One WNBA star is not happy with the big money that Becky Hammon will be getting from the Las Vegas Aces.
Aces owner Mark Davis, who also owns the NFL’s Las Vegas Raiders, said this week that Hammon will be receiving over $1 million in salary annually from the team. The Aces recently hired Hammon, the ex-WNBA guard and San Antonio Spurs assistant, to be their new head coach and GM.
After introducing Dave Ziegler and Josh McDaniels, owner Mark Davis, who also owns the Aces, confirmed that new coach Becky Hammon will be the first WNBA coach to exceed $1 million in annual salary: pic.twitter.com/bT8ZfnuEZ6
— Sam Gordon (@BySamGordon) January 31, 2022
The news did not sit right with Aces center Liz Cambage, who called out the WNBA on Twitter for giving Hammon a salary four times that of the league’s highest-paid player. The 6-foot-8 Cambage also said that she herself was having to pay out of pocket to upgrade her seat on flights to games.
ahhh yes the @WNBA, where a head coach can get paid 4X the highest paid players super max contract. lmao and y’all think imma spend another season upgrading my seat on a flight to get to games out of my own pocket.
— Elizabeth Cambage (@ecambage) February 1, 2022
Former WNBA MVP Breanna Stewart recently signed a one-year supermax deal worth $228,094 to return to the Seattle Storm. Phoenix Mercury guard Diana Taurasi is also a supermax player who is making $228,094 next year. The next highest-paid WNBA players are Skylar Diggins-Smith and Brittney Griner (both also of the Mercury) as well as the Connecticut Suns’ DeWanna Bonner and the Washington Mystics’ Elena Delle Donne. All four of those players will make $227,900 in 2022.
It is worth noting that the WNBA is an unprofitable business, losing roughly $10 million a year, according to what NBA commissioner Adam Silver told reporters a few years ago. Thus, the NBA actively subsidizes the WNBA in order to overcome this.
As for Cambage, she is one of the more well-known WNBA stars as a four-time All-Star, an ex-scoring champion, and someone with nearly a million followers on Instagram. But she did not articulate the reason she believes that the WNBA should pay for upgraded airline seats, especially as a business that continues to operate at a major annual loss.
It might also strike some as odd for an Aces player to speak negatively about the team’s new head coach and GM. However, Cambage, an Australia native, is actually a free agent at the moment and might not even be back in the WNBA next season, something that she hinted at in her tweet.
In any case, Cambage is not the first WNBA figure to call out the poor travel accommodations for players. But the argument rings a little bit hollow in the context of the WNBA’s financial realities. It also rings hollow in the context of Hammon, whose salary will not be paid out of the league’s salary cap and who had a chance to stay in the NBA if she was not properly compensated.
Photo: Kelley L. Cox-USA TODAY Sports
