tuesday, even if Clark wouldn’t be playing.
Luckily for the Fever and ESPN, the WNBA rescinded Clark’s technical, so Clark will face the Liberty. But ESPN (and ABC) weren’t totally out of the woods. Las Vegas Aces head coach Becky Hammon rested superstars A’ja Wilson, Chelsea Gray, and Jackie Young for the reigning champions’ marquee matchup with the New York Liberty on Sunday.
The Aces announced they will rest their trio of A’ja Wilson, Jackie Young and Chelsea Gray during Sunday’s game vs. the Liberty. pic.twitter.com/kXtqdOLv4N
— Yahoo Sports (@YahooSports) August 9, 2026
Hammon would like all angry fans and media executives to direct their complaints to the league office.
“Everybody has a brutal schedule at some point,” Hammon said during her pregame media availability. “I don’t even think they do this in the NBA, though, where it’s less than 24 hours. You can check, but I’m pretty sure that’s not even legal on the NBA side. You’d have to look it up, but I don’t recall. With the time change, it ends up being that.”
Hammon was referencing the fact that the Aces finished their loss in Minnesota less than 24 hours prior to tipping off against the Liberty in Brooklyn, New York.
“But we’re going to always err on the side of health and safety for our players,” Hammon continued. “Not going to put them in any kind of jeopardy to get hurt when we’ve been expending a lot of energy and traveling a lot of miles back and forth, crisscrossing the country. So, it is what it is. I know these are big matchups, and these are what people want to see. But you should ensure that it’s fair.”
To Hammon’s point, the NBA has been more proactive in the scheduling department, as outlined by Patrick Harrel, who led the NBA in optimizing scheduling before joining the Charlotte Hornets’ front office. “We have to ensure that there’s 22 hours between every single game, and then, in general, we try to avoid instances where teams travel two time zones between games,” Harrel told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel in February 2024.
On the flip side, however, the NBA is very strict about teams making star players available for nationally televised games within its “Player Participation Policy.”
But let’s get out in front of any disingenuous comparisons to the NBA’s load management and tanking epidemic. Entering Sunday, Gray and Young had not missed a single game for the Aces this season, and Wilson had only missed two. The WNBA does not have a problem with stars and teams punting on the regular season. Teams do, however, share in the league’s problem with clunky regular-season scheduling.
New issues pile on WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert’s desk daily, but scheduling has consistently been an issue for years.
The WNBA regular season will expand from 44 to 50 games in 2027, as part of the league’s “transformational” new collective bargaining agreement ratified this offseason. The CBA also outlined a new schedule footprint, in which the WNBA Finals can run as late as Nov. 21, as opposed to the Oct. 31 end date this season. Theoretically, a longer season should make it easier to avoid condensed back-to-backs, but Engelbert doesn’t always hit her layups.
In June 2024, the WNBA announced its 11-year media rights deal with Disney, Amazon Prime Video, and NBCUniversal. At the time, it was worth a reported $2.2 billion. That was before the WNBA tacked on Versant last September. This season, the WNBA is airing a record 216 national games.
The pressure is on to appease fans and broadcast partners, but the impetus must remain player safety and the overall health of the league. In the meantime, Hammon will prioritize putting the Aces in the best possible position to capture their fourth WNBA title in five years.
About Megan Armstrong
Since first getting published as a student by the Kansas City Star in 2013, Megan Armstrong has gone wherever curiosity and stories have taken her, specializing in sports, media, music, and culture coverage. She also has an extensive background in interviewing and profiling public figures. Her work has appeared in Billboard, Boardroom, Bleacher Report, Esquire, GQ, GRAMMY.com, NYLON, Newsweek, Teen Vogue, The Hollywood Reporter, UPROXX, and elsewhere.