Getting the W

Back in June, I wondered how far we’d get before the pandemic swamped the sports re-start. Well, the basketball bubbles held, and baseball had its World Series. Football, especially college football, is a dumpster fire of rapid COVID spread among players and coaches and, potentially, fans, but it hasn’t blinked and won’t. (Collateral damage born of machismo is so inured in the beating heart—and bruised brains—of the sport, no one should be that surprised.) More than 200,000 people may be dead, but since the federal government has given up any pretense of stopping the spread, we might as well have our games to soothe and distract.

For most of these sports, however, the TV ratings are down. Chalk it up to cord-cutting, or increased competition for eyeballs, or the players’ temerity to express their politics, but fewer people have watched sports when ostensibly trapped at home than they did in the beforetimes. I don’t have any brilliant insights as to the decline, but I do know that one sport that bucked the trend, professional women’s basketball, also held my attention more than any other.

What made the WNBA especially compelling in 2020,¹ despite the various limitations on teams’ star power imposed by some players’ rightful COVID concerns and righteous social justice activism, was its timing. By that I mean both that the games were fast-paced, and they came at you fast: the league played at its highest ever tempo—an average of 79.2 possessions per team in each 40 minutes played—as part of a relentless schedule that saw each team playing every-other-day for almost the whole 22-game regular season. The effect was that the teams were easy to watch, and it was easy to watch them. Turn on a game, get hooked on a player or team, and know that you could count on seeing them in action again two nights later. If you ponied up the $17 for WNBA League Pass,² you could hardly miss a game. Start watching a team like the Seattle Storm—my favorite team—and you were likely to see Sue Bird instigate some of the most aesthetically-pleasing ball movement this side of the 2006 Phoenix Suns. Add in the trapping defense favored by the eventual champions’ (season-long interim) head coach, Gary Kloppenberg, and Storm fans had access to full court, full throttle, hyper-aggressive basketball that made my pandemic-hardened little heart sing. But they were far from the only inspiring story: the Las Vegas Aces, Chicago Sky, Connecticut Sun, Los Angeles Sparks—hell even the lowly Dallas Wings, thanks to the ever-electric Arike Ogunbowale—all gave fans ample reasons to watch.

But the timing of the season itself also mattered: for the first time ever, the WNBA season significantly overlapped with both the NBA regular season and playoffs.³ Instead of playing, as per usual, in the fallow period of an ordinary sports summer—when more basketball arenas are cheaply available and when the WNBA stars can’t be overseas making three times as much (or more!) as they do stateside—the W played primetime wubble games alongside their men’s league bubble equivalent (albeit in a different part of Florida). This meant that Mike Breen was regularly reading promos for upcoming WNBA games on his NBA broadcasts, that NBA players could hype Diana Taurasi’s GOAT status with hoodies in the tunnel, and that the two groups of players could collectively raise their voices for social justice and act in solidarity during the all-too-brief wildcat strike staged in the wake of the murder of Jacob Blake. There was real synergy, to use a wince-inducing word, and instead of being blotted out by the men’s game, the women’s league soared.

Though the change won’t be permanent —can’t be, given the overseas paydays awaiting stars like Breanna Stewart and A’ja Wilson— it showed that the league has the chops to compete in the basketball marketplace. That in an ideal world, one in which WNBA player salaries don’t max out at $215,000—or roughly half of what players like LeBron James make in one game—the league would be better off playing in (gasp) basketball season. Playing in the summer, it turns out, is othering: adding ammunition to the armory of those who would deny the league’s amazing athletes their proper respect and admiration.

But given the reality of a return to standalone summer play, my hope is that the extra publicity and ease of accessing the WNBA that the COVID season provided will grow the game even more. Not just in terms of fans, but in terms of teams. At just 12 squads, the league’s rosters are dripping with excess talent. And if the MLS can add 4 teams every year in a Ponzi-style promise of future growth, it seems reasonable that the W could quickly reach 16 or 18 and attract fans in markets that are ripe for women’s basketball, like Portland, San Francisco, Philadelphia, and Houston. And since the league’s braintrust has figured out that NBA team owners don’t make good WNBA owners—with 7 of 12 teams now independently owned—the pool of potential franchise buyers is much larger than the billionaire boys club that runs the men’s league.

Unless you’re a far right senate candidate in Georgia, that is. As l’affair Loeffler and the subsequent wave of WNBA player endorsements for her opponent, Raphael Warnock, demonstrated, the league’s players are not afraid to take on team ownership. Kelly Loeffler, the junior US Senator from Georgia and co-owner of the W’s Atlanta Dream, could lose her seat as a result, at least in part, of such endorsements. The league-wide solidarity in supporting Warnock also underscored that these women are not afraid to be unapologetically themselves: unapologetically Black, unapologetically queer, unapologetically political—even if it costs them fans of the pony-tail patriot type garnered by the USWNT. The days of donning makeup and dresses to sell feminine sex appeal for the league are long over. As a certain WNBA superfan and Sue Bird’s fiancée, AKA Megan Rapinoe, put it: “the W and its players have made activism more than just a ‘thing they’re doing.’” The league is better for it—and more fun, too.

So my biggest takeaway from six months of pandemic sports is this: if we survive COVID and the Trump presidency, the WNBA is only going to get better, aesthetically, narratively, and politically, on and off the court. At a pivotal moment for our country, when women’s rights are more threatened than they have been in 40 years, let’s hope that we all get a chance to see and be a part of it.

1. In case you’re inclined to quibble, dear reader: the WNBA is fun because watching high level basketball is fun, and it doesn’t matter what the gender of the participants might be. I’m not interested in engaging arguments to the contrary, because however you dress them up, their core basis is misogyny. So you like dunking—I do, too! Most of what basketball is isn’t dunking. ↩︎
2. You read that right: $17. By comparison, NBA League Pass runs $200. ↩︎
3. In a normal year, the WNBA season begins just before the end of the NBA playoffs, in late May. ↩︎