On September 15, 2026, five of North America’s biggest professional sports leagues — the NFL, NBA, MLB, NHL, and MLS — did something unprecedented. Alongside their respective player unions, they sent a joint memo to gaming regulators across 35 states and Washington, D.C., calling for lifetime sportsbook bans for anyone who harasses or threatens athletes. It was a bold, coordinated statement on one of sports’ most urgent crises.

There was just one problem: the NBA, which co-owns the WNBA and shares offices and leadership with the league, made a deliberate choice to leave WNBA players out entirely.

The same players who had been posting screenshots of racial slurs from bettors. The same players who had received death threats tied to prop bets. The same players who had already forced an emergency meeting with league leadership over the very issue this memo was designed to address. Those players were excluded — not accidentally, not through oversight, but as a calculated institutional decision.

The WNBA Players Association is calling it exactly what it is.

A “Historic” Coalition That Forgot Half the Court

The joint memo described its signatories as “the five largest professional sports leagues and players associations.” The letter’s language was unambiguous and morally clear: “Too often, individuals who lose sports bets direct threatening and harassing messages toward players, coaches, and their families via social media and in-person interactions. Threatening the safety of an athlete or their family members over a sports bet crosses a bright ethical and criminal line, and it is entirely unacceptable.”

Among its demands: lifetime bans from legal sportsbooks for verified harassers, a standardized cross-platform reporting mechanism, cross-state exclusion lists that prevent offenders from simply re-registering in neighboring states, and proactive monitoring by sportsbook operators. It was, by any measure, a meaningful and overdue call to action.

But the WNBA, WNBPA, NWSL, NWSLPA, and PWHL were nowhere on it.

WNBPA Executive Director Terri Carmichael Jackson did not mince words in her statement to Front Office Sports: “It is deeply disappointing that, given the very public and troubling incidents of betting-related harassment experienced by our members over the past several seasons, the NBA determined that WNBA players did not warrant inclusion in a joint position statement intended to address this very issue.”

Notice what Jackson did there. She did not say the NFL excluded WNBA players. She did not say “the leagues” excluded them. She specifically named the NBA — because the NBA is the entity with the institutional authority and the ownership stake to have put WNBA players on that memo. The NBA chose not to.

The WNBA Is Not a Separate League. Not Really.

To understand why this exclusion is so damning, you have to understand the actual power structure. The NBA owns approximately 42% of the WNBA. NBA team owners hold additional individual equity stakes in WNBA franchises. The two leagues operate out of the same New York City office building. For most of her tenure, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert reported directly to NBA Commissioner Adam Silver.

As one high-ranking WNBA stakeholder told The Athletic anonymously: “One of the great misunderstandings is that Cathy has ultimate power. She’s in the room, she’s around, but the W makes very few decisions on its own.”

Engelbert herself announced her retirement on September 4, 2026 — just eleven days before the memo was sent — leaving the WNBA in a leadership vacuum at precisely the moment it needed an advocate in the room. Silver, overseeing the search for Engelbert’s replacement, had pledged the incoming commissioner would have independence on “basketball and player issues.” Yet here was the NBA unilaterally sidelining WNBA players from a major player-protection initiative. The contradiction is not subtle.

This was not a scheduling conflict. This was not a clerical error. The NBA co-wrote and co-signed this memo. It made a choice.

The Players They Left Behind

What makes the exclusion unconscionable is the documented, specific, and severe harassment that WNBA players had been publicly enduring for seasons — harassment directly tied to sports betting.

