Culture
Why isn't Olympics medalist Gabby Williams in the WNBA? It's complicated
Why isn’t Gabby Williams playing in the WNBA?
It’s a question that Williams has had to reckon with too many times over the past four years, and one that is once again at the forefront after the former UConn guard’s dominant showing at the Paris Olympics. As Williams debates a return to the league she has played 135 games in since 2018, the barriers to her re-entry raise important questions about player agency in the WNBA and what changes the players union should prioritize as they decide whether to opt out of the current collective bargaining agreement at the end of 2024.
Williams, who led France to a silver medal and averaged 15.5 points, 4.8 assists, and 2.8 steals per game during the Olympics, entered the 2024 WNBA offseason as an unrestricted free agent. She has been an ace perimeter defender throughout her professional career and has improved her ballhandling and shot creation while playing in Europe and could immediately step into a guard rotation for a contender.
But Williams has been an intermittent member of the WNBA since 2021. She couldn’t play that entire season and has dealt with prioritization challenges each of the last two years. The players union has a variety of priorities to address in a new CBA, including salaries, maternity protections (of particular importance after the Dearica Hamby lawsuit) and revenue sharing. The experience of Williams also shines a light on player agency and autonomy, and what sort of freedoms the players have earned after helping to build the league.
BEST of Xi’an 👑
Gabby Williams helped France 🇫🇷 sweep #FIBAOQT in Xi’an, while averaging 16.3 PTS, 4.0 REB, 2.7 STL and 19.3 EFF and claiming TISSOT MVP honours ⚙️ pic.twitter.com/UALfRCwPCe
— FIBA (@FIBA) February 12, 2024
During the 2024 offseason, rather than sign with a team, Williams opted to spend the first half of the season preparing for the Olympics. Since she retained her status as a free agent and finished her European club season before May 1, Williams isn’t restricted by the WNBA’s prioritization clause, which requires players competing internationally to report at the start of the WNBA calendar (even if their overseas team is still playing) or else be suspended for the season. She could choose to play out the remainder of the season stateside provided a team has a roster spot and cap space available. Even with the WNBA trade deadline on Tuesday, Williams is likely the most impactful addition a team could make before the end of the regular season.
However, as originally reported by Rachel Galligan on X and confirmed by The Athletic, Williams is considering whether to return to the WNBA this season because of how that decision would impact her options in 2025. If Williams simply elects to eschew the WNBA in 2024 (she already has a contract to play for Turkish powerhouse Fenerbahçe for 2024-25), she will once again be an unrestricted free agent in the 2025 offseason and have full control over where she plays in the league next year. However, if she signs for the rest of the season, that team would have the opportunity to core Williams and thus retain her exclusive negotiating rights for 2025.
WNBA teams have the opportunity to designate a free agent as a core player during the offseason. The player can subsequently only negotiate with said team as a free agent and is guaranteed a one-year, supermax contract unless the two parties agree on a deal with different terms or a trade.
The purpose of the core provision was to give teams the ability to protect their investment in a player. After drafting, developing and investing in a player, the core gives franchises another mechanism to keep top talent in their organizations. However, it also by definition reduces player freedom, which has inadvertently been the story of Williams’ WNBA career.
In 2021, Williams was set to miss part of the season to compete in EuroBasket and the Tokyo Olympics for France. Although she anticipated being able to return stateside once her international commitments were complete, the Chicago Sky suspended her for the full season, meaning she wasn’t paid her WNBA contract. In 2023, the prioritization clause would have prevented Williams from suiting up for the Seattle Storm because her French season ended after the start of the WNBA calendar. She only ended up being able to play for the Storm because of an unexpected coincidence; she got a concussion in France, thus prematurely bringing her European season to a close and clearing her to be available for Seattle.
GO DEEPER
Why is Gabby Williams the first test case for WNBA’s prioritization rule?
Now, Williams finds her autonomy threatened by another CBA provision: the core.
Williams’ case challenges the theory of the core provision. She isn’t a franchise player. If she returns to the WNBA, it will be to a team that didn’t draft her and hasn’t given her any marketing money because she’s always overseas during the offseason. A team’s only investment in her would be the $20,000 or so it will pay her for about a dozen regular-season games to close out the season. And for that limited stretch, a team would be able to control where she plays in 2025.
As the WNBA increases in scale, bringing in more revenue, the CBA still exists to protect the teams’ interests, not the players. Mechanisms like restricted free agency, a hard cap and the core depress players’ markets and ability to seek out situations of their choosing.
As a result, players are called upon to make tough decisions that often disincentivize their participation in the WNBA. Prioritization forces a choice between playing overseas and in the U.S., and overseas contracts often outpace what the best players can earn stateside. Elena Delle Donne was cored this offseason by the Washington Mystics, and the veteran is now sitting out despite reportedly expressing an interest to play elsewhere, so the WNBA is missing out on one of the final healthy seasons of a two-time MVP.
Williams could stay in France and bask in the glory of her silver medal for a month before reporting to Turkey. Instead, the decision to help a team chase a WNBA title could handcuff her, once again putting her WNBA career in the hands of an outside actor. The professional experience should be prioritizing players, not forcing them to rely on the promises and goodwill of organizations. The reason Williams isn’t playing in the WNBA is because she is trying to control her career, and the league’s CBA is trying to control her.
(Photo: Jean Catuffe / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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