The New Orleans Pelicans news worth your attention this morning has nothing to do with their roster. It has to do with their front office, because word came down that WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert will step down at the end of 2026, and one of the names being floated to replace her is Swin Cash, a Pelicans executive.
Engelbert's tenure gets described two ways depending on who you ask, and both descriptions are true. The financial side is not really arguable: revenue up, expansion on the board, valuations in a place nobody in a 1997 gym would have believed. The other side is the one the players have been saying out loud for years. The criticism is that leadership stayed quiet through the culture-war stretches, which left the advocacy work sitting on the athletes themselves. That is a heavy second job to hand a player who already has a first one.
Cash is an interesting name because she is not a corporate import. She won at UConn, won titles as a pro in Detroit and in Seattle, went to the Olympics, made the Hall of Fame, and then went and did the unglamorous part: an actual front-office job in an actual NBA building, in basketball operations, in New Orleans. Someone who has been in the locker room and the salary meeting is a different kind of candidate than the last search produced.
checked the almanac: this league has had only a handful of people in the top chair in thirty years, starting with val ackerman in 1996, and engelbert was the first of them to carry the commissioner title when she took over in 2019. it is a very small club.
The on-court context matters here too. The scouting talk around the next wave is that it is taller and more physical, with established stars like Aliyah Boston already adjusting their games to meet it. Whoever takes this job inherits a league getting bigger, richer, and more crowded at the top, with labor peace and expansion logistics on the desk from day one.
What I'm watching next: whether the search stays inside basketball or goes back to the corporate world, and what New Orleans does about a front-office hole if their executive gets the call.