  • Chelsea Gray of the Las Vegas Aces, in July 2026, posted an Instagram Story screenshot showing a racial slur sent by a user whose bio identified him as a sports bettor. The man was subsequently identified and fired from his employer.
  • Natasha Cloud of the Chicago Sky had been receiving death threats, racist messages, and misogynistic abuse she directly connected to betting losses. She told Front Office Sports: “I’m called a [slur], I’m called a [slur], I’m called everything under the sun. I’ve been told that they hope our plane crashes on the way home.” Cloud explicitly called on both Adam Silver and Cathy Engelbert to act: “We want to be in it; it’s great for our league, but also within it, we have to be protected as human beings when we take these jerseys off.”
  • Alyssa Thomas received death threats following an on-court incident with Caitlin Clark, with social media vitriol amplified by bettor rage. While Thomas publicly stated she hadn’t heard from Commissioner Engelbert directly at that moment, the league had in fact been in contact with the Phoenix Mercury organization. Engelbert and Thomas had exchanged texts the week prior, and Engelbert directed league security to get in touch with Phoenix security once she learned of the threats. Engelbert released a statement on June 30, 2026, confirming that the league and its security team had been in contact with the Phoenix Mercury organization.
  • Courtney Williams of the Minnesota Lynx publicly responded to a profanity-laced direct message from a bettor furious about a missed parlay.
  • Jonquel Jones of the New York Liberty publicly called on the league to address the online attacks she and her teammates were absorbing from gamblers.

In late July 2026, the WNBPA was so alarmed that it requested a virtual emergency meeting with Commissioner Engelbert, league security, and the union’s executive and JEDI committees. Players shared threatening messages in real time. The league responded with a joint statement emphasizing communication and launched an AI filtering platform called “No Space for Hate.”

WNBPA Secretary Elizabeth Williams offered a measured but pointed assessment afterward: “Overall, there are steps that are being taken, which is encouraging. But we just want to see a little more consistency.”

That consistency failed to materialize six weeks later when the NBA sent its memo without the WNBA’s name on it.

This Is the Second Time

What should remove any remaining benefit of the doubt: this was not an isolated incident. On April 30, 2026, the same five unions jointly submitted comments to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission specifically regarding prediction markets. The WNBPA was not included in that filing either — making the September 15 memo, which separately addressed betting-related harassment of athletes with gaming regulators, the second consecutive major joint advocacy effort from which WNBA players were deliberately excluded.

A pattern is not an accident.

The NWSL Players Association found out about the September memo the same way fans did — through media inquiries. NWSLPA Executive Director Meghann Burke confirmed her union was never consulted. “The NWSLPA learned of this memo and call to action by the men’s pro sports leagues and unions via inbound media inquiries,” Burke said, adding that her organization fully supports protecting athletes from betting-related harassment. The PWHL was similarly omitted.

The Model Existed. Women’s Leagues Were Still Left Out.

The five leagues’ memo was essentially a call for national adoption of Massachusetts’ newly launched “Bet on Respect” program, which the Massachusetts Gaming Commission announced on August 31, 2026. The program uses state law and commission regulation to exclude verified harassers from all licensed sportsbooks and casino properties simultaneously. Anyone — including individual athletes, leagues, players’ associations, and college athletic programs — can file a report through a dedicated portal, triggering an investigation that can lead to statewide exclusion from all legal betting.

The program’s supporters include DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, Caesars, and the Boston Bruins, Boston Celtics, Boston Legacy FC, Boston Red Sox, New England Patriots, and New England Revolution. MGC Commissioner Eileen O’Brien put it plainly at the launch: “Today, we’re launching Bet on Respect. Whether you place a bet or not, adults should know better. Harass an athlete in Massachusetts, and you will lose access to sports wagering in the Commonwealth.”

The infrastructure to protect WNBA players existed. The model worked. The five leagues called for its national expansion. And then named the same WNBA players who had been publicly harassed as ineligible for inclusion in that call to action.

The Hypocrisy of Leagues That Profit From the Problem

There is a layer of institutional cynicism here that deserves its own accounting. When ESPN’s Adam Schefter posted the joint memo on X, a community note was quickly appended: every signatory league listed has official sports betting partners — DraftKings, FanDuel, BetMGM, and others — whose aggressive marketing and promotion of sports gambling has contributed directly to the culture of bettor entitlement that fuels harassment.

The September 15 memo was a joint effort by all five major sports leagues and their respective players’ unions working in concert — not the product of any single league’s initiative. Yet its timing was unmistakably pointed: the multi-year betting partnerships that the NFL, NBA, and others had finalized with DraftKings, FanDuel, and Fanatics Betting and Gaming in August 2026 — just one month prior — were inked with the same platforms implicated in bettor harassment of athletes.

