Erica Barris

What was that like?

Can you describe it?

What did she tell you?

She accounted for the fact that the NBA season has more games, the games themselves are longer, and there are fewer WNBA teams.

Then she crunched all those numbers and estimated that the average WNBA salary should be about a quarter to a third of the average NBA salary.

In reality, Claudia calculated, it was more like 1 80th.

So that is the pot of money that Alicia and her negotiating team decided to zero in on, revenue.

They wanted what's called revenue share, which Alicia says she didn't really understand in her rookie years.

So they sent their first proposal to the league in February of 2025.

And what they asked for was 40% of revenue to split between players.

We know now they were willing to settle for less.

But negotiators usually start out with something called an anchor number.

to influence the direction of negotiations.

By the way, NBA players get about 50% of rev share using a different system.

So they're going back and forth, and Alicia and the other negotiators are following along with help from, you could say, the Claudia Golden team, the math team.

We've actually been looking at a list of, quote, hard bargaining techniques on a Harvard Law School post about negotiation tactics, things negotiators might use in a situation like this.

Now, a source for the league told us, quote, we did not rely on negotiating tactics or anything of that nature.

But we think that some of the experiences Alicia told us about sound a little like some of the tactics on the list.

And Alicia said it really helped to have their own math in their pocket, especially when they thought the league was seriously lowballing them.

Yeah.