WNBA players are broke!!!!

Interesting numbers here:

With the all star game on TV, I felt compelled to look up the average salary for WNBA players. Don't ask. It's a slow day.

Anyway, incoming rookies make $34,500 at minimum. The average first year player salary is a little higher than that. The MAXIMUM salary a WNBA veteran player can earn in a season is $95,000 according to a finance site.

$95,000?! That's it!? Don't get me wrong, that's good money. I'd play sports the rest of my life for that. Heck, I'd clean port-o-potties the rest of my life for that kind of cash.

But for a pro athlete?

By comparison, let's look at the NBA salaries. Kobe Bryant was the league's highest earning player in 2010-11 in terms of game salary at $25,244,493. Sad, huh? If you really want to cry… that breaks down to $307,859.67 PER GAME, or roughly $78.22 PER MINUTE of the game.

Dry those tears. He' the exception.

Most players don't make that much cash in the NBA, although the average yearly salary for a player is over $3 million.

Take Ben Uzoh for example. He just finished his first season in the league after starring at the University of Tulsa for four years. He made $473,604 last year AS A ROOKIE. (an undrafted rookie, no less)

He made a little under $5,800 per game last season while with the New Jersey Nets.

That's a HUGE disparity between the leagues!!!

To be fair, the WNBA season is half the length of the NBA season, but still. Double the maximum annual salary for a WNBA player ($180,000) and you're still only making a little more than a third of Ben Uzoh's yearly rookie salary in the NBA.

I'm not sure this is really all that surprising, but it's just eye opening. With the NBA in a lockout situation and staring at an extended work stoppage, maybe the WNBA has it right.

Is it possible?