The short answer is no. Either salaries will rise or the league will fall from elite status.

is that all the best players, with only a few exceptions, are from America. And the other leagues limit foreign players per team, although they do grant citizenship to add to that. I think Becky Hammon, Deanna Nolan and Kelly Miller all have Russian citizenship and Sancho Lyttle now plays for the Spanish National Team.

So the league’s will likely never be better than the current WNBA since they won’t have as many great players per team unless they let Americans flood them. Although a few Russian league teams may have been the greatest ever. One managed to get Bird, Taurasi, Jackson and Tina Thompson on the same team Which makes me wonder what their foreign player limitations actually are. I thought it was two but maybe it is two Americans. Bird has Israeli citizenship and I think Taurasi has Italian citizenship.
 
But it does seem like the best Americans could give up the WNBA. In fact, I think some of these teams offer more money if you don’t play in the WNBA. At least I saw a sportswriter claim that Deanna Nolan has a contract that only allows her to play in Russia. I assume that they give her more money to put that restraint in there. There are players who retire from the WNBA and continue to play in Europe like Nykesha Sales and Nicole Ohlde.

But I have also heard that salaries are coming down over there, at least in Russia where the guy that was paying Bird, Taurasi and Jackson huge bucks was assassinated.

The thing the WNBA has in their favor is that the players seem to enjoy playing here over and above their salary. Definitely better crowds than Europe even though they aren’t great crowds.

The thing that is keeping the WNBA as the best women’s professional basketball league for now is the fact that most of the best women’s basketball players are Americans, and they want to play at home in front of their fans. There are several problems however, which are:

1. As I noted above, the pay abroad, in particular Eastern Europe is better. While an average WNBA player stands to make a good living on a team in Russia for example, the pay for the elite stars like Candace, Lauren, Diana, and Sue is even nicer. It has come to my attention that yes, for these elite players, they don’t just get the fancy gifts, or the extra 1,000 euro bonuses for key victories, like what the late Shabtai von Kalmanovich (the Spartak Moscow womens’ hoops team owner) did. They even will give to the elite players late start dates after negotiations of course.
2. The seasons for these teams are basically on from October until May when the WNBA season starts. If these leagues are always paying more, then the problem here is that these elite players may start caring more for the winter-time team than the summer time team, and understandably so. I do remember when Diana was considering sitting out a WNBA season, and why would she sit out a summer instead of the winter? duh, the winter-time team pays more.
3. When money talks, you may begin to see that the WNBA players may start to feel just as loyal to the team abroad, not just the team here in the US. Look at some of the quotes here that Sue Bird gave about Kalmanovich. I’m not trying to say that Sue Bird likes Spartak more than the Storm solely for the money, but at the same time, I can understand that she felt very loyal to him because of the way he was to her.
4. I don’t know if the WNBA season really can be stretched out more than it already is if it is going to be a summertime league. The purpose of extending the season would be to allow for teams to raise more revenues so players salaries can rise. However, there is an interest in keeping the WNBA season starting in late May, to allow for college semesters to finish (as you all know, WNBA rookies are at least 4 years out of high school and most graduated by then, unlike NBA counterparts). The bigger issue is when the season ends. If the season ends in late October or mid-November, this will coincide with the opening week and the initial matchups in the NBA. Do the WNBA playoffs want to be made totally irrelevant because of the NBA season? Probably not. But at the same time, the NBA playoffs get a lot more attention than opening week, so who knows?
5. This isn’t a totally off base suggestion, because it has been done before in Major League Soccer. In the next CBA, perhaps we should have a variation of the David Beckham exception to the flex cap. Here is the proposal. The purpose of this is to allow players to be paid more than the current league maximum salary of just over $100,000.00, but still keep a tight hard cap to prevent the joke of a system we have in the NBA. What we do is allow a system where WNBA teams have a $1.5 million designated player exception. This exception can be broken up to more than one player (up to three total players), but no more than $1.5 million can be used total nevertheless. Any designated player(s) will take a cap hit at 80% of the maximum salary to allow for salary cap flexibility so the other players are given a fair opportunity for the remainder of the dough. Any player(s) who are designated players under this exception will NOT be allowed to play on an international professional team. This gives the WNBA significantly more power to keep the best players in the US. If an elite player isn’t classified as designated or she won’t agree to it, then yes, she can still play overseas….

The con about this is money. Where is it going to come from? That will have to be up to the teams themselves unfortunately. Much of this money could be brought from additional sponsorships, etc. and this will encourage all the remaining teams to get a jersey sponsor (maybe Connecticut won’t because they kinda have it already). The other con is that teams that are made of the richest ownership groups would have the biggest advantages in getting designated players. I don’t know what you all think of this last idea, but I would be all for it.