If you’re salivating about the WNBA’s return to its regular season tomorrow night you’re clearly a more patient and loyal fan than moi. I for one thought that ship had already sailed, and I’d contend in hindsight it probably should have.
The number of ways that the league has misread the room is on par with at least the number of assists that Angel Reese or Paige Bueckers is capable of in a given game and conceivably could approach their respective point totals. All because of a supposed greater good which REUTERS’ Amy Tennery addressed as one would any elephant in it yesterday:
The WNBA season resumes on Thursday after the league’s growing influence was felt at the FIBA Women’s World Cup, where a punishing schedule underlined the difficulty of staging major international tournaments without accommodating the world’s leading women’s league…The season restarts only four days after Sunday’s final, in which the United States beat France 97-79. Many players had rushed from their WNBA teams to join their national squads in Berlin, leaving little time to prepare and adding to fatigue as the tournament progressed.
“The FIBA Women’s World Cup, like the Summer Olympics, is important for the growth of women’s basketball both in the US and globally given the global stage it offers,” (a) spokesperson added.
To which I’d respond in the manner of Tennery’s home country thusly: Bollocks.
For a league that finally in Year 30 had grown and matured enough to be culturally and athletically significant to take a two-week hiatus so close to the end of its season would be reprehensible even if FIBA wasn’t admitting to compressing too much into too little time. The finals concluded with back-to-backs last weekend where the U.S. team was heavily challenged in the semi-finals by Spain–and they also barely escaped during the group stage with a narrow win over Italy. You may have only noticed how close they came to being a far bigger story via alerts as these supposedly world class tilts were being conducted head-to-head with the first significant weekend of college and pro football–not to mention the U.S. Open finals that had its own problems with gaining attention. And because the primary shelf spaces of its usual media partners like ESPN, Peacock and CBS were otherwise occupied those WNBA players whose storylines both good and not so much became headline-making were competing in relative obscurity on the Turner Sports networks and HBO Max, where the lesser known have competed only in Unrivaled for the past two winters.
And not only was their international schedule compressed but so too is their sprint to the end of their newly entended season which will see each team play four games within a week. Had there been actual stakes of consequence one could have at least tried to argue that there could be a reason to look away from still more football, let alone far more consequential late-season MLB games where actuall playoff spots are still up for grabs. But as luck would have it, every one of their playoff spots has already been clinched. Which leaves the likes of ROUNDTABLE SPORTS’ Grant Afseth scrambling for talking points in yesterday’s piece:
Eight teams make the playoffs, and conference does not matter. The first round is best-of-three and starts Sunday, Sept. 27. All eight of those spots are filled. Minnesota, Golden State, Las Vegas, Atlanta, Indiana, New York, Washington, and Dallas have clinched.
Afseth then proceeds to attempt to put lipstick on the pig that addresses home court advantage and the #1 overall seed. You tell me how much that all matters in the big picture. Do you think even hardcore Liberty, Wings and Dream fans care while their baseball teams are in the exact same boat at the exact same time?
Then there’s this not inconsequential point that he bullets:
(Alanna) Smith played 12 minutes for Australia in its World Cup opener against Puerto Rico on Sept. 4. She had 10 points and eight rebounds, went 4-of-5 from the field, and limped off after a defensive rebound in the second quarter. Australia won 70-54. Smith sat at the end of the bench in a hoodie for the second half…Smith shared the 2025 Defensive Player of the Year award with A’ja Wilson while playing for Minnesota. She signed a three-year contract worth roughly $3.75 million with Dallas this offseason and has averaged 6.0 points and 3.9 rebounds in 32 games, with 18 starts. Her first season in Dallas has included a broken nose in the preseason, a stint in the concussion protocol in late June, and a right leg injury that cost her games in July…No timetable has been announced for her return to the Wings.
With that in mind, what do you think are the chances that equally if not more significant players for the Wings and their seven fellow post-seasoners won’t be playing every possible minute of every game this week? How much do you think the chances of a significant upset from one of the have-nots looking for some sort of statement to head into the off-season are? And therefore how watchable do think this sprint to the finish line will be?
Not since the money-grab ramp-up to the 2020 NBA playoffs in the Orlando bubble that featured six additional teams theoretically still in playoff contention when the COVID shutdown occurred being given an invite, so as to provide an action-starved country still mostly trapped in their homes with a full TV day even in time slots when the regular MLB season chose not to fill has a home stretch of any league been as poorly thought out and executed as this one will be.
If there is a silver lining to this cloud, it’s clear that the powers that be are committed to this never recurring, as Tennery also reported:
FIBA has already said the 2030 World Cup will be staged later in the year, another sign that the league’s growing power is reshaping the global basketball calendar.
“We are pleased that the collaboration between global women’s basketball stakeholders, and adjustments we are seeing in the global women’s basketball calendar, more easily allow players to fulfill both WNBA and international team commitments,” a WNBA spokesperson told Reuters.
Good for them. At least they are choosing to deal with their own elephants. The WNBA turned a blind eye and a deaf ear to these realities about getting their own house in order in exchange for some otherwise meaningless hardware and the pious belief that just like their male counterpart league they’re at a point of global relevance to truly matter around the world. Note that not even Amazon Prime Video chose to carry the FIBA World Cup. I know they know data and demand better than I do–and even they didn’t think was a must-carry even at a time when scant little else live or even scripted was dropping.
The other big news from this extended Labor Day break was that embattled commissioner Cathy Englebert is indeed stepping down at last. The one that signed off on all of this, including the baffling choice of Warner Brothers Discovery to somehow interject themselves into the already confusing array of splintered sources WNBA fans must navigate. This only provided an even longer list of potential Uber drivers to speed her to the airport to destinations unknown beyond the rank and file of WNBA players.
I’d offer that since she’s now so familiar with the hot spots in Berlin that Englehart might want to head there once she’s dropped off at her gate. Oktoberfest is an especially fun time over yonder, and I’d further offer the less we see of her might give us all a chance to get the bad taste of this irrelevant final week out of our mouths. Auf Wiedersehen for now, frauleins.
Courage…