Imagine Angel Reese catching the ball on a rebound and passing to Caitlin Clark, who then shoots down the floor to Paige Bueckers, who drives to the goal and fools the help defender with a bowl to the best player on the planet.
Imagine A’ja Wilson going for the gold medal for the United States at the FIBA World Championship next month.
For the WNBA, this best-case scenario in Berlin would be a welcome escape from the noise and an extended break from unity at a time of major conflict. The summer of Sophie (Cunningham) added to the already existing – and seemingly never-ending – tensions. We have the Caitlin Clark Experience, a majority black league with a significant queer presence, and questions about transgender eligibility inspiring demonstrations outside arenas… and disruptions inside arenas.
House Republicans are writing to WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert about concerns that “attacks” on Clark on the court could be “racially motivated.” Loserville spectators throw sex toys onto the field. Juggling circus clowns like Enes Kanter Freedom makes a scene during a nationally televised game featuring the league’s biggest star.
In such a volatile political climate, the WNBA is weaponized by bad actors who, Engelbert said, are using the league “to sow division” on the fronts of race, gender and sexuality.
Online threats and hatred directed at players is inexcusable, and no advantage can compensate for that. And yet, these fault lines cut through the foundations of the WNBA at a time when all general interest metrics are up, up, up, and when one of the league’s newest franchises, the Golden State Valkyries, has reached the billion dollar mark.
The WNBA has to be smart about how it navigates through and around the extremely delicate issues fueling the fires of the culture war, but here’s the good news: For someone who watched and appreciated the league but didn’t cover it, it sure seems like more fans and fans were focused on the WNBA this summer than ever before.
That means more people tune in to Indiana Fever matches to watch Kaitlyn be Kaitlyn or to see Cunningham play a villainous WWE heel, only to walk away saying, “Hey, I didn’t know Kelsey Mitchell was that good.”
Watch this: Mitchell, Clark combine for 67 as fever rolls across the sky
Meaning an array of exciting young talent in the league, Clark’s mass appeal and history of major league sports surviving existential crises suggests he’ll figure it out and find even greater prosperity on the other side.
Every successful league has endured its share of controversy and adversity, perhaps none more so than the league that launched the WNBA. In 1998, after Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird turned the NBA into a global giant, I sat in David Stern’s office high above Fifth Avenue, reminiscing about what his league was like in the 1970s.
“We’ve been written off as too black, too drug-infested,” the commissioner said that day. We reminisced about half-empty arenas and conference finals games shown on tape at 11:30 PM ET. Toward the end of the NBA’s 30th season, Game 3 of the 1976 Finals in Phoenix started at 10:30 a.m. — yes, mid-morning — so CBS could air an afternoon of golf.
In the 30th season of the WNBA, no one is getting out of bed to play a championship round game for a barely interested network. You can’t turn around without finding a WNBA game on TV somewhere in prime time slots.
Stern had a ton on his plate at the time, including Johnson’s HIV disclosure, Latrell Sprewell’s attack on his coach, Tim Donaghy’s gambling scandal, and in 2004, “Malice in the Palace.” That feud between Indiana Pacers players and Detroit Pistons fans forced the commissioner to launch a player community outreach program, NBA Cares, and to institute a dress code that was condemned in some quarters as the racist antithesis of Allen Iverson and hip-hop.
NBA players eventually became fashion icons, and everyone stopped talking about the dress code, another hard-earned victory for Stern, who understood how to weather the storm.
Does the WNBA have that kind of smart leader? Engelbert presided over a period of impressive growth, no doubt, and the real problem lies with outsiders advancing their agendas and chasing their votes. But in an era where the world moves much faster than it did in Stern’s pre-social media heyday, the WNBA is often caught flat-footed, reacting rather than acting, when those divisive forces Engelbert referred to begin to take their toll.
Although Cunningham, a role player with the number of followers of a franchise player (about 8 million combined on Instagram and TikTok), was entitled to express an opinion about transgender athletes that is consistent with the view of most Americansit says something about WNBA leadership that an opinion piece published in July in a lengthy ESPN article — Cunningham said she wanted to “protect young girls in the locker room, or young girls in sports who shouldn’t be going up against biological men” — continues to wreak havoc for weeks on end.
This much is clear: If Engelbert is on her way out, the WNBA absolutely cannot pass up her replacement. The stakes are too high. That much was evident on an electric Saturday night in Brooklyn, where two franchises worth more than half a billion dollars — the Fever and the New York Liberty — presented a case study in how far the league has come and how high it can still go.
