Using the New Developmental Player Spots

Now that the regular season is almost over, it is a good time to evaluate how teams have utilized their two spots for developmental players over the course of the year. Some teams have tried to use the spots to their maximum capacity, keeping players there and being in position to use all of the game activations allowed for the season. Others have not always filled those spots or will not be able to activate players up to the limit based on how many games are left in the season. Some of the under-utilization of the roster spots is due to teams trying to navigate the new rules, but some of it is also the rules not necessarily encouraging their use, so changes there could have modified team behavior.

This Season’s Utilization

For each team, the number of unused days between the two spots was calculated. While it is certainly possible to simultaneously release and sign players on the same day, there are certainly complexities in those logistics, so the first day will only be counted if the team does not sign another player by the end of the following day. Using available boxscore data, the number of activations that team still have available was also calculated to determine whether teams will be able to use all 24 games by the end of the season. It was clear that some of the boxscore designations could not possibly have been correct and some players who were marked as DNP should have marked as DND or omitted from the boxscore entirely instead. There are three teams in particular whose actual unused activations are probably undercounted and they are indication with question marks by their numbers.

For the most part, teams have made reasonable attempts at keeping both spots occupied for as much of the season as possible. The actual logistics around signing players mean that it would be unlikely that teams could fill every day unless they just kept the same players for the entire season. There were some notable outliers, including Las Vegas, which did not add any players until later in the season, although they do look set to maximize Ta’Niya Latson’s activations before the end of the season. It is possible that American players might not find being a developmental player for Toronto as being as appealing an offer as the team has gone international for those spots until recently. A number of teams will be able use all of the activations, but there are definitely teams that will leave some on the table this year. It is worth noting that Portland has carried Sania Feagin in one roster spot even though she suffered a season-ending injury almost immediately after joining the team so she could not have been activated for games during that time.

Team	Unused Spots Days	Unused Activations
Atlanta	59	9
Chicago	30	4
Connecticut	28	0?
Dallas	23	5
Golden State	14	4
Indiana	26	10
Las Vegas	176	15
Los Angeles	22	1
Minnesota	44	5
New York	17	0?
Phoenix	2	6
Portland	59	12
Seattle	89	9
Toronto	117	1
Washington	66	3?

Alternative Rules Possibilities

While these spots are new to the WNBA, the basic idea around them did not originate out of thin air, definitely drawing some inspiration from the NBA’s two-way contracts. There are plenty of similarities, but also their share of differences, which include some changes that seem to be undoing lessons already learned in the NBA. A few tweaks to those rules would have changed team approaches in ways that could have benefited teams, coaches, players, and fans. There would seem to be no path to making any changes in the near-term, but the effects are worth considering for future CBAs.

Mandatory Use

The new CBA mandated that teams carry 12 players on the main roster at nearly all times, eliminating the ability that teams had in previous seasons to maintain future flexibility by spending at least parts of the season with fewer players. The benefit to the player side of ensuring more jobs at all times outweighed the effects of possibly further limiting player movement. There is no such mandate to use the spots for developmental players though even with the lower cost associated with them and the endless number of players who teams could at least get some benefit from evaluating up close over an extended period of time instead of just during training camp or while they are playing in other leagues.

Flat Pay

When the NBA first adopted two-way contracts, pay was based on whether a player was with the NBA team or their G League affiliate and there was a limit on days with the NBA team, regardless of whether it was spent in a game or during practice. These rules ended up being changed because it made personnel decisions far too complicated and a flat pay model was adopted with a limit on how times players could dress in games. It was surprising that the WNBA did not go with the flat pay model for these spots after those lessons for a number of reasons. Player compensation would have been easier to project and coaches would not have to make activation decisions with financial consequences in mind. It would have reduced the scramble at the end of the season for teams to get players who have been with them for the bulk of the season as many activations as possible and allow them to be used mainly for basketball reasons.

Hardship Rules

There was plenty of support for this type of roster expansion because of the benefits to many sides without requiring the same scale of financial commitment as adding full roster spots under the increased minimum salary. Players had the added opportunities to play in the league and prove their ability to contribute, front offices had the ability to evaluate players and retain those who had been selected in the draft, and coaches had additional players to call upon with existing experience with the team. On the fan side, fans of individual teams had more players to connect with instead of seeing vacancies filled by any player available at a given time while fans of the league as a whole could benefit from a higher level of play resulting from players filling in having more experience with those teams already.

Even with the addition of developmental players, teams are still finding themselves in situations where they are signing hardship players and still conserving games where they activate developmental players, not exactly using the new system to address a problem that people were hoping that it would solve. The simplest way of solving this would have been to allow games where a developmental player was functioning as a player signed under a hardship contract to not count against the game activation limit while still having the increase in pay for that game. It would allow for the team to maintain as much continuity as possible in navigating player absences while also making it so that teams would not have to worry as much about activating players in games where the roster is fuller.