More attention means more sponsors more sponsor mean more money and then high pay.

Honestly depends on how much the cartel that owns basketball can keep from the WNBA, last time the NBA players got organized the cartel got Obama to talk them out of a wildcat strike.

Also there isn’t much solidarity amongst sports players, when England won the Football world cup, it was only possible because in the early rounds, multiple teams basically spent their whole game attacking Pele, without that Brazil would almost certainly have won.