What is your pet sports take? You know, the one that you think about more often than is healthy? 

The take that you interject into conversations even though it's only tangentially related? The one that is contrary to popular opinion, or maybe just doesn’t get talked about enough?

It could be that Draymond Green is a Hall of Famer, or that Babe Ruth is overrated. Maybe you believe draft picks and young prospects are overvalued for fantasy or that the St. Louis Cardinals have the Best. Fans. In. Baseball. What is that? You hear that one all the time? Are you sure? I’m pretty confident I just came up with that off the top of my head.

In any event, my number one sports take, which I have just been dying to write about since I was asked to join LFG, is that the WNBA and NWSL are playing in the wrong time of year. I am convinced both leagues should play in the winter, like nearly all the other professional leagues in those sports. We will almost certainly explore the NSWL side of that equation in a future article, but for today, I present my six reasons why I believe the WNBA should change to a winter schedule.

1. Expand the season.

The WNBA has consistently expanded the season in the last decade, going from 34 regular-season games per team in 2015 to a record 44 in 2025. The playoffs have expanded as well. All series before the WNBA Finals used to be best-of-three, while the Finals were best-of-five. This season, only Round 1 was best-of-three. The Semifinals were best-of-five and the WNBA Finals were, for the first time, best-of-seven.

The WNBA has pushed its summer window about as far as it will go. The season already encroaches on many of the players’ seasons overseas, and it is not practical to cram many more games in. If the league wants to continue to expand its season and thus its revenue, it has to go to a Fall-to-Spring schedule. Hopefully, we’ll never see an 82-game schedule like the NBA, but you could have teams play two or three games a week and get to 65ish games pretty easily.

  2. Keep players fresh.

Cramming so many games into such a short schedule, especially when so much of the league has just finished a full season overseas or in college, has been cited as one of the reasons for the league's high injury count this season. This was arguably the best season the WNBA has ever had, but its hard to argue it wouldn’t have been better if Caitlin Clark hadn’t missed half the season, or if the Liberty’s stars hadn’t all missed time, or if Napheesa Collier, Satou Sabally, Breanna Stewart, Kelsey Mitchell and DiJonai Carrington hadn’t all gotten hurt in the playoffs. A winter schedule won’t eliminate injuries, but more time between games, combined with a real offseason in the summer, might allow more players to be upright at the end of the season.

  3. Give the rookies a break.

It is truly remarkable how good the last couple of rookie classes have been, considering how little time those players have between the NCAA Tournament, the WNBA Draft, and the start of the WNBA season. It's one reason a lot of rookies tend to fall off in the second half of the season: they wear down compared to other players who may have taken the winter off or are simply more used to the grind of playing year-round. I don’t think it's a coincidence that Caitlin Clark was terrible to begin her rookie season but was much, much improved after the WNBA took a month off for the Olympics.

How much better would rookies perform if they actually had a break between seasons? You could have a summer league for the rookies and young players to get more experience and instruction, and then let them recharge ahead of their rookie years.

I think this is important for two reasons. Firstly, as the league expands, more rookies are going to make rosters and be in their teams’ rotations from day one. This was less of an issue when only a few rookies were making a difference, and anyone not chosen in the first round probably wasn’t even making a roster.

Secondly, one of the biggest advantages that the WNBA has over most sports leagues in the world is that many of its best players come into the league as stars. In the era of one-and-done, there are few true stars in men’s college basketball. That is not true on the women’s side. Nearly every WNBA star was a star in college. Diana Taurasi, Sue Bird, Candace Parker, Maya Moore, Breanna Stewart, A’ja Wilson, Sabrina Ionescu, Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese and Paige Bueckers were all huge stars long before they ever set foot on a WNBA court. The WNBA has never been great at turning its late bloomers and international players into stars, so it needs to do its best to put the stars it is handed in the best possible position to succeed. I believe a winter schedule would do that.

  4. Avoid international competitions.

Every year, several prominent players either opt to skip the WNBA season or have to miss a significant portion of it to play in international competitions such as Eurobasket, Americup, the Women’s Basketball World Cup, and even the Olympics. All of those competitions are held in the summer, and they all take very good players away from the league. That was more palatable when there were only 12 teams, but as the league expands, it can no longer be so cavalier about whether or not it gets the best players.

  5. Avoid Overlap with overseas leagues.

Now that the new CBA, in whatever form it takes, is going to see players’ salaries increase dramatically, there is no need for the WNBA to share its players with leagues in Europe, China, Australia, or anywhere else in the world. The WNBA wouldn’t have to worry about enforcing its prioritization rule, which is a point of contention for some players, because players wouldn’t need to play overseas as their main gig and in the WNBA as their side hustle.

Players would still play in the offseason, both internationally and, perhaps, in Unrivaled if it moved to the summer. But the WNBA wouldn’t have to suspend players for missing training camp and even the start of the regular season because they were fulfilling their commitments overseas. This has been a big headache for the league for years, but now that there is so much more money flowing into the league, I don’t think the WNBA has to worry about competing with those leagues. I think they can just play their games in the same portion of the calendar as everyone else and still lure most of the best players in the world to their league.

  6. The WNBA doesn’t need to avoid the NBA anymore.

I may have buried the lede with this one. I get why the WNBA started out playing in the summer. The NBA wasn’t going to launch a new league that would directly compete with itself, and the summer was mostly blank on the basketball calendar. Nobody was watching Eurobasket or, frankly, any FIBA competition. Outside of the Olympics, there wasn’t much for basketball fans to watch in the summer. Even the NBA draft and free agency weren’t nearly as popular as they are now. There was little else going on in the summer, and the WNBA looked to fill that void.

As we pointed out above, that is no longer the case. More importantly, the WNBA isn’t really even avoiding the NBA that much. The WNBA season begins in the heart of the NBA playoffs, which is hardly ideal. The NBA draft, free agency, and Summer League all fall right in the middle of the WNBA regular season. And while the second half of the WNBA season still falls in a fallow period on the basketball calendar, there is plenty of competition from other sports. The WNBA playoffs fall in the heart of the MLB playoff race and the start of the NFL season. There is still plenty of competition for attention, even if it doesn’t come from the NBA.

Even more to the point, Women’s college basketball, the WSL, and myriad international leagues have proven that women’s sports can thrive during the men’s season. The WSL doesn’t play on the most popular days of the EPL season, and by doing so, is able to bring in tons of fans to the pitch and on TV. I don’t see any reason why the WNBA couldn’t do the same thing. Hopefully some day soon, more people will start to agree with me.