The WNBA itself has a DraftKings partnership and team-level FanDuel agreements. WNBA players were lucrative enough to be included in the betting ecosystem — their statistics packaged, their performances monetized, their every missed shot turned into someone else’s losing parlay — but not important enough to be included in the coalition demanding accountability for what that ecosystem creates.

The NCAA’s own research found that 51% of Division I men’s basketball players experienced online abuse related to athletic performance, with 46% directly attributing it to gambling. The scale of the problem is not a secret. The NBA’s own house was far from clean: Jontay Porter received a lifetime ban on April 17, 2024, for violating gambling policies, and subsequently pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud on July 10, 2024. In October 2025, Terry Rozier and Chauncey Billups were arrested as part of a federal crackdown on illegal sports betting. The NBA has no shortage of reasons to take gambling-related threats to athletes seriously — and yet it still decided that WNBA players, who had done nothing wrong and had been among the most publicly victimized, did not merit a mention.

The Moment the WNBA Is in Right Now

The timing of all this is almost cruelly ironic. The WNBA in 2026 is arguably the most commercially and culturally valuable it has ever been. To illustrate how far values have climbed: when Joe Tsai purchased the New York Liberty in 2019, the transaction was valued at just $10 million. According to Sportico’s 2026 valuations, the average WNBA franchise is now worth approximately $427 million. A landmark $3.1 billion, 11-year media rights deal is in place. The new seven-year CBA introduced maximum player salaries of $1.4 million and raised the salary cap to $7 million. The league is on a path toward 18 franchises and 50-game seasons.

On September 13, 2026 — just two days before the memo was sent — Team USA, featuring Caitlin Clark, Breanna Stewart, Paige Bueckers, and Chelsea Gray herself, defeated France 97-79 in Berlin to win the FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup gold medal, their fifth consecutive title. Breanna Stewart was named Tournament MVP.

These are not fringe athletes being protected by a charitable association. They are among the most visible, commercially significant, and recognizable figures in American sports. And the organization that owns 42% of their league looked at all of that and said: your safety is not worth a signature.

What Comes Next

The WNBPA is not without options, and Terri Carmichael Jackson has demonstrated throughout her tenure a willingness to act independently when the league does not move. Several paths forward are viable.

  • The NBA faces significant reputational and political pressure to send a supplemental memo to regulators that explicitly includes the WNBA. The cost of doing nothing is now public.
  • The WNBPA can file its own independent advocacy directly with state gaming commissions. The Massachusetts “Bet on Respect” portal, notably, is open to any athlete or players’ association — the WNBPA does not need the NBA’s permission to use it.
  • The incoming WNBA commissioner — whoever succeeds Engelbert — has an opportunity and arguably an obligation to renegotiate the NBA-WNBA partnership framework to ensure co-equal standing in all future player protection initiatives. Adam Silver himself has said the next commissioner should have independence on player issues. That principle needs to be tested immediately.
  • Federal legislative attention remains a longer-term possibility, particularly as the MLBPA has already pushed to eliminate player prop bets in labor negotiations. A federal standard that explicitly includes women’s professional leagues would close the gap that institutional inertia keeps reopening.

The Line That Shouldn’t Need to Be Said

There is something almost absurd about having to argue, in 2026, that a woman who receives a message saying “I hope your plane crashes” because a man lost a parlay bet deserves the same institutional protection as a man who receives one. And yet here we are.

The NBA sent a memo to 35 states and the nation’s capital calling for lifetime bans against people who threaten athletes. It used words like “bright ethical and criminal line” and “entirely unacceptable.” It invoked the safety of athletes and their families. And then it decided that the athletes playing in its own affiliated league — athletes it profits from, athletes whose games it broadcasts, athletes whose betting markets it partners with DraftKings and FanDuel to monetize — were not worth including.

Natasha Cloud said it plainly months before any memo was sent or withheld: “We have to be protected as human beings when we take these jerseys off.”

That is not a complicated ask. The NBA’s decision to exclude WNBA players from this coalition was not a bureaucratic failure. It was a choice. And the WNBPA, correctly and without apology, is holding the league accountable for it.