Players in 2026 WNBA Draft enter league in a new era created by predecessors

Players in 2026 WNBA Draft enter league in a new era created by predecessors

When Sue Bird was in fifth grade, she and her classmates were asked to predict what they’d be when they grew up. Bird wrote: A doctor, a lawyer or a professional soccer player. At the time, there was no NWSL (or WNBA, for that matter). The main professional team sports leagues in the U.S. were for men — the NBA, NFL, MLB and NHL.

It’s not surprising that someone who achieved so much in her profession was so driven as a child that she could easily imagine a world that didn’t yet exist. Three decades later, Bird would retire from the WNBA as the league’s leader in assists and games played.

“The year I made those predictions, the WNBA didn’t even exist yet. There was no professional path, no professional league, no obvious place for someone like me,” Bird said in her Naismith Hall of Fame enshrinement speech. “What a wild journey over 30 years to go from no league at all to a league of our own.”

What a wild journey, indeed. A few years after making that prediction for herself, still before there was a WNBA, Bird traveled to Philadelphia to see the 1996 Olympic women’s basketball team play as part of its run up to the Atlanta Games. Watching those women — many of whom went on to become founding players in the WNBA — was Bird’s “see it, be it” moment. Once she saw what they did on the floor, and the path they carved out in the professional basketball world, Bird knew where she was going. Then, she went on to not only pave that path, but also extend it even further during her 19-year career.

It’s a familiar story lived out by so many athletes who are a part of leagues in their nascent years — you build something that you hope long outlives you while making it better for those who come after. And players such as Bird had to live through a lot in those early decades of the WNBA, where she’s now a minority owner of the Seattle Storm, to get to the point it’s at now.

Her rookie salary in 2002 as the No. 1 pick was less than $60,000, and the league had only recently introduced benefits such as 401K matching and year-round dental insurance. Player salaries inched up over the next two decades, but overseas play — which also resulted in year-round play and higher injury risk — was a necessity for many players to supplement salaries. Some of those players, who spent most of their careers traveling in coach, are still competing in the league.

This offseason, the players’ union and WNBA signed a historic collective bargaining agreement that will — in the league’s 30th season — see $1 million players hit the court for the first time. The supermax of $1.4 million will nearly reach the entire team salary cap of the previous CBA ($1.5 million).

The players who will be drafted on Monday night will never experience what it’s like to fight for a 401K match or dental insurance. They’ll travel on charter flights. The No. 1 pick will earn $500,000 in her first season — something it took Bird a decade to make from the WNBA (and seven times as much as the No. 1 pick a year ago, Paige Bueckers).

It’s a new era in the WNBA, a sentiment that has been felt before with this league, but one that feels particularly heavy — especially in bank accounts — now.

Unlike players not that much older than them, the 2026 draftees won’t have any sense of what it’s like to grow up playing basketball without seeing a path before them. This class will avoid so many of the pitfalls of the WNBA’s recent history because of the players who sustained it through challenges. Some of the most important voices will suit up besides these rookies. For the incoming rookies, who mostly were born in the early 2000s, the WNBA has always been a reality. Today’s reality includes a growing foundation and serious investment. Some of the gains had felt about as tangible as Bird’s fifth-grade goal chart.

“From the beginning, there was optimism and real conviction about what women’s basketball could become. But belief and scale are not the same thing,” New York Liberty CEO Keia Clarke wrote in TIME Magazine last month. “The early years proved the concept; they did not yet build the engine. You cannot grow a billion-dollar enterprise on enthusiasm alone. Sustained growth requires sustained infrastructure. Elite performance requires elite conditions.”

This draft class will get to enjoy the engine-era of this league.

These players came of age during the NIL era of college basketball, in which endorsement deals were rampant and six-figure paydays became the norm. Now, going pro won’t feel like a step back from their college days. It’ll feel like a massive jump, which it should.

On Friday night, some incoming rookies had dinner with WNBA veterans, including Nneka Ogwumike, the Women’s National Basketball Players Association president. She told them about the recent negotiations that brought about this massive upheaval in the league. Ogwumike, who entered the WNBA in 2012, probably has some stories to tell that would make this 2026 class shudder at the idea of what she and teammates fought through to bring the league to this point.

But it’s here now, and they all get to enjoy the fruits of it (even players like Bird, who aren’t still playing, will get to enjoy some of the benefits as one of the 2026 CBA provisions is backpay for players who helped build the league before revenue sharing).

“It means a lot just because I know that so many people have paved the way, and now, we know our draft really gets to have so many great benefits and a lot of really cool opportunities and amenities and salary,” UCLA senior Kiki Rice, a likely first-round draft pick, told the Associated Press. “Really excited for that. Grateful for all the work they put in to get us to this point and excited to continue to pay that forward.”

The WNBA experience Rice and her fellow draftees will have will be entirely different than that of their dinner dates; it’ll be significantly different than it was just a year ago.

This 2026 draft class won’t know what it’s like to celebrate wins such as  individual hotel rooms on the road, but its job is the same as it has always been for leagues and athletes experiencing this kind of astronomical growth: To imagine a future that isn’t even a reality yet, and then to build it for the players who come next.

This article originally appeared in The Athletic.

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