Marina and Myles want out
Why the NBA should pay close attention to how fans reacted to trade requests by Marina Mabrey and Myles Garrett.
Welcome back to Club Sportico, where we break down the intersection of sports and money—with an extra bit of humor and opinion. Today, Eben requests a trade.
As a journalist, sometimes you write something that gets more attention than you expect. Sometimes you write something that vanishes into the internet. And sometimes readers find one tiny nugget from a story and blow it into a huge deal.
That happened to my colleague Eric Jackson last week. He wrote a smart piece about how the WNBA’s Connecticut Sun have responded to an exodus of players, and during his reporting, team president Jennifer Rizzotti mentioned that the team had denied a trade request from guard Marina Mabrey. Eric tucked the comment into the fifth paragraph.
Almost immediately after the piece ran, Rizzotti’s comments went viral in WNBA fan groups, reddit threads, and across social media. League players were also quick to weigh in, including Arike Ogunbowale, who played with Mabrey at Notre Dame. She posted this on X:
The reaction from all the above was pretty unanimous. Fans and players were stunned a) that a WNBA team would deny a trade request, and b) that an executive would be this public about it. It underscores a point I’ve written here before: women’s sports fans treat athlete rights fundamentally differently than fans in men’s sports.1 The culture is night and day.
Shortly after Eric’s story ran, Mabrey’s agent said this to ESPN:
“In this current age of women's empowerment and support of the players, the CT Sun threatening to force Marina Mabrey to play for them after her trade request is mind-boggling… Why would anyone try to force someone to play on their team when they don't want to be there? It's counterproductive in a ton of ways.”
Contrast this with Cleveland Browns star defensive end Myles Garrett. He requested a trade in early February, and the NFL team has been quite public in its refusal. “We can't imagine a situation where not having Myles as a part of the organization is best for the Browns,” GM Andrew Berry said this week.
Unsurprisingly, there’s very little fan outcry for Garrett’s situation. No one is griping about how absurd it is for an NFL team to force a player under contract to stay on its roster. The few rooting for a trade seem to either prefer a team rebuild or just be rooting against the Browns’ success. Most sentiment seems to be tied up in this column by beat writer Mary Kay Cabot titled: Why it makes no sense for the Browns to trade Myles Garrett, and why they won’t.
All of this is particularly relevant now of course because the WNBA and its players are in the early stages of negotiations on a new labor accord. The NBA owns 42% of the women’s league, and will play a significant role in the talks. This isn’t WNBA players vs. WNBA as much as it is WNBA players vs. the WNBA and NBA.
Some of the dynamics here look similar to those in men’s leagues. WNBA revenue is up and owners are making more money, so players want better benefits and a larger share of the pie. The talks will hinge on how much.
But there’s one major difference: public sentiment. When labor negotiations in the NBA threaten the games themselves, as they did in 2011, many fans view the players as well-compensated and selfish. It’s a critical lever for billionaire owners, and they wield it. Not only do they have the financial comfort to better weather missed games, but they know the public sentiment will affect both camps relatively evenly.
That won’t happen with the WNBA. We’re not yet at the point where the negotiations have spilled into the public, or at the point where missed games are a possibility, but if we do get there, the fan reaction will be extremely one-sided. I’m not sure exactly how much that’s worth, but it is worth something.
We’ve already seen this dynamic play out, to a degree, in the NWSL. The league’s prior CBA was set to expire at the end of the 2026 season, but owners chose to open talks years in advance. In exchange for six more years of labor peace, owners last year signed off on the most player-centric labor deal in U.S. team sports. The NWSL got rid of its annual player draft, bumped up salaries, and granted no-traded clauses to every player. Any NWSL trade now requires the player’s consent.
WNBA players won’t get all that, but they can make this extra tough for the NBA if they want to, and I suspect they do. Here’s WNBA boss Terri Carmichael Jackson at a Sportico event in October talking about the players’ decision to enter talks early 👇
The framework is already being laid. Caitlin Clark and Sabrina Ionescu’s decision not to participate in the NBA All-Star Weekend was viewed by many in our industry as a nod to the current labor tension. The launch of the Unrivaled 3x3 league, which pays many players more than their WNBA salaries, is another fascinating piece of leverage. WNBA star Napheesa Collier recently earned $200,000 for winning Unrivaled’s one-on-one tournament; her WNBA salary last season was $208,000.2
Guard Natasha Cloud was recently asked what the WNBA can learn from Unrivaled. “We want our money and we want it now,” she said. “Just prioritize the players.” Fans strongly agree.
Jacob’s ⚡ Take: It’s hard to quantify the balance of power between teams and players across leagues, but here’s one attempt. The Browns have more Instagram followers than Myles Garrett, but Mabrey—who largely came off the bench for Connecticut last season—outguns the Sun on IG. In newer leagues, relying on individual star power to draw eyeballs also means giving them more power for disruption.
Matt’s ⚡ Take: This fully supports my take that WNBA Fans are too "new" to understand the wholly unserious world of sports social media. NBA Twitter (X) has been filled with trolls trolling and fans taking the bait since the inception of the platform (RIP NBACentel), and NFL fans hate their own teams so much that they would do pretty much anything to get a star player to stay just to make their own lives slightly less miserable. I want the record to show that this is not a knock, whatsoever, on the W or the amazing support and fandom that has blossomed recently because it has been truly incredible to see. That being said, some of these fans need to develop some calluses on their twitter fingers before overreacting to the 2nd ever post by "@marinasux420xx__".
Programming Note: The Pick Six now comes in a separate post, in your inbox every Saturday AM.
Club Sportico is a community organized by Sportico, a digital media company launched in 2020 to cover the business side of sports. You can read breaking news, smart analysis, and in-depth features from Eben, Jacob and their colleagues at Sportico.com, and listen to the Sporticast podcast wherever you get your audio. Contact us at club@sportico.com.
And many of these are the same fans!
Collier is also one of the league’s co-founders, which somehow wasn’t a controversy at all. Another difference between fanbases.