As of Monday morning, there were 87 tickets left to be sold by the Indiana Fever to the general public for the team’s opening home game of the WNBA season. It sounds more extravagant to cite the value of higher-priced seats on the secondary markets as proof that something is dramatically different with this franchise this season, but what puts money into the business are those seats sold directly by the club. And nearly all of those 17,274 are gone.
Given the median ticket price for Fever season tickets, on a per-game basis, is $53.24, Caitlin Clark’s presence on the roster for the home opener against the New York Liberty will be worth a significant multiple of the $78,000 the team will pay her in 2024.
And that’s just one of 20 home games. Using last year's average attendance, the Fever's ticket revenue projects to jump almost $14 million.
If this seems an outrage, it is.
But it’s not problematic because the NBA’s No. 1 overall pick will make $10.5 million his first season. I mean, the Major League Baseball overall No. 1 won’t make that much, and neither will the NFL No. 1. The No. 1 pick in the Major League Soccer SuperDraft will make more than $10,000 less than Clark. This is the economics of sport.
MORE: Why Caitlin Clark won't lose NIL deals turning pro
What makes Clark’s contract indefensible is this: It is the product of the league’s rookie salary scale. The rookie salary scale is the most odious off-the-field innovation in American sport, a contraption devised by gutless, guileless team owners and embraced by players associations content to essentially haze those pledges entering the fraternities and sororities of professional athletes.
If Clark were being drafted by the Fever into a league with a salary cap but no rookie scale, Clark easily would have been able to command the WNBA max salary of $248,984. And it’s hard to imagine the Fever looking at the ticket sales that predated her official selection and the crowds that gathered at last week’s draft parties and pushing back against such a demand. She’s worth all of that, and more, before she’s ever nailed a logo-three for her new team.
She can’t be paid her worth, though, until at least her fourth WNBA season.
This is preposterous on every level.
MORE: Contract details for Clark, other WNBA rookies
The rookie scale's history is not flattering
There actually was a time, even subsequent to the introduction of the salary cap, that players entering various leagues could negotiate their contracts based on individual worth.
It was a magnificent time for the NBA.
From 1990 until 1994, the league drafted such future Hall of Famers as Gary Payton, Shaquille O’Neal, Jason Kidd and Grant Hill. Each of the five drafts had at least one such player. But in 1994, Glenn “Big Dog” Robinson came out of Purdue after conjuring one of the great college seasons ever and had the audacity to request a $100 million contract from the team that selected him, the Milwaukee Bucks. Even though Robinson eventually signed for closer to $70 million, the team and league collectively freaked out, and a year later the rookie salary scale was introduced.
It has been a disaster for the league’s development process. Whereas once there had been tremendous incentive to enter the draft primed to be one of the first few players selected and earn a Big Dog-type contract, the rookie-cap era meant the difference between first overall and 10th was not significant.
In the five-year period before it was installed, 16 of the 25 top-five draft selections became All-Stars at least once, 15 of them appeared in at least 800 career games and 18 topped 10,000 career points. In the same period at the start of the next decade (2000-2004), those numbers plunged to 10 different All-Stars, 12 with 800 career games and just 11 with 10,000 or more career points.
The least productive top-five draft pick from 1990-94 probably was Billy Owens, who played 600 games and scored 7,026 career points. Eight of the 25 top-5 picks from the first years of the 2000s failed to meet those standards.
The idea of capping rookie earnings appealed to other leagues, though. The NFL installed its rookie scale in 2011, introducing an era when having a quarterback on a rookie deal became advantageous for teams trying to build Super Bowl contenders.
The WNBA’s is among the most visibly problematic, because it restricts entering players to salaries that are not typically what would be available to popular professional athletes. When the great Candace Parker entered the league in 2008, the Los Angeles Sparks sold seven times more season tickets than the previous year, but she was paid a mere $44,000.
She, like Clark nearly two decades later, could not negotiate a deal based on her obvious value.
MORE: Explaining Caitlin Clark's net worth between salary, marketing deals
No one’s arguing against a salary cap
There is a massive difference between a rookie wage scale and a team salary cap. The cap is tied to revenues and thus assures players receive a substantial portion of the income generated by the teams and leagues. It also guarantees the competition is about which team performs the best at assessing, assembling and assimilating talent rather than – as in Major League Baseball or England’s Premier League – teams that have wealthier owners or greater market revenues winning big by outspending their competitors to acquire players.
A rookie scale simply denies each young athlete entering the league in question the opportunity to negotiate an appropriate salary.
While a student at Duke University School of Law, attorney DJ Rowe published a paper in The Sports Lawyers Journal titled, “It’s Time to Retire the NBA’s Rookie Salary Scale.” His position was oriented toward how it rendered young players underpaid relative to their true value, citing 2014 NBA Finals MVP Kawhi Leonard as earning just $1.9 million as a third year player – compared to the average Finals MVP salary of $14.8 million for the previous 20 years.
He compiled a chart using the “win shares” statistic to show how early career players – especially those still under scale contracts in years two and three – were being paid roughly half the value they were generating in results for their teams.
We don’t know what sort of player Caitlin Clark will be for the Fever. We know the team can’t get worse than it’s been over the previous four years, when they won just 23 percent of their games and three times couldn’t manage double-digit victories.
We can imagine the Fever would have paid Clark whatever they were permitted in order to generate the kind of intensely passionate reaction that followed the news the team had won the right to exercise the No. 1 pick, and Clark’s announcement she would renounce her extra year of NCAA eligibility, and the ceremonial process of Indiana to making her the overall first draft selection.
The rookie salary scale does not allow this.
If you want to be angry about something relative to Clark’s salary, this is the best place to start.
