WNBA CBA talks show execs still don't take women seriously. Do they like losing?

There’s always a winner and loser in contract negotiations. And until sports executives, more often than not men, start taking the women across the table from them seriously, they’re always going to be the loser.

The WNBA and its players finally came to an agreement on a new contract on Wednesday, March 18, after almost 18 months of talks. Scratch that. A month of real talks, because it didn’t dawn on the W and its NBA overlords until the last few weeks the players not only knew their worth, they weren’t going to take a deal that reflected anything less.

The league is lucky a deal got hammered out in time to preserve the entirety of the regular season. But this last-minute drama was needless, the result of the W, and the NBA, not recognizing that the game has changed.

Just as U.S. Soccer found out four years ago, women are over being treated like charity projects. They know the economics as well as anyone the suits bring to the table — hell, probably better — and aren’t going to be fooled by chump change offers.

They see the skyrocketing ratings. They see teams outgrowing the W’s traditional, midsize arenas. They see the sponsors tripping over themselves to get in on what, especially when compared with men’s sports, is a growth industry. They see people who are savvy enough to realize there is a boatload of money to be made not batting an eye at $250 million expansion fees, a fivefold increase from two years earlier.

When W owners cried poor or presented offers that might have looked fair but were really just smoke and mirrors, this generation of women athletes would not be played for fools.

“We're not just players that run up and down the court and do amazing things. Some of us are business owners, some of us are foundation owners. So we know what it takes,” Las Vegas Aces center A’ja Wilson, she of the signature Nike line, said last July at the All-Star Game.

“When we see the revenue, when we see things flowing into our league, we want that. We are going to demand that because we see it and we see the growth,” Wilson added. “And when you see a business growing, obviously the people that are working for the business should have some say in that as well. So I think we know what we are talking about.”

That it took until the last few weeks for the league to realize that is — I’d like to say shocking, but any woman, in every industry, has her own story of being marginalized and underestimated. At some point, powerbrokers are going to have to recognize they can’t get away with it anymore.

There was a time when women had to accept less because it was the only way to get more. The U.S. women’s national team needed a contract that gave them salaries at one point because they didn’t have a professional league like the men. W players were willing to go without charter flights in the last CBA because they needed salaries that offered a living wage. The NWSL is still flying commercial because that paled in comparison to higher salaries and the need for professional-level support staff.

But the days of taking their bosses at face value or having to accept crumbs in exchange for the continued existence of their leagues or teams are over. The W is in its third decade while the NWSL is in its second. Owners have invested millions in brick-and-mortar statements on the leagues’ futures, from practice facilities to the Kansas City Current’s purpose-built stadium.

And this is what, year seven of this boom in interest in women’s sports? By the time the WNBA’s new CBA expires, the landscape is going to look vastly different than it does right now. The women knew that and weren’t going to accept a deal that didn’t reflect that.

Did they get everything they wanted? Of course not. That’s not how negotiations work. While revenue sharing will double to almost 20%, that's still less than half of what NBA players get.

But W players got enough — the salary cap will jump to $7 million from $1.5 million and the minimum salary will now be $300,000 — that they are the clear winners in these talks. Just as the USWNT was when it got equal pay in its current contract with U.S. Soccer.

The days of short-changing women are over. Maybe sports executives will finally get that through their thick skulls by the time the next CBA rolls around.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.