Today, the winner of the inaugural WNBA Commissioner’s Cup will be decided as the Connecticut Sun take on the Seattle Storm in the Championship Game to tip off the second half of the season after the league stopped play for the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.
The Seattle Storm will rep the West and the Connecticut Sun will be the beast from the East conference.
However, before the WNBA season began, players were barely aware of the Commissioner’s Cup.
New for the 2021 season, the Commissioner’s Cup is the WNBA’s in-season tournament, which will culminate on Thursday, August 12, when the ball goes up at the Footprint Center in Phoenix. Before the league broke for the Olympics, each team in the league played 10 games to determine who would represent each conference in the Commissioner’s Cup Championship Game. The two teams — one from each conference — with the highest win percentage from those games will face and play for the new prize.
The game doesn’t count towards the regular-season standings, but there is a prize-money pool of $500,000. Players on the winning team will be eligible to earn $30,000 per player while those on the losing team will be able to earn $10,000 per player. An additional $5,000 will go to the game’s MVP. All that means a win would almost double the rookies’ individual salaries.
