I've stood by the WNBA for a couple of years now but have seen my own interest dwindle as the league has a ton of issues from poor officiating and a major thing is that the correspondants and the pundits that work for the league seem to have this strange racist attitude where they will focus on certain players and not on others because of their skin color.
This started when Caitlin Clark arrived on the scene and she was being brutalized on the court by other players who were jealous of her "taking the spotlight" even though that spotlight was a mere candle-flicker by the time she got there and the only reason why people were watching is because Caitlin Clark was a truly electrifying player to watch. Caitlin became the highest paid player by far in the history of the WNBA, and was bringing in fans in droves. WNBA's response to this was to attempt to pull the spotlight, that was clearly on Clark and everyone knew it was, to literally anyone else in the league especially if they were non-white.
When Paige Beuckers arrived the following year and also happened to be a white girl, the WNBA doubled down on ignoring her as well, even though the fans were speaking with their wallets and these two were the most famous and most sought after in the league.
Any time either of these two would have a less than absolutely amazing performance, it was THEN that the news media would pounce whereas when they would have amazing games they would be glanced over as a non-issue or not talked about at all. It has been very frustrating to see.
I didn't watch a single game of the finals and as it turns out, very few other people tuned in as well. In case you didn't know the final was between the Atlanta Dream and the Golden State Valkyries. I would imagine that the WNBA goons who are in charge of stuff were absolutely foaming at the mouth because Angel Reese plays for the Atlanta Dream and they have been pushing this woman on us since she arrived at the same time as Caitlin Clark and were rivals in college.
There is no comparison between the two though and anyone with any sort of basketball acumen knows this. Angel is a freakishly tall brute of a player with very little ability to shoot and had it not been for her being "paired up" with Caitlin because of their rivalry in college, I seriously doubt anyone would even know her name kind of like almost nobody knows the names of any of the other players on any of the teams.
I have honestly never seen a more bizarre system of favoritism towards a particular player in my entire life of watching sports. The league and the sports media largely, determined that they LOVE Angel Reese from the start and would almost never say anything negative about her even when there was plenty negative to say. I'll start with this "record breaking" stat.
Angel Reese misses layups and other easy post shots like clockwork, but she is so much taller and stronger than the players around her that she often gets her own rebounds on her own missed shots. It's almost comical at times because you are scratching your head wondering how it is possible for a professional basketball player to so consistently miss shots right under the basket. Well anyway, if you rebound your own missed shot, even if you do it multiple times in a row, it still counts as a rebound and that's all fine and dandy but the whole idea of this sport it to put the little ball in the little hoop, not see who can push and jump the highest to get the ball out of mid-air. If the latter was the objective it would be even more of a boring sport than it already is and Angel would be the best at it.
What we should be focusing on in the media is how awful the rest of her stats are but the media almost refuses to do so.
There's Angel down at the bottom. Played almost the entire game, got a mere 8 points, turned over the ball 4 times, shot horribly from everywhere, inexplicably was shooting 3s when she can't make 2s most of the time, and even missed a majority of her free throws. But but but! 12 rebounds!
The game highlights are pretty embarrassing to watch not just on Angel's part (although that is definitely a big part of it) but just generally speaking on the part of both teams.
It looks like a joke or a comedy sketch about a pretend league where we put a bunch of people that have never played this sport before and see what we can get out of them.
....and I suppose this is why almost nobody tuned in for the games.
To put things into perspective, the NBA Finals of last season pulled in an average of 24 million viewers per game and this is JUST the USA streaming/television audience. The WNBA got 2 million for the first game, and then ended up going south from there and being below 2 million per game for all the rest of the games even though it went to the full 7-game tournament and had a lot of ups and downs.
While they are careful to hide this on all broadcasts, you can see empty seats in the crowd... at a FINAL.
A ton of excuses were being made, of course, about how one of their games was on at the same time as a World Series game and one of their games was on during the same time as a regular-season NFL Monday Night Football, which by the way had nearly 20 million people watching it. The excuse here is that if only these poor women weren't being discriminated against and had their game on as the same time as something else, more people would have watched! Such a load of bollocks
They are botching the numbers as much as they can and also concealing the fact that their numbers are "tracked" through broadcast, subscription, and streaming numbers. Streaming numbers for sports is a relatively new thing and aren't really kept "honest" by anyone, so they could have just thrown whatever number they wanted in there and nobody would be able to verify it.
I likely wouldn't even know the series was over had it not been for the fact that the sport news sites definitely have an agenda to force this information on us whether we want it or not.
This league needs to embrace their true strengths in whoever the fans like, drop the always on a lookout for racism and misogyny bullcrap that plagues their commentary, and stop playing the victim.
You have a chance for a high quality product here but it seems like the people who are in charge are just fixing a problem until it is broken beyond repair. I personally was a big advocate of this league for a while and supported it. These days I am feeling kind of delighted when they fail.
Can they turn it around next year? I hope so. Because as Caitlin and Paige get older fewer and fewer people actually care about even them and when those people walk away, they will likely do so and never turn back.
