After the highs of the 2024 WNBA season, expectations were that 2025 would deliver just as much, if not more. But with only five days left in the regular season, reality looks different. Yes, ESPN viewership is slightly up, ABC broadcasts jumped 17%, and attendance has been strong, too, thanks to the addition of the Golden State Valkyries. But did you notice how every headline began the same way: “Despite injuries…” And that’s where the “what if” game starts. What if Caitlin Clark, the WNBA’s most popular player, wasn’t sidelined for most of the season? Clark has managed just 13 games this season, and her absence is only the most visible part of a larger problem looming over the league.

While criticism has landed on the WNBA’s officiating crews and even the Indiana Fever’s medical staff, the deeper issue may lie in the league’s schedule itself. Even with the addition of an expansion team, the season length has barely shifted, creating a tighter grind for players. The result? A wave of major injuries to star athletes across the league. Now, a new federal report adds weight to the concern, linking the demanding schedule to the growing injury toll.

In a recent episode of the We Need To Talk podcast, WNBA reporter Alicia Jay brought this report to light. She said, “There was a study done by the National Institute of Health. From 2015 to 2019, 34 game seasons found that 195 injuries during those four years and a total of 1352 games were missed. That did not state that all injured players’ reports were available because of course we’re not getting all the information when it comes to these injuries. But if you just look at over the past two and a half seasons as the number of games have gone up. Looking at around 551 total illness or injuries and over 2,000 games lost.”

Here, Jay was referencing an epidemiological study by Baker et al. (2020) that dug into injury patterns in the WNBA. And the 1352 number is spot on. The study further pegged the overall injury rate at 5.975 per 1,000 athletic exposures, a number that looks clinical on paper but in reality meant teams were constantly reshuffling lineups.

Also, gaps in research cannot be ignored here. A review by Lian et al. (2022) found that only four studies have ever focused specifically on WNBA injuries: one on ACL tears, one on hip impingement across U.S. and European basketball, one on players before the WNBA draft, and one that lumped WNBA and NBA data together. Because each study used different data, researchers couldn’t combine their findings into a bigger picture.

This lack of information isn’t unique to the WNBA. Emmonds et al. (2019) noted that sports science still pays little attention to elite female athletes, making it harder to create evidence-based training and care. When women’s injuries are studied, the focus usually falls on ACL tears, the “Female Athlete Triad” (now called Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, or RED-S), and concussions in contact sports like rugby and soccer. Meanwhile, most other orthopedic injuries remain under-researched.

Paul et al. (2023) also shed light on how of nearly 670 sports medicine papers published between 2017 and 2021, fewer than 9% focused only on women. And when it comes to the WNBA specifically, the difference is striking. Searching “WNBA” on Google Scholar in August 2023 returned fewer than 10,000 results, while “NBA” produced 333,000. That’s roughly one article on the WNBA for every 34 on the NBA.

To make matters more complicated, most injury studies rely on retrospective data, meaning researchers look back at records kept by teams or medical staff. While convenient, this approach introduces significant bias. In other words, some injuries may never be recorded, or even noticed, leaving gaps in the evidence that can’t be filled. Several have often blamed the Indiana Fever’s medical staff for mishandling Caitlin Clark’s injury, criticism that grew so loud that even head coach Stephanie White admitted mistakes.

But if academia itself has long overlooked the WNBA, can we really expect the Fever to have all the answers? And if the league has added game after game without thinking that bodies need time to heal, can we really expect the Fever to even answer us?

The injury epidemic this season isn’t limited to the Fever, though. As of today, The Next’s Lucas Seehafer’s injury tracker has recorded 243 injuries. According to the same tracker, there were a total of 203 injuries in the 2024 season. An obvious, fast rise. As Seehafer recently said, “As far as I’m aware, the high is 789, which happened, again, two seasons ago. … We crossed the 650 mark [today], Friday, Aug. 1. … It wouldn’t surprise me if we end up closer to 1,000 games missed than the 789 number, which is, it’s concerning”. 

Seehafer didn’t mince words when it came to who is at blame, saying, “if you’ve looked over this time as well since the pandemic, the [WNBA] has systematically been increasing the amount of games over that five years to a high of 44 this year, without actually increasing the number of days in the season, at least not to a significant amount. So basically, they’re cramming in more games, but not extending the season, and that just gives them less and less time for athletes to recover.”

Jay tried to drive that point home to the league while also pointing out that until Engelbert and Co. find a solution, teams like the Indiana Fever would have to be more cautious. “When you look at that, you have to look into just as the Indiana Fever has to look into their own franchise and what’s happening there , the W has to look into what is happening with these injuries as a whole. And they need to change some things around. whether they find that it directly correlates or not, there has to be some type of movement in that area to help protect these players even further as we go on because the schedules are just going to get more rigorous,” Alicia Jay said.

Stars like Natasha Cloud, Breanna Stewart, and Satou Sabally have openly voiced frustration, directing their criticism at commissioner Cathy Engelbert. They’ve been joined by coaches such as Cheryl Reeve and Tyler Marsh, who have also spoken out about the shortage of rest days built into the schedule. With CBA talks already stalled and the specter of a lockout looming, Engelbert faces a delicate test because the WNBA can hardly afford another major disruption right now.

How can the WNBA solve its scheduling problem?

Average rest between games has dropped alarmingly, from 4.03 days in 2021 to just 2.7 in 2025. So, the first and probably the simplest way could be to just increase the length of the season. Till now, the league has been running from May to September as a way to avoid any clash in schedule with the NFL and NBA. However, that was at a time when the WNBA was not very famous among the masses. Now, things have changed. New records are being set every year, which is a sign of growing popularity. Sure, it is a risk to run a league next to the NBA and the NFL, but if there was ever a time to take that risk, it is now.

Another relatively easy method the league can use to address the scheduling issue is to increase the roster size. Currently capped at 12 players, teams have little flexibility, forcing stars to log heavy minutes. Allowing larger rosters wouldn’t solve the scheduling crunch outright, but it would help in two important ways: spreading playing time more evenly to keep athletes fresher, and creating additional opportunities for players to enter the league.

As Erica Wheeler wrote on X, “We pushing get more teams in the W! NO EXTEND the roster to 14 players! That’s just a quick signature!! Adding a new teams gotta got thru 500000 layers! Adding 2 more spots to 12 teams is 24 more spots in the league! This is a easy change!”.

The league can also try to optimize the teams’ travel and road games to better align them. This could reduce the time lost in travel and ensure that fatigue is not built up due to any travel issues. Also, there are no excuses. They have an example from the NBA itself. In 2017, with 30 teams playing 1,230 games in just six months, often in arenas that also host concerts, wrestling, hockey, or even circuses, there was a lot to juggle. On top of that, the league had to make sure players got enough rest, travel wasn’t too draining, fans got weekend games, and TV networks got the best matchups.

To handle all this, the NBA worked with KPMG to build a special computer system that could test out trillions of different schedule combinations. After weeks of crunching numbers, the system helped the league find options that struck the best balance. The results were big. Players had fewer back-to-back games, teams traveled more efficiently, and overall, the season became less exhausting.

So, the ball is in the league’s court now. Let’s see which way they toss it.