In 2018, about a year after putting the Liberty up for sale, Madison Square Garden CEO James Dolan told me he didn’t know how to be successful with his WNBA team.
“I believe in the Liberty product,” he said. “If you go to a Liberty game, those are fun basketball games to go to. But I’ll be damned if I know how to get people to go to those games. … We’ve pumped tons of marketing dollars, we’ve done everything we can to make the team successful, and people aren’t coming.”
Eight years later, when the Liberty and Fever played at the Barclays Center in front of an incredible sellout crowd of 17,581, the final minutes of a tense clash felt like the final minutes of a sudden-death playoff game.
Kevin Durant, Kyrie Irving and James Harden only wished they had this kind of support in their bygone Nets days.
Of course, the event wasn’t just about basketball. Before the game, rival protesters gathered outside the Barclays Center to express their feelings about Cunningham’s stance on trans athletes. They were separated by metal barriers – those who supported Cunningham’s views here, and those who did not there.
The pro-trans athlete group member said she just wanted to feel safe and welcome at the Liberty games, and at halftime those exact messages were posted on the giant arena’s video board, including one that read: “Welcome Trans Liberty fans! You are loved and you belong!”
Cunningham never spoke about trans fans, her supporters claim, only about fairness in athletic competition. One protester in Brooklyn praised the eight-year-old Indiana guard for speaking out despite knowing she would face fierce criticism.
Cunningham argued that all the extra attention she helped bring to the WNBA, good and bad, had a net positive impact. “I think every time you look at the W more,” she said, “it’s a great thing.” Asked if she could envision a day in the not-too-distant future when the WNBA matches the popularity of the top men’s professional leagues, Cunningham said, “Yeah, I really do…I really just think we can be a pioneer for women’s leagues that they can look up to.”
With the league growing to 18 teams by 2030, Liberty head coach Chris DeMarco, Steve Kerr’s assistant for four Golden State Warriors championships, agreed the WNBA could “absolutely” approach the appeal of his former league in the future and cited the benefits of the summer schedule – when the NBA is on vacation – and the level of play in the sport.
“The product is so good right now and you’re seeing a modern brand of basketball that every team is playing,” DeMarco said. “You want that basketball to shine and I think it is right now.”
Check this out: Paige Bueckers shows off, explodes for 32 big points
Yes and no. The basketball is really great, but the non-basketball battles felt overwhelming. Joe Favorito, a longtime marketing and public relations official who has worked for the Women’s Tennis Association and the National Women’s Soccer League, said the WNBA desperately needs alignment from all its constituents.
“Every major problem in professional sports in North America is overcome when everyone in the league is on the same page,” Favorito said. “The goal should not be to never have controversy because that is not possible. The goal is to use these moments as lessons.”
Sunday evenings the bizarre Natasha scene of Cloud-Freedom in Chicago, which led to Heaven forbid freedom from his games, it’s clear that the process can be accelerated by an understanding among players, coaches, owners and legitimate fans that the constant sniping about transgender eligibility — when no trans players compete in the WNBA or major college basketball — hurts the cause. Cloud would have been better off ignoring Freedom rather than giving it to him a platform and oxygen he didn’t deserve.
At this point in the news cycle, unity, or at least something approaching it, should be the league’s main goal.
White stars can help by publicly supporting their black counterparts, who are especially targeted by internet trolls and harassers. The league would do well to intentionally promote Wilson, who has won three WNBA titles, four league MVPs and two Olympic gold medals, as much as Clark as the face of the league.
Watch this: A’ja Wilson channels inner Dirk with one leg in the loss
At the same time, all WNBA players can help promote unity by fully embracing Clark as the invaluable asset most responsible for the 2024 NCAA Women’s Finals. it attracted 4 million more viewers than the men’s finaland who was unwillingly drawn into the recent drama and used as a political pawn.
The WNBA is a better place when Clark lights it up like she did against the Sky, sinking a career-high eight 3-pointers on a dozen attempts and scoring 37 points in a 113-90 win. A few weeks after she assured Barack Obama that she would not surrender her joy to what the former president called “all this nonsense” in the NBC Chicago video from the All-Star Game, I asked Clark to describe to someone who had never experienced it the feeling of playing with an alien ball.
“You feel like a little kid in a candy store,” she replied.
That’s where this league will be if it can survive the culture wars, in that candy store. When it comes to basketball, and the joy of playing the game at the highest level, the WNBA will become an unstoppable force.
