This summer, the WNBA celebrates its thirtieth birthday. The league has never been more popular. Television ratings and attendance have never been higher, merchandise sales have never been hotter, and the sport’s place in our public conversations has never been more prominent.
And yet, for all that, the WNBA is still losing money. It has lost money, in fact, over the course of each of its previous twenty-nine seasons. Someone has been covering the losses and paying the bills. That somebody is the NBA. (The “men’s” basketball league, if you prefer.) And despite being the recipients of all that patience and largesse, many of the players and fans in the WNBA are far from grateful. They’re demanding more – and as we’ve all seen this summer, demanding it happen entirely on their terms.
The WNBA’s loudest voices are convinced that they’ll get that “more.” And that reason is because they’ve spent decades helping to turn the levers of the Political Vise.
Regular readers of this column – and of my book -- know that machine well. The Political Vise, originally designed to ensure that government remained responsive to the people, has long since become a device through which the left manufactures and enforces a consensus. And as far as the WNBA and its most ardent cheerleaders are concerned, the consensus ought to be that misogyny is the sole cause of the league’s enduring financial precariousness. The women who play are woefully underpaid, the consensus says, and the reason is that they play in a country that does not value women.
Bias in the Balance Sheet?
A’ja Wilson is regularly cited by the league’s media allies as one of the best basketball players alive. Born in 1996, the year the WNBA launched, Wilson (who plays center for the Las Vegas Aces) will earn $1,400,000 this season – matching the highest salary in league history. That compensation is only a small fraction of what Steph Curry makes. Repeat that comparison often enough, in enough sympathetic outlets, and it hardens into irrefutable proof of bigotry and sexism. What the comparison leaves out is that Steph Curry plays in a league that brings in ten billion dollars a year, while Wilson plays in one that brings in a few hundred million -- and consistently loses money all the while.
It should not be controversial to observe that the men are paid more because the men’s game earns more. The NBA’s stars are paid out of real profit, and not someone else’s speculative (or guilt-ridden) generosity. This disparity is less an injustice than it is a balance sheet. But a balance sheet has never moved anyone to indignation. And indignation is the fuel on which the Vise runs.
Setting the Vise aside, there is a real argument to be had about exactly how much WNBA players ought to be paid. Their labor has real value, even if the league for which they play has yet to generate a profit. But the Vise is not interested in the dull details of labor negotiations. It has a grander claim to sell, which is that the gap between what the women earn and what the men earn is undeniable evidence of this country’s enduring contempt for women. Anyone who questions that framing pays a price. Just ask Draymond Green.
Green – an NBA veteran and hardly a stereotypical reactionary – remarked several years ago that the money simply wasn’t there to pay WNBA players what the men were making. He wasn’t making a point about talent or effort; he was making an observation about math. Quite sensibly, Green argued that if you wanted to increase compensation, you needed to increase revenue first. Grow the game, he said, and the money will follow. For his trouble, Green was set upon by the likes of Megan Rapinoe and countless progressive media figures. He wasn’t a truth-teller, but an ill-informed and unappreciative bigot. To his credit, he stuck to his proverbial guns. It takes considerable courage to resist the pressure of the Political Vise, and the most feared enforcer in modern NBA history was just tough enough to do it.
The reality is that very few folks are as adept at standing their ground as Draymond Green. Even if the Vise couldn’t crush my fellow son of Michigan, the episode served to warn anyone else against placing math (and reality) ahead of ideology.
The Second Player They Tried to Break
This summer, another enforcer learned something about placing reality (and biology) ahead of Woke ideology. Sophie Cunningham of the Indiana Fever has become a pop culture sensation thanks to her fearless play on the court and her even-more fearless comments off of it. When Cunningham dared to say that women’s sports should be reserved for biological women, and when she posed for photos with anti-trans activists, she infuriated the very same progressives who went after Draymond Green. Two unquestioned articles of faith on the modern left are that WNBA players are underpaid thanks to misogyny, and that transwomen are women. Though the majority of Americans side with Sophie Cunningham on the trans issue, that hasn’t stopped many in the media from demanding that the Fever star be brought to heel.
Sophie, like Draymond, has held her ground. But the progressive Vise has never depended on winning over the likes of Sophie Cunningham. It depends on everyone else watching what happens to her and deciding that they aren’t quite so brave (and that they might be better served to keep their mouths shut). When the Vise finds it cannot crush a particularly stubborn public figure, it looks for more vulnerable targets. This past Sunday, at an Indiana Fever game played in Atlanta against the hometown Dream, the arena’s own camera crew put a fan wearing a “Protect Trans Kids” shirt up on the Jumbotron for the crowd to cheer. Two other women at that same game wore shirts reading “XX-XY,” the slogan of the movement to keep women’s sports for women. They did not get the Jumbotron. What they got instead was WNBA security, who approached them and asked them to cover the offending message. The approved slogan got a big screen celebration. The other got told to cover up.
A Blink and a Hedge
The league later said the security intervention should not have happened. They didn’t go so far as to offer a genuine apology, as that would no doubt have infuriated some of their most fervent supporters. That attempt to have it both ways will please no one. It does not bode well for the league going forward.
The WNBA is a wonderful sport, made all the more popular by the likes of Cunningham and her incandescently gifted teammate, Caitlin Clark. From a free market perspective, its stars deserve a chance to market their talents and make good money as a consequence. The question now is not whether women’s basketball is worth supporting. The question is whether those who run and manage the league will let outdated ideological commitments drive that burgeoning support away.