Given current circumstances, the coming 2026 WNBA season is strictly a theoretical construct. It should begin on Friday, May 8. Opening night should include a late tilt between the Seattle Storm and your Golden State Valkyries. This season could even include reigning league MVP A’ja Wilson playing for a new team, because 80% of the league’s players are free agents. You and I should be excited about all of the sweet, sweet hoops action that all of this promises.

The problem is that the WNBA is in some really deep s—t right now. 

Thanks to circumstances tragically familiar to any lifelong sports fan, a dispute over money is threatening to scuttle the beginning of this season, and maybe even all of it given how s—tty things are going right now between players and the league. It’s a collective bargaining standoff years in the making, and it threatens to obliterate all of the good will — and more importantly, the profits that come along with that good will — that women’s basketball has amassed over the course of this decade.

Article continues below this ad

I’ll try to top-line this as best I can, because the details are so opaque that you’d need to flick on your wiper fluid to see them. The WNBA has given the Women’s National Basketball Players Association a loose deadline of March 10, next Tuesday, to agree to the league’s recent proposal. Players, who have been vocal about wanting their fair share ever since Caitlin Clark and the Great Women’s Hoops Explosion of ’24, hate the deal they’ve been presented. They should, because it falls........

© SFGate