Sports
The WNBA missed a chance to capitalize on a women's sports moment – The Washington Post – The Washington Post
Nearly four hours before tip-off of Game 4 of the WNBA Finals, Marqweesha “Marsh” Guthrie already had begun her commute to Barclays Center. She’s a longtime New York Liberty fan, going back to when she was a 6-year-old Jersey girl in awe watching ballers who looked like her play the game she loved. That passion still burns, and by the time I caught up with Marsh on Wednesday afternoon, she still sounded a bit hoarse from Sunday’s Game 3 experience.
“I lost my voice in the second quarter,” she said, because in fandom rules, surrendering your larynx for your favorite team is always justifiable.
For devotees such as Marsh, the league office couldn’t have scripted a better matchup. The defending champion Las Vegas Aces with their super-friends squad vs. the Liberty and all their stars playing in America’s largest media market. And this showdown, which concluded with Aces players sprinting down court at the buzzer, becoming the league’s first back-to-back champ in 21 years, appealed to basketball purists and celebrities alike. Tom Brady and LeBron James attended Game 1 in Vegas; James later shared a Marine Johannès highlight with three fire emoji to his 52.7 million followers on X. When the series moved to Brooklyn for Games 3 and 4, Lil’ Kim, Fat Joe, Aubrey Plaza and Jason Sudeikis provided the star power.
More than just courtside attention, the league and its network partners boasted about the rise in viewership after the opening three games of the Finals averaged 673,000 viewers on ABC and ESPN, the highest figure in two decades. But don’t get blinded by the shine of celebrities or be impressed by figures that have been cherry-picked to secure headlines. Rather, I’m rooting — and waiting — for this 27-year-old league to grow up and truly have its moment.
This shouldn’t be a difficult ask — it’s happening elsewhere in women’s sports. A volleyball game in Nebraska draws 92,003, an attendance record for a women’s sporting event. An exhibition basketball game in Iowa attracts 55,646, nearly doubling the previous record set for a single-game in women’s hoops.
This momentum evidenced by sold-out football arenas hasn’t stopped at the gates. In March, the LSU-Iowa championship game set the standard for women’s basketball ratings. The meeting between two powerhouse personalities in LSU’s Angel Reese and Iowa’s Caitlin Clark attracted an average of nearly 10 million viewers, with the most-watched portion of the game peaking at 12.6 million.
The WNBA, even with its dream matchup pitting A’ja Wilson, Kelsey Plum and Chelsea Gray (who missed Game 4 because of an injury) vs. Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu and Jonquel Jones, hasn’t come close to those kind of “wow” numbers. Even that spicy Game 4, played on a slow night in sports, with an MLB playoff game decided early, averaged 889,000 viewers which was less than pro wrestling, according to Nielsen data. The last time a WNBA Finals game averaged more than a million viewers was in 2003. And for non-playoffs, the league has to search back to Candace Parker’s rookie debut in 2008 as the only time a regular season game averaged at least a million viewers.
If you’re thinking that seven-figure viewership is the Holy Grail that only a cultural earthquake can achieve, think again. This month, a Professional Bull Riding broadcast on CBS topped 1.8 million viewers.
“[LSU-Iowa] totally changed the expectations for what that event can draw, going from 5 million for the championship game the previous year to 9.9 million. I don’t think even the most optimistic projection would’ve had 9.9 million,” said Jon Lewis, who covers ratings trends and the industry for Sports Media Watch. “I would even bring in Colorado in college football, and nobody thought Colorado was going to start drawing the way that it does. That’s a shocker. So that is where you are seeing major league, meaningful, ‘this-changes-things’ kind of growth. The WNBA has not had the kind of growth that changes things yet.”
The pinnacle game in college, of course, comes during a time when fans have been indoctrinated to care only about March Madness. So, the scheduling of the WNBA’s glamour event during the football season — with two of the four games airing right in the middle of NFL Sundays — has not helped the push for ratings. For years, it has been this way; Finals games air exclusively on ESPN and ABC, and because these networks do not broadcast NFL games on Sundays, they fill the void with the WNBA Finals. But when the media deal ends in 2025, the league could do itself a favor by negotiating more control over when and where its Finals games are scheduled. You know how bull riding got a million viewers? The event enjoyed the best warmup act possible — airing after an NFL game. Imagine giving the biggest stars of the WNBA that kind of football lead-in and the audience they could attract.
Marsh, who purchased Liberty season tickets this year, can see progress, but she also has thoughts. The WNBA can grow in a major way, she believes, if the players become bigger household names.
“We’re putting our games on ESPN at 3 o’clock, and we’re getting hundreds of thousands of people, and we’re competing with football,” Marsh said. “We have to believe as a society and a sports society that if we build the table, people will come and they will show up. . . . But access is key and marketing all year round.”
The league has plenty of marketable stars — such as Wilson, the two-time MVP and 2023 Finals MVP. She has a winning brand and personality yet was not chosen as the league’s cover girl on NBA 2K24 — that honor went to Ionescu. Wilson doesn’t have a signature shoe. Ionescu does. Her team’s social media account didn’t even understand who should be the face of the league, first choosing a solo shot of Kelsey Plum, who went 2 for 12 from the field in Game 4, to post along with the final score.
It’s not just wrong promotional choices. The WNBA is also dampening its own free publicity. This year, the league announced a new media policy — proposed by the players association — that ended locker room access. The decision was curious, in light of Women’s National Basketball Players Association Executive Director Terri Jackson expressing before the season that the throngs of media that came out to televise Brittney Griner’s first news conference should keep that same energy in covering all players.
Professional reporters aren’t yahoos obsessed with watching athletes get dressed. Rather, inside those more intimate spaces, reporters do the work to build trust with the athletes they cover. And with that trust comes professional relationships — relationships that produce more nuanced and insightful pieces that reveal athletes as people. If any other league that matters attempted to close its locker rooms, it would be rightly criticized. But female pro basketball players have largely received a pass. Which should be even more worrying because reporters should care about covering the WNBA with the same diligence as they would every other sport.
Even when the Aces won the title Wednesday night, reporters were locked out of the locker room. It wasn’t until near midnight — almost two hours after the game and past deadline for many reporters — that the Aces invited media members in to the staging area held on the Liberty’s practice court. I think back to covering the Washington Mystics’ clincher in 2019 and writing about the La Marca prosecco flowing and the players dancing and lingering in long hugs, being their authentic, jubilant selves inside their locker rooms, and can’t believe players today would prevent those scenes from being captured for readers and fans.
When teams cocoon themselves from the world, that’s a step backward. When the best player in the league gets second billing, even from her own team’s Instagram account, that stunts progress. When the games land in an unwinnable television slot, that slams the brakes during what should be an era of acceleration. Women’s sports are having a moment. Casual fans are out there, not just die-hards such as Marsh. When will this league decide it’s finally ready to find them?
