As the 2025 WNBA season gets underway, there is no shortage of excitement surrounding the league.
One of the W’s more under-the-radar subplots, however, is the reality that its current collective bargaining agreement is set to expire at the end of this year.
Whenever the league’s new CBA is agreed to and goes into effect, it will likely mean some significant changes for the league. And according to WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, one of those changes could come in the form of its regular season expanding from its current 44-game format.
“I can definitely see us going to 50 [regular season games],” Engelbert said during an interview on The Bill Simmons Podcast.
Admittedly, doing so will be easier said than done.
Currently, the WNBA’s regular-season schedule runs from mid-May to mid-September with the league’s postseason lasting through late-October. Expanding the schedule would likely mean pushing the postseason into November, as the league would prefer to keep its current setup of holding its draft on the heels of the NCAA Tournament.
After all, the WNBA’s current calendar allows for it to capitalize on the exploding popularity of the college game by allowing incoming high profile prospects like Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers to enter the league fresh off of starring roles during March Madness. Effectively, any expansion of the schedule would have to come on the back end, as the league is understandably unwilling to mess with that recipe.
“The question is do we want to go into November and and crossover with the NBA and college basketball?” Engelbert said. “People don’t understand, there’s not much you can do on the front end because we love the college draft, we love the rookies.”
“… You can’t move it too much forward if you want the rookies to come in, which we do because it’s a great, it’s a great theater system for us, as you said. So we’ll look at the back end and how far can we go and how many NFL and college football Saturdays can we go into and we’ll evaluate all that under the CBA.”
While there is certainly an argument to be made that the WNBA would be better off keeping its regular-season schedule at 44 games considering the challenges of the sports calendar, the reality is that more games means more money, both for the home teams and from a media rights perspective. As such, it’s hard to imagine that the length of the league’s calendar won’t be one of the primary topics in what promises to be the most pivotal labor negotiation in the league’s history.
