The WNBA arrives in Toronto in seduction mode, both feet on the brakes

Women’s basketball has never been so popular.

The women’s final of the American college championship, the March Madness, drew a peak of 12 million spectators in the United States. Riding the top of this wave, the repechage of the WNBA drew a record close to 600,000 spectators.

But of the dozens and dozens of talented players who graduate from the university ranks every year, there will only be a handful who will manage to break through the training of one of the rare teams of the oldest professional women’s league, the Women’s National Basketball Association, launched in 1997.

The W has since become the most difficult professional league to enter. With 12 players per team, there are only 144 players per year who can claim to be part of the best women’s basketball league in the world. It is not even uncommon for a player drafted in the first round a month earlier to be released before even having taken part in an official match, as places are so limited.

Almost to the day a year ago, commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced that the WNBA wanted to add two more teams in the next few years, offering scant consolation to those who had just been cut from one or the other. another of the camps which had opened with the month of May.

Two more teams is not much when you think of the 30 teams that are in the NBA (and which have 15 players per team, in addition to their development team in the G-League, which the WNBA obviously does not have not), but the breath of fresh air was necessary in the context of tense relations between the players and the management of the league.

In June, the commissioner said that the league had reduced its list of cities targeted for expansion to 10 or 12, and the following month that it was targeting 2025 for expansion, or even 2024!

Toronto was on that short list and for many it was a favorite along with San Francisco.

Finally!

Twelve years after the league went from 16 to 12 teams, the WNBA would once again be trying to spread its wings and Canada had an excellent chance of being in the game.

Except that once the season ended, Cathy Engelbert’s speech began to change. And the more the commissioner delays, the more the window of expansion seems to extend.

Last February, Engelbert admitted that the expansion is now planned for in two to four years i.e. from 2025 to 2027, and at the beginning of the month, it announced that it had reduced its list of candidate cities to 20.

You read correctly, the list has been reduced in one year from 12 to 20 cities.

No question either while the league dithers to increase the number of players per team.

The WNBA is backpedaling while the rest of the professional women’s sports world presses the accelerator.

The NWSL final attracted more viewers than the WNBA final last year with 915,000 viewers.

Photo : Reuters / Amber Searls

Just this week, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) announced that it was doubling down on its own expansion process. Two more teams in 2024, then two more teams by 2026. 16 teams. And no need to explain to you that a soccer team has more players. Each of its teams represents 26 new professional athletes.

The NWSL will provide 100 more opportunities to make a living from your sport. In Canada during the same period, Project 8 proposes to create an 8-team soccer league in 2025.

If you’re a talented young athlete, be it with the ball, not the ball in your hand, if you want to maximize your chances of having a professional career.

Until recently, however, the WNBA could boast of offering the best salaries in women’s sports. This is still true at the level of the average salary, since the players are less numerous in each formation, but the salary mass of the NWSL and even that of the Premier Hockey Federation (PHF) have caught up with that of their older sister.

The Montreal Force will play its second season in the Premier Hockey Federation in 2023-2024.

Photo : Twitter/@LaForceMontreal

In 2013, when the NWSL launched, teams operated with a maximum salary budget of $200,000 (US dollars) for female players. At the same time, that of the WNBA was $900,000.

In 10 years, that of the NWSL has increased sevenfold to reach $1,375,000 while that of the WNBA is at $1,420,500 for the next season. PHF teams, of which the Montreal Force is a part, will be able to offer up to $1,500,000 to their players next season… without even counting on many of the best players in the world who are working on their own league project professionally with the PWHPA.

By dint of treading water, the WNBA is no longer the happy exception of women’s sports.

By dint of showing a wait-and-see attitude, the league has not only lost its lead, but does not seem to know how (or want) to take advantage of the tremendous paradigm shift that we are seeing in women’s sport, in North America and in Europe, to generate growth.

The WNBA suffers from having been a pioneer… and from its complex relationship with the NBA, its creator in 1996 and main funder since, but which also limits its possibilities for growth.

Let’s be clear, without the NBA — which still owns half of the WNBA, while the other half is collectively owned by the league’s 12 franchises — there is no W. But the NBA keeps its counterpart. feminine in a vice: summer.

NBA Commissioner Adam Silver

Photo : Getty Images / Takashi Aoyama

The WNBA plays from mid-May to the end of September. His season begins in a whisper during the thunder of the NBA playoffs, when interest in men’s basketball is at its peak, and ends just before fall camps, with no attention paid, for the half as many games (40 versus 82).

Even though the WNBA Finals was broadcast by ABC and ESPN in the United States last year, the average viewership was 550,000. That’s 20 times less than the women’s March Madness final this year, as we showed above. There is a huge, hungry audience for women’s basketball that the WNBA is unable to reach. (On the men’s side, the disparity is almost non-existent between the two: 19.5 million listeners on average for the NCAA Finals for 10 years compared to 16.5 million for the NBA.)

Another example of how the NBA is limiting the growth of the WNBA: active male players, who are now accumulating stratospheric personal futures — 60 players earned $20 million or more this season — and many of whom have a particular affinity for women’s sports, can now invest in W teams, but only if the team owner is not tied to an NBA team and on the basis of a maximum 4% of the value of the deductible.

And as it navigates its potential expansion, the WNBA will make duplication almost impossible starting next year.

Players who spend the other eight months of their year in Europe or Australia, where they sometimes earn much more than the summer in the United States (as the Brittney Griner case sadly showed), will have to report to the camp of the WNBA as of May 1, even if their season is not over, otherwise they will not be able to play for the season. A risky position that could well backfire on the league if wages do not rise quickly to compensate for the loss of anticipated income for athletes.

So when is an expansion of the WNBA in Canada? As soon as possible, hopefully. And not just in Toronto, why not in Montreal and Vancouver too. And elsewhere in the United States as well. Two teams? I say ten. It is certainly not the talent that is lacking. And why not play in the fall too, during the months when the men’s season is struggling to get up. A final in December. 60 matches.

Come on, a little courage, fear is a bad adviser.

They deserve more, they deserve better.