The history books will be kinder to Cathy Engelbert than this last year was as WNBA commissioner.
Six expansion teams. An international market. A landmark media rights deal. Exploding TV viewership and arena attendance numbers. Team valuations topping out at $1 billion and averaging $460 million.
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Then there’s the league’s first $1 million player salaries and a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) based on revenue-sharing, marking the second “transformational” CBA she oversaw. They bookend a mind-boggling ascension for women’s sports collectively in Engelbert’s seven years running a league that turned 30 this year, and is the longest-running women’s league in the United States.
Pull back 10,000 feet, and those are the highlights of a theoretical Encyclopedia Britannica entry, not the turmoil that ultimately led to Engelbert’s decision to retire at the end of the year, announced on Friday. She is the league’s second-longest-tenured leader, and told the Associated Press she had initially intended to do the job for three and a half years. She sped past that short window, and told the AP she had been mulling the decision for months.
“This is a really good time given the financial transformation journey we’ve been on,” Engelbert told the outlet, adding it was her decision and she did not feel pressure from NBA or WNBA stakeholders. “Getting the collective bargaining agreement done, getting a long-term media rights deal done, getting expansion done.”
Engelbert led the league over a period of unprecedented growth, a product created by a combination of her approach and outside forces. There is a reason team owners never came out to rip her, and why even players critical of her tenure — and there are valid reasons to do so — quieted when the paychecks began to hit their bank accounts in May.
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To put it bluntly: Engelbert made everyone really, really rich and relevant in a business historically suppressed and at the butt of cultural jokes.
The ascension of women’s basketball happened so quickly, it’s easy to forget Engelbert took this job in May 2019 at a time when the New York Liberty were playing in Westchester County Center, having been shuttled to an auditorium and left to disintegrate by former owner James Dolan. They now average near sell-out numbers nightly after the Tsais moved them to Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, a proper home where they averaged 16,495 fans per game this season and won their first championship in 2024.
Mark Davis hadn’t yet purchased the Las Vegas Aces, which he did in 2021, nor had he built a team-specific training facility that sparked an arms race that has since revolutionized and professionalized all women’s leagues in the U.S. The Aces are on a run of three titles in five years, packing the Las Vegas Strip for parades. Engelbert’s first champions, the 2019 Mystics, immediately flew to play overseas after popping their champagne bottles.
No, Engelbert herself didn’t do either of those things, or many of the other foundational pieces of the last six years. But her leadership, which notably included a business background at Deloitte and not a law degree, mattered to many opting into the WNBA.
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Expansion talks popped early in Engelbert’s tenure, a top-of-mind issue pushed down the list by necessity. Months after taking the job and signing a monumental 2020 CBA, the world shut down amid the COVID-19 pandemic. Engelbert insisted on holding a season, believing that to skip one would do detrimental harm to a league that had no qualms pushing the idea that it already wasn’t profitable. They were the first to return, hosting a bubble season in Florida beginning that July.
After another successful 2021 season that began without fans, Engelbert led a controversial $75 million stake sale in 2022 that looked necessary at the time. It was the largest-ever investment round in women’s sports, financing the overdue upgrade in the league’s digital and marketing segments. The front office expanded to properly promote the league in an era that transformed players into household names.
She could finally directly answer the question that opened quite nearly every press conference she held. Expansion? When?
Golden State became the first expansion team since the Atlanta Dream in 2008 when the league announced ownership under the Warriors’ Joe Lacob and Peter Guber in 2023. They began play in 2025, followed this year by the resurgence of a Portland team and international reach to Canada in Toronto. At a gathering held at their offices last summer, the league announced three more in Cleveland (2028), Detroit (2029) and Philadelphia (2030), each at a record $250 million fee. It will bring the WNBA to a record 18 teams. The schedule continues to expand, with 50 games slated for 2027.
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More games, more markets, more money for all.
Engelbert will forever carry the distinction of the league’s first commissioner after previous leaders of the WNBA led under the title of president. Though she held the title equivalent to those of major professional leagues in the U.S., she also faced the reality that the WNBA sat underneath the NBA’s umbrella and commissioner Adam Silver.
That precarious standing tilted dangerously toward demise in recent months. Players criticized her lack of relationship building, an issue that never relented following Napheesa Collier’s scorched-earth end-of-season interview last year, calling out Engelbert and the WNBA as “the worst leadership in the world.” The CBA negotiations were tense, requiring around-the-clock conversations almost past the 11th hour. The deal marked major wins for everyone, namely the players, but condensed a busy offseason into a few short weeks.
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As tensions rose, officiating wilted and culture wars enveloped the league, many questioned her leadership. Engelbert never thrived in that aspect of the role. Her public-facing conversations improved over the years, but were never her strong suit. She rarely spoke outside of tentpole events, and was far more comfortable talking shop than chit-chat. The underlying question remained how involved Silver — who both hired and announced her retirement — was.
Though those issues will make it to her bio, it will be buried. Engelbert did her job and did it well, even amid forces majeures that rattled the entire world beyond a game played between 90 feet.
In the end, money talks, and bank accounts don’t lie.