Let’s say you ran a sports league and you had two choices in how to market that sports league. First choice: All-American, fun, inspiring, generally normie. Second choice: militantly lesbian, trans, anti-white, and the players bet on their own games.
Which would you choose?
The NBA seems to be making its choice every single day. Yet another WNBA scandal cropped up this week, and it’s precisely what you think it is.
I am an NBA fan. My son is an even bigger NBA fan. Back in the 1970s, we probably wouldn’t have been NBA fans. Most people weren’t back in the ’70s, and there were a bunch of reasons for that. The NBA was broadly perceived as a thuggish, drug-infused league. They had no national TV coverage because of that perception.
In 1977, a player for the LA Lakers named Kermit Washington nearly killed Rudy Tomjanovich in the middle of a game by punching him in the face. A fan actually assaulted a referee during the 1976 NBA Finals. The ownership groups were totally mismanaged; the amount of blow and hookers wading through the NBA in the ’70s was extraordinary.
The NBA was plodding. They didn’t have a three-point line. The American Basketball Association (ABA), which was its big competitor and had its own financial problems, had three-pointers and dunks. The NBA had serious problems.
So the NBA decided to solve that problem. The Celtics drafted Larry Bird. The Lakers drafted Magic Johnson. And then the entire league was built around them. They’d been huge, high-wattage college stars; Bird was white, and Magic was black. The NBA also absorbed the ABA. Stars like Dr. J entered the NBA, and the NBA decided to change its style. They added the three-point line in 1979. By 1982, NBA games were now live, not tape-delayed, and by 1983, the NBA had decided to pursue a serious anti-drug policy to wipe out the cocaine problem.
The NBA also decided to put serious focus on policing on-and-off-court violence and behavior. They were fining players and suspending them, and the NBA mostly decided to protect its stars, which it still does, which is why a lot of people will complain that stars in the playoffs get all the calls.
This is how you build a league.
Now let’s turn to the WNBA, the subsidized little sister of the NBA. It has lost money every single year it’s been in existence. The NBA basically pays its bills.
Its quality of play? Let’s just say they ain’t dudes. There are men’s suburban over-40 basketball leagues that play better basketball than what was played in the WNBA All-Star game.
That alone would be a problem, but its brand is even worse because it has become militant lesbians who are decent at basketball by female standards, but certainly not by male standards, and are simultaneously obnoxiously insistent that the only reason people won’t watch them is racism and sexism.
That was the WNBA brand.
And then the WNBA received the greatest gift of all time: Caitlin Clark. That’s because Caitlin Clark was breaking records in college, and her entry into the WNBA meant a spike in viewership and people actually giving a crap because she was really good.
But there is one problem for the WNBA. The league is still plagued by radical political leftism that has somehow become intertwined with the very character of the league. They let the character of the players dictate the character of the league, and so the players whine incessantly about the fact that Caitlin Clark gets attention, instead of them celebrating the fact that people are actually watching their crappy games.
They keep saying that she’s not good, or that the people who are following Caitlin Clark are only doing so because she’s white and racist.
There were people who did this throughout Larry Bird’s career. There were two differences: The league rejected it, and Bird would trash-talk the living hell out of everybody and would own you if you tried to do this.
There is a large-scale trend of Caitlin Clark getting randomly manhandled. Even that gave the WNBA an opportunity, because it turns out that Caitlin Clark’s team also has a very pretty forward named Sophie Cunningham, who is All-American in her attitude and viewpoints, and has become Caitlin Clark’s protector on the court, which led to the viral moment when another player told her not to point at her, so Cunningham proceeded to point at her for a meme-worthy 22 seconds.
Cunningham knew the cameras were on her. She knew exactly what she was doing. Smart marketing. Yet another opportunity for the WNBA, right?
Wrong. Why?
Because Sophie Cunningham has the wrong kind of politics. Last week, she said that boys aren’t girls and girls’ sports should be protected from the boys playing with them, and all hell broke loose.
This is an 80/20 issue. Most Americans don’t believe that boys should play against girls. And you’re talking about a women’s sport league.
A 14-year-old high school freshman boy starting varsity at any decent public school in America would torch these ladies. That is not sexist. That is reality.
Naturally, the WNBA top voices decided to come out in stern opposition to Sophie Cunningham. That’s because the WNBA isn’t the women’s NBA; it is the LNBA or LGBT NBA.
All of that came out into the open this week. Brandi Kruse, a journalist in Seattle whom I know from my days back on a Seattle radio station, took a bunch of girls to the Indiana Fever game in Seattle, and they were wearing XX-XY shirts. They stand against men in women’s sports.
And then an owner of the Seattle Storm, Celeste Keaton — who seems like a real charmer — showed up to scream at these teenage girls.
According to the girls, she first tried a softer approach: “I hope Jesus can forgive you for what sin you’ve done.” One girl recalled, “And then she told us that we were effing insane.” Asked whether Keaton actually said the curse word, the girl answered that she had.
Meanwhile, the Seattle Storm center, Stefanie Dolson, who is 6-foot-5 and 245 pounds — which makes her the Shaq of the WNBA, except she stinks, averaging 3.8 points and 2.6 rebounds per game with the mobility of quicksand — wore a shirt that said: “Trans rights are human rights.”
Sophie Cunningham applauded the girls. She wrote on X: “I truly believe there is a safe space and love for everybody; biological girls, biological boys, trans women and trans men. Welcome to my table! You can disagree and still be kind. Bravo to those girls for standing up for what they believe. You’ll be hearing from me soon. Yay for gifts! Truly embarrassing of the co-owner. Unfortunately shows the type of leader she is.”
Sophie Cunningham is trying to play it as mainstream as possible. She’s even using the politically acceptable language here, which I would not recommend because it isn’t going to win her any points.
It is incredible that this was even a controversy. The WNBA eventually suspended Keaton for the next five home games and fined her.
But the lasting impression here is pretty obvious if you are traditionally conservative: If you’re rational in any way, if you are not a radical LGBT activist, you do not belong at a WNBA game.
They are actively alienating well over half of the American population.
The WNBA could be successful; after all, there are a lot of women’s sports that are: women’s tennis, women’s golf. (Not so much women’s soccer, which tends to spike around the World Cup and then fall apart for the same exact reasons, because it’s very important to be incredibly woke.)
But if you want people to watch your product, you might want to think about this: To which crowd are you trying to appeal? I have two girls, 12 and six. Do I want to bring them to a WNBA game where they are being preached to about the virtues of LGBT radicalism?
It’s enough of a burden for me to pretend that the games are actually entertaining and interesting. I would never allow these people to shovel politics into my kids’ brains.
That’s the problem for the WNBA: The league can’t separate itself from its politics.
For them to do what they actually need to do to become successful, they would need to acknowledge they’re totally out of step politically with the rest of America.
They won’t.
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