WNBA has jackpot on its hands after women’s NCAA Tournament success
The WNBA is sitting on a gold mine.
As the league prepares to welcome Aliyah Boston, Diamond Miller and sharpshooter Maddy Siegrist in Monday night’s draft, folks are still talking about Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark and the NCAA women’s tournament that ended a week ago. Add to that wave of interest the WNBA’s established stars — Diana Taurasi, Brittney Griner, Breanna Stewart, A’ja Wilson and Candace Parker — and an Olympics next year, and the league is poised for the kind of transcendent moment the NBA had when Magic and Bird joined the league.
Provided the WNBA doesn’t screw it up.
The W can get in its own way like no other league. Going into its 27th season, the WNBA often operates as if it’s still not sure it’s going to make it. It takes what it gets from its TV partners rather than demanding what it deserves. WNBA teams are still flying commercial during the regular season, subjecting the best players in the world to the whims of seat maps and the weather gods.
League officials are just fine with some of its franchises pinching pennies on both staff and facilities; the Chicago Sky was still practicing in a local park district gym after winning the 2021 WNBA title, for heaven’s sake! When New York Liberty owners Joe and Clara Tsai decided to buck the league and charter during the 2021 season, the W responded by fining them a record $500,000.
And while the NWSL announced two expansion teams last month, with one and possibly two more on the way, the WNBA is dragging its heels.
“We are not in a rush,” commissioner Cathy Engelbert said in February, pushing out the initial timeline to add two franchises to the 12-team league by at least a year, to 2025.
Nothing like not rising to meet the moment.
The WNBA has made strides, for sure. Its guaranteed salaries have risen enough that top players no longer have to spend their off-seasons playing in Europe or Asia just to stay above the poverty line. It provides maternal and reproductive health benefits that should be the gold standard for every company.
Free agency played a role in the creation of two super teams this off-season, and the matchups between the Liberty and defending champion Las Vegas Aces are already the most hotly anticipated in WNBA history.
But it continues to act as if it’s a bit player rather than the next big thing. Which it is.
Or could be.
“We need people to invest in the game,” Aces owner Mark Davis told USA TODAY Sports last September. “If we invest in the product, it will come back to us in multiples.”
Davis knows of what he speaks. He lured Becky Hammon back from the NBA last year by making her the first WNBA coach to earn more than $1 million a year, and built the Aces a state-of-the-art practice facility in a complex they share with his NFL team, the Raiders.
The Aces won the franchise’s first title last fall.
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Anyone paying even the slightest bit of attention knows there’s money to be made in women’s sports. Buckets of it.
Ratings for women’s basketball have skyrocketed over the last few years. WNBA ratings were up 22% for last season, while this year’s NCAA tournament drew a whopping 9.9 million for the title game alone, a 104% increase. The tournament also set an attendance record with 357,542 fans.
With the WNBA’s current media rights deal expiring in 2025, this is the time for the league to capitalize on its burgeoning star status. (Did you see the NBA spoofed on “Saturday Night Live” this weekend? No, you did not.)
If it doesn’t, that moment will be gone, with no guarantee another will come.
This isn’t an idle threat, mind you. Players are already opting to take advantage of their COVID year and stay in school for a fifth season, knowing they can make more in college with NIL deals than they can in the W, where the projected base salary for the top picks is a little over $74,000.
Those at the top schools also know playing in the WNBA will be a comedown from the conditions they’re used to.
“At least I’ll fly charter!!” Breanna Stewart, the 2018 WNBA MVP said on Twitter after her college coach, UConn’s Geno Auriemma, joked about trying to get her an extra year of eligibility.
“I’m in no rush to go to the league,” Reese, who won’t be eligible for the WNBA draft until 2025, told the I Am Athlete podcast. “The money I’m making is more than some of the people that are in the league that might be top players.”
Reese isn’t wrong, and that ought to terrify Engelbert and everyone else at the WNBA. The NBA, too, since it supposedly is a partner — not that you’d know it from its lack of visible involvement.
Reese and Clark are the biggest things going in women’s basketball right now and, along with UConn’s Paige Bueckers and Stanford’s Cameron Brink, will continue to be for the foreseeable future. When none are itching to get to the next level — Clark, who just finished her junior season, has already floated the idea of staying at Iowa for a fifth year — that is an indictment of both your product and, more so, the people in charge of it.
Over the next couple of years, the WNBA will either see itself transformed or permanently cede center stage to the college game. But as they decide which way to go, Engelbert and Co. should know you rarely get a second crack to cash in on a jackpot.
Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on Twitter @nrarmour.
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