The WNBA is on the clock
With two of the sport's biggest stars turning pro, the WNBA needs to capitalize on women's basketball's growing popularity
“The WNBA is on the clock…”
Those are words you typically hear on draft day, most famously with the National Football League, which has turned everything, from its college combine to cancer, into a moneymaking scheme for the sport and its 32 owners.
This upcoming spring, the WNBA, the United States’ primary women’s professional basketball league, is faced with an opportunity to capitalize on the fact two of the biggest college basketball stars in the women’s game — Iowa’s Caitlin Clark and LSU’s Angel Reese — are entering the league.
On Monday, Clark was drafted No. 1 overall by the Indiana Fever, while Reese was drafted No. 3 by the Chicago Sky.
To understand the momentous impact this could have on the league, you need to go all the way back to 1979 and Larry Bird and Earvin “Magic” Johnson. The two players famously faced off in that year’s NCAA championship game, with Johnson’s Michigan State Spartans defeating Bird’s Indiana State Sycamores, 75-64.
It was the start of a rivalry that would go on to characterize and build the modern day NBA throughout the 1980s, with Johnson’s Lakers and Bird’s Celtics winning a combined eight NBA championships during the decade, including three Finals match-ups that featured the Lakers verse the Celtics, with Johnson winning two to Bird’s one.
Bird and Johnson were generational players who came to the NBA with a past and a backstory, but also a promising future. Clark and Reese have a similar built-in backstory that could ultimately lead the WNBA to the glory days it could have only dreamt of upon its founding in 1997.
Ratings Blockbuster
On Monday, April 1st, I watched the entirety of the Iowa-LSU women’s basketball game. I think the last women’s college basketball game I watched was around 2001-2002, when UConn’s women’s teams, led by Sue Bird and Diana Turazzi, were playing for an undefeated season.
The Elite Eight matchup between the Tigers-Hawkeyes game was a rematch of the 2023 NCAA women’s championship game, which was won by Reese and the Tigers over Clark and the Hawkeyes, and ended with Reese guestering toward her ring finger in front of Clark to show her she’d earned the ring. The rematch was the most highly anticipated game of either the women’s or men’s tournaments.
Two days prior, when Iowa defeated West Virginia, the telecast set a record for the most viewers of a women’s tournament game outside of a Final Four or title game with 4.9 million views. For reference, the 2023 WNBA Finals averaged just 728,000 viewers, which was its highest-rated Finals in 20 years.
Having Clark and Reese in the league likely prompts networks to promote and schedule women’s games in prime time, which will only further grow the visibility and popularity of the women’s game. The WNBA and its television partners have already announced the Indiana Fever, Clark’s new team, will play 36 nationally televised games this upcoming season.
A potential championship faceoff in the WNBA, would only be a further boom for the league and women’s sports.
Characters Welcome
One of the things (there are many) hurting the men’s college game, and thus the NBA, is the one-and-done rule. Eighteen and nineteen-year-old men (?) enter the draft following their freshman season, or a particular superb three-week performance in the NCAA tournament.
They are then drafted and wallow on NBA benches, only to maybe surface three or four years later, their college careers largely forgotten by then, or they physically breakdown due to the demands of the 82-game schedule (see: Ball, Lonzo and LaMelo) on young, immature bodies.
The success of the NBA in the 1980s and ‘90s was due to the fact that we knew players such as Michael Jordan, James Worthy, Patrick Ewing, Hakeem Olajuwon, Charles Barkley, and others from their two, three or four seasons playing college basketball. Thanks to Name Image Likeness (NIL), of which Reese and Clark have benefited, women players have been able to afford to hang around the college game, building their own brand, and giving the public an opportunity to grow an affection (or disdain), for certain players.
Following last season’s championship game and what many considered an unsportsmanlike gesture, Reese became Public Enemy No. 1. However, she capitalized on the attention, signing 17 NIL deals with McDonald’s, Coach, PlayStation, Outback Steakhouse and Amazon, to name a few, to posing for Sports Illustrated’s Swimsuit Issue, with fellow Tiger, gymnast Livvy Dunne1.
After some early season questions regarding her status with the team, which was only complicated by LSU head coach Kim Mulkey’s veiled responses to the media’s questions, Reese and her teammates, the defending champions, rightly felt themselves in the crosshairs of the women’s basketball world and women’s sports as a whole.
Mulkey herself became the subject of a recentWashington Post expose by Kent Bapp, who reported on Mulkey’s family life and coaching career. Before the piece was even published, Mulkey threatened a lawsuit against Bapp and the Post.
Also earlier this month, an L.A. Times piece by columnist Ben Bolch villified Mulkey’s Tigers as “dirty debutantes” in the team’s match-up against “America’s sweathearts” from UCLA.
The Times and Bolch later apologized for the piece as it initially appeared.
Mo Money, Mo Problems
As rapper Notorious B.I.G. once sang, “Mo money, mo problems.”2
Between last year’s women’s national championship game, and this year’s tournament, women’s college basketball has creeped into the big time. And with it comes the magnifying glass.
Women’s college basketball, and those working in it, such as Mulkey, have been working in relative anonymity for most of their careers. They’ve been big fish in small ponds.
As women’s basketball becomes more mainstream and players and coaches become celebrities, everything about them will become scrutinized, whether they like it or not.
That includes their appearance, from Karen haircuts and ostentatious Hillary pant suits, to their personal lives, from daddy issues to their sexuality. I’m not condoning or condemning any of it, but merely stating facts. It’s all part of the territory that comes with the hyper-sexualized culture we live in.
And it has already seem to taken a toll on one player, at least. Following the Tigers’ loss to Iowa in this year’s Elite Eight, Reese lamented to the media about, "Death threats, I've been sexualized, I've been threatened...I'm still a human. All this has happened since I won the national championship, and I said the other day, I haven't been happy since then."
The WNBA
The WNBA is in a precarious situation right now.
They need to nail the landing here. They have two potential stars to build the league, and women’s sports overall.
The fact is, however, the WNBA has continually failed to do so over the course of it’s nearly 30 year existence.
The league has been fed multiple stars from the college ranks: Lisa Leslie, Sheryl Swoopes, Rebecca Lobo, Candace Parker, Sue Bird, and Diana Turazzi to name some of the biggest. The U.S. women’s basketball teams won gold in the 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020 Olympics, and yet the league has never fully capitalized on the good fortune of having the world’s greatest women players. Again this year, the USA women’s basketball team will be heavily featured on NBC’s Olympic coverage.
If the WNBA expects players like Clark and Reese to pay the price for fame and fortune, the league also has to be willing to go above and beyond to create an environment that celebrates and highlights these women and their athletic ability.
ESPN has done it continuously over the last 20-plus years with the NCAA women’s tournament, and social media should make it easier for the league and the players.
This year’s NCAA women’s tournament featured some of the highest ratings we’ve seen for non-football sporting events, and ratings for the women’s final between Iowa and South Carolina (average 18.9 million) beat the ratings for the men’s final between Connecticut and Purdue (average 14.8 million). Something that would have been unheard of just a few years ago.
The question now becomes, can the WNBA continue to produce games and rivalries such as we saw between Clark and Reese, Iowa and LSU? And Iowa and South Carolina?
The WNBA needs to, or it may be a long time before women have the chance to do so again.
Dunne is the highest-paid college athlete thanks to NIL deals worth a reported $3.5 million.
Just ask P. Diddy about that.