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Ahead of the 2022 WNBA All-Star Game, league commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced that the 2023 schedule will expand to a record 40 games for each team, up from 36 this year. In addition, she revealed that teams will fly on charter planes during the 2022 Finals.
“For the WNBA Finals we’re going to provide charter flights to our players, so for all Finals games that’ll happen,” Engelbert said. “In the spirit of finding other ways to compensate our players, we’re planning to increase the postseason bonus pools by almost 50% to a half million dollars … we’re just trying to chip away and find ways for the players and to lift them and to pay them more.”
The topic of chartered flights became a controversy earlier this year, when Liberty owners were fined by the league for providing their players with charter planes, which was deemed an unfair competitive advantage. The league fined New York a record $500,000, though originally sought a $1 million penalty.
Last September, a source told Sports Illustrated that the Liberty made an unofficial proposal to the WNBA Board of Governors to make charter flights the default travel option for WNBA teams—with New York saying they’d found a way to get it comped for everyone in the league for three years—but the proposal lacked majority support. Engelbert denied at the time that a proposal had been made to the board.
“We discussed [charter flights] with the [players association],” Engelbert said on Sunday. “I think we’ll look for other opportunities to do charters like we have in the past. People don’t know we did a bunch of charters during last year’s playoffs when we had a West to East [travel] with challenging one day’s rest or no days’ rest, so we’ll continue to look for those opportunities should our budget allow it.”
