It is a rare occasion in this little backwater of the Internet for the lead topic to be anything related to the WNBA. Today, the first two items are about the WNBA and that would be extremely unusual. Here goes …
The WNBA just concluded its All-Star break/game; the game drew a TV audience of 2.2 million viewers which is about half the number of folks who tuned into se the NBA All-Star Game about 6 months ago. The league is and should be happy with that audience. I did not watch the All-Star Game because I don’t like All-Star Games and because I am only marginally interested in the WNBA. However, I did notice something when checking in on the reporting surrounding the game:
- WNBA players are very much like NBA players; they don’t care much about their All-Star Game to exert effort to play defense.
The final score this year was 151-121; total number of points = 272. For the record, the WNBA record for most total points in a regular season game is 221 points back in 2018. The All-Star Exhibition eclipsed that standard that has stood for 7 years by 51 points. Good defense, ladies …
[Aside: The WNBA games are 40 minutes long compared to NBA games which are 48 minutes long. Hence the reason the women’s records for total points are significantly behind the men’s record.]
And, there was something else that emanated from the All-Star break that deserves discussion. The league and the women need to forge a new CBA because the women opted out of the current one and it will expire at the end of this year’s WNBA playoffs. The women chose the All-Star Game to make a statement about those negotiations by wearing warm up shirts that read:
“Pay Us What You Owe Us”
This is not going to be a popular comment, but it is the truth. The moment I saw photos of the women warming up in those shirts, the thing that flashed into my mind was:
- Colin Kaepernick
Hear me out, When Colin Kaepernick famously “took a knee” to bring attention to/protest police brutality/systemic racism in society, I completely agreed with him on the issues that he was protesting. I also said then – – and continue to think now – – that he chose a wrong format for demonstrating his protest. He chose to do something that made him stand out and be noticed (good move) by doing something that was guaranteed to piss off a very large segment of the audience he was demonstrating in front of (bad move).
I am now in the same situation with the players in the WNBA. They were right to opt out of the current CBA because reports I have read say that the players now get as part of their salary cap calculations only 9% of the league’s national revenue. Forget the fact that the NBA players get 50% of the NBA’s national revenue and forget arguments about parity; the current level of 9% is not even a token recognition of the value of the players on the court. I am foursquare aligned with the players in terms of making more money available to them in a salary cap structure.
But let me be equally clear about three other things:
- The players are not “owed” anything. They have earned an increase in their share of the revenues and need to acquire that increase, but no one owes them anything.
- If the players insist on presenting themselves as litigants demanding what they are “owed”, are they ready to share their newfound riches with the women who played in the WNBA 25 years ago keeping the league only slightly below water so that it could survive until the current women arose to claim what they are “owed”?
- The fact is that the WNBA has been a money-losing proposition for about 30 years now and it has kept body and soul together based on the largesse of the NBA owners and Commissioners. If anyone or any group is “owed” anything, it would be the NBA owners who paid the bills so that the lights stayed on. I will not hold my breath waiting for one of the women to acknowledge that “inconvenient truth”.
Finally, here is a comment from WNBA star player, Sue Bird, which was surely prescient:
“We’re going to have a moment. It’s coming; just that breakthrough that’s going to give us a cool factor, and more people will want to be a part of it. Because that, to me, is the only thing we’re lacking – that social thing: ‘It’s cool to go to a WNBA game.’ “
But don’t get me wrong, I love sports………