Remember the WNBA? The women’s basketball league the NBA started to draw more women into watching basketball? In its inaugural season, the WNBA finals drew 2.85 million viewers, when the Houston Comets won the first of their four championships.
It’s never reached those heights again, and the Comets folded in 2008. There was a mild uptick to 728,000 viewers last year.
So you’d think the league would welcome an exciting, highly skilled new breakout player.
You’d be wrong.
“For almost three decades the WNBA has been a laughing stock and disgrace of a professional sports league that only survives due to NBA subsidies.”
“A possible turning point for this sad existence of a league has arrived in the form of a basketball messiah.”
“Caitlin Clark, the greatest and most popular female college basketball player of all time, has announced she’ll be joining the WNBA this upcoming season, and some think she can do for the WNBA what Larry, Magic or Jordan did for the NBA.” I think she can make it more popular, but I sincerely doubt she can produce the same boost that trio gave to the NBA’s fortunes.
“The WNBA’s players don’t want Caitlin Clark to succeed.”
“The WNBA is made up primarily of players who’ve been infected with the false ideas of modern feminism, which heavily focuses on issues related to race, sexuality, gender identity and participating in the oppression Olympics.” I would say “Get woke, go broke,” but the WNBA was already broke without NBA subsidies.
“The players that have been infected with this ideology don’t want Clark to be the face of the league and will do everything in their power to stop it from happening.”
“The first problem Clark will face is that she will be a straight player in a primarily LGBT dominated league, which some of you may think is nonsense and won’t have any effect.”
“But don’t take it from me, take it from former WNBA champion and number three overall draft pick Candace Wiggins, who claimed that 98% of the league is gay and that the toxic environment within the the league affected her as a straight woman and made her retire early.”
“From her first moment in the league, she was targeted and harassed because she was straight and a nationally popular figure, and that many of the other players were jealous and consistently tried to hurt her.”
“After Wiggins came out with these comments, the media didn’t support her. Instead they tried to tear down and diminish her.”
“If you look at viewership numbers since the start of the league, you’ll see viewership is still down tremendously. But the league and the media will still try to create a positive narrative by saying things like how this year’s finals had the highest viewership for a game three in 18 years, without mentioning it was still over 200,000 viewers short of the game three 18 years ago, and one of the teams that played in that game [doesn’t] even exist anymore.”
“Even worse for Caitlin Clark is that, unlike Wiggins, in the minds of those who participate in the oppression Olympics, Clark bears the ultimate sin of being white.”
“We’ve already seen this be a problem for other WNBA Stars. For example Sabrina Ionescu. She’s of course the player who took Steph Curry to the wire in the Three-Point Contest, which was probably the most exciting thing of that dumpster fire of an All-Star weekend.”
“Like Clark, Sabrina was a dominant college player who won awards and consistently pulled in higher attendance numbers for her college game than the average WNBA game, yet ever since she’s been in the league she’s faced criticism from players and the media because she’s white.”
“With an Emmy-nominated sportscaster [Chris Williamson] straight up saying the reason people aren’t rocking with Sabrina is because she leans into her white privilege and benefits from her whiteness and doesn’t use it to uplift and amplify her black co-workers voices in the WNBA.”
Plus the usual accusations of racism for putting her on the NBA2K24 cover. (Which is, I think, a special WNBA edition available only at Gamestop? I don’t play sports video games, so I have no idea how these various editions work.)
“This past year, Sabrina was ranked six by the fans and media among guards for All-Star voting, but was ranked 19th by the players.”
“Articles have already started to emerge which claim Clark’s whiteness is the reason she has been elevated to superstar status instead of, you know, the fact that she’s actually a legit college superstar who’s scoring points at a level not seen since Pistol Pete and bringing in more fans to the women’s game than ever before.” This is hyperbole. Though quite impressive, Clark’s 27.8 points per game in NCAA Division 1 doesn’t come close to Pete Maravich’s insane 44.5 points per game, and Chris Clemons averaged 30 points a game 2018-19.
“Those in and around the league subscribe to beliefs that simply don’t allow them to build the WNBA around Caitlin Clark, but rather instead actually urge them to tear her down.”
Is the commenter (TooLazyToHoop) overselling Clark? Maybe. I’m hardly an expert on the WNBA or women’s college basketball. (Although, since I could, in fact, name five past WNBA players with a gun to my head, I probably do know more than 99% of the American public.) But the video shows Clark does have a very sweet 3-point stroke.
And now Bill Burr’s quite relevant WNBA rant:
“Nobody in the WNBA got Covid.”
“We gave you a fucking league! None of you showed up! Where are all the feminists? None of you went to the fucking games. You failed them, not me.”
“Women failed the WNBA.”
“Meanwhile, the Kardashians are making billions. Those Real Housewives shows are making money hand over fist. That’s what women are watching.”