In a week where the WNBA made more headlines than usual, at least for the month of February, just what is the status of the league?
When the Seahawks’ strolled to victory over the Broncos in last week’s Super Bowl, Fox Sports — and many other outlets — said it was Seattle’s first major pro sports championship since the defunct Supersonics won the NBA Finals in 1979. The vast majority of the game’s 112 million viewers likely thought nothing of it, but for a select group, it was an infuriating snub.
The Seattle Storm won WNBA titles in 2004 and 2010, and Storm fans, players and media did not appreciate the omission. Storm C Lauren Jackson wrote on Twitter that sexism was “alive and well in sports and sporting culture” and that the press had minimized “female achievement in sport” (NYDN, 2/4). Seattle Times reporter Jayda Evans echoed those thoughts, writing that it was time to look at the ‘major pro sport’ “quantifier for what it is — sexist.” Evans: “The WNBA is the only successful women’s professional league in America. That makes it major. And that has to be recognized. Period.”
While few can argue that the WNBA faces an inordinate amount of sexist taunts, even from members of the mainstream media, the idea that sexism was involved in the Storm snub is, frankly, hard to believe. The fact of the matter is, the WNBA is not a major professional team sport. Neither is the Arena Football League, or — arguably — Major League Soccer. Had the Sounders won the MLS Cup, Fox Sports would have been perfectly justified in ignoring that accomplishment as well.
Just because the WNBA is the most successful women’s league does not mean it is a major sport. We are, after all, talking about a league that has not generated one million viewers for a single telecast in six years, where empty seats are the rule and not the exception — even in the championship series. Multiple teams with championship pedigree — the four-time champion Comets, the three-time champion Shock, and the 2005 champion Monarchs — have all folded (although Sacramento’s case can be more attributed to the Maloofs than fan disinterest), and the two-time champion L.A. Sparks were dangerously close to the chopping block (if not necessarily on it) until about a week ago.
So no, the WNBA is not a major sport. It will not be for quite some time, if ever. One does not have to be sexist to ignore the accomplishments of teams in the league, and it is quite a reach to make that suggestion.
None of which is to say that that the WNBA is a lost cause, or an example of political correctness propping up a failure. The league is a ‘minor’ pro sport on fairly solid ground, on par with the AFL and to a far lesser extent MLS (MLS is much healthier, even if the ratings are similarly low). Even after the Sparks’ owners abandoned the team in December, prompting some to write the team’s epitaph, the league was able to find pretty good replacements in Magic Johnson and Mark Walter. Including 2014, the league will have held steady at 12 teams for five consecutive seasons, with none folding or relocating since 2009.
Half of the 12 teams made a profit last season, league president Laurel Richie told the L.A. Times, quite an improvement considering that the Sun became the first franchise to ever turn a profit in 2010. While that means half of the teams did not profit — including the Sparks, who lost $1.4 million last year according to their previous owners — that is not exactly unprecedented in pro sports. After all, if one truly believes David Stern was telling the truth about the NBA’s finances leading up to the 2011 lockout, 22 of 30 NBA teams failed to make a profit during the 2010-11 season. This may be where sexism comes into play — the NBA can have more than two-thirds of its teams fail to make a profit and still be considered viable. In the WNBA, half of the teams can make a profit, and sportswriters seem almost annoyed that the league has not altogether folded.
The condescending skepticism of the WNBA’s viability is more troubling than ignoring the Storm’s success. After Magic Johnson acquired the Sparks last week, Tom Hoffarth of the L.A. Daily News wrote that it would be “far more noble” for him to “admit he was doing a Dudley Do-Right and coming to the rescue of some hoop-centric damsels in distress,” rather than “trying to sell everyone on the premise that the WNBA is going to make him and his partners a profit someday” (LADN, 2/7). The implication being that the WNBA is a borderline charitable endeavor with which no rational-thinking business person would waste time.
This has been a trend in mainstream coverage of the WNBA — the perception that the league is merely being propped up by the likes of Johnson or Stern, and absent that support it would collapse into nothing. But the WNBA has been around for 17 years now; they were playing WNBA basketball before Tim Duncan played his first NBA game. Surely, if it was hemorrhaging money for so long, even the most charitable of supporters would have eventually abandoned the cause. Mainstream sportswriters have seemingly been waiting for the league to drop dead since about June 21, 1997 — but there is no reason to believe it is going anywhere anytime soon.
Of course, that goes two ways. The WNBA is not going anywhere (i.e., folding), but it is also not going anywhere (i.e., growing). It is entirely possible that another team could fold or move in the near future. However, despite failed predictions to the contrary, it would seem that most of the teams have reached a level of relative stability.
The WNBA may not be particularly successful — and it is certainly not ‘major’ — but it has found its place on the lower tier of U.S. team sports. It does well enough to occupy a small, but devoted niche, and the growing number of profitable teams (one in 2010, three in 2011, six in 2013) points to increasing health. While one does not have to be a sexist to ignore it, one does not have to be a fool to invest in it either. Somewhere between the poles of Evans in the Seattle Times and Hoffarth in the L.A. Daily News, there is the league’s actual status — a solid minor league.
(Some information from Seattle Times, L.A. Daily News, L.A. Times, N.Y. Daily News)
