In Cathy Engelbert’s WNBA, the money never stops.
The curve is always linear, the expansion bidders keep lining up. Every offseason, more sponsors inquire and more deals are made. The numbers keep multiplying, and that means business is booming.
The league’s biggest superstar looks miserable. The greatest player of all-time, in the midst of an all-time great dynasty run, is barely breaking media containment. A star guard, playing for an expansion franchise in their inaugural season, made the leap from very good to great after a single-season-record-tying 53 point performance. It’s already out of the news cycle. Instead, the collective eye of the sports world is fixed on a slow motion replay. It’s not about the basketball or even the players involved anymore. It’s a culture war battleground. That’s all it’s ever been and all it will ever be. A pure basketball discussion cannot even occur without a current running underneath. The league’s window to snuff that out, to center the basketball and forcefully denounce this dynamic on both ends, has passed and now we’re all left to deal with the fallout. Three years have passed and nothing has improved. A death spiral of takes and algorithmic torture.
But in Cathy Engelbert’s WNBA, does that really matter?
Does it matter as long as there’s more eyes on the league, regardless of where they’re coming from and why? Does it matter that the environment is so toxic and corrosive that longtime fans feel pushed out and new fans feel unwelcomed and ostracized? Does it even matter that the people here for the basketball are being turned off because of all of this?
As it turns out, your players can be unhappy. Your fans can be anywhere from exhausted to angry to bereft. Your press corps can feel demoralized fighting the bully pulpit of national networks who want to center anything but the game.
If the number goes up, all of that unhappiness is worth it.
Because that’s life in Cathy Engelbert’s WNBA.
Caitlin Clark feels absent this season.
Even as the Indiana Fever remain in the playoff conversation, there is something about the experience that feels off. Every week there’s dialogue, largely driven by fans first then the media behind them, about the superstar, her play, her less-than-stellar communication with the officials, her relationship with her head coach, or if she’s living up to the generational superstar billing she was given when she first defeated South Carolina in the 2023 NCAA Final Four.
She was the Steph Curry of women’s basketball. A Gen-Z Larry Bird. Even in a national championship loss to LSU, Clark was seen as the chosen one who would finally take women’s basketball into the mainstream.
While plenty of elite men’s athletes had been transformational figures for their respective leagues without needing a national championship, the phenomenon is somewhat unusual in the WNBA. Since 1997, there have been several special superstars that the league believed were ‘faces’ to market the entirety of their product around. Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes were already out of school when the W began play in 1997, but every player since has had that one thing in common.
Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi, Candace Parker, Maya Moore, Brittney Griner, Breanna Stewart and A’ja Wilson were all anointed. All seven won championships. There have been other number one overall picks that haven’t won national titles from LaToya Thomas to Janel McCarville, Angel McCoughtry to Jewell Loyd. If you’re a casual fan of women’s basketball you may recognize one or two of the last four names I’ve mentioned. But you’ve absolutely heard of the other seven at the top of the list.
It just felt like a truism in women’s basketball. More titles meant more time on TV which meant more fans and more publicity. At least until Sabrina Ionescu came along…
The NCAA’s career triple-double leader had brought Oregon, a near complete unknown of a program, to their first ever Final Four in 2019 and seemed primed for another deep run had the Pandemic not sidelined the tournament in 2020. Like Caitlin Clark, Ionescu didn’t have a championship but possessed enough career accolades that her greatness at the college level wasn’t really in question. Moreover, a lot of people gravitated to her play, her connection to the late Kobe Bryant, the various Nike NBA superstar co-signs on social media or her status as Nike’s collegiate athletic standard bearer. Some could say it was manufactured hype, but it was hype all the same.
The signature shoe announcement came, followed by the first release and then an NBA 2K cover that ostensibly placed the All-WNBA Second-Team guard as arguably the most recognizable face in the league. Some — particularly fans of A’ja Wilson, who was in the midst of beginning a dynastic run that is still happening to this day — voiced their frustration while others — who believed Ionescu’s New York Liberty teammate Breanna Stewart was the true barometer of greatness in the W — were just confused.
“It was basically told to me that the only way I was going to have success from a marketing standpoint is to really sell this straight girl next door,” Sue Bird told journalist Pablo Torre back in 2024, “‘You have the ‘look.’’ These were things that were told to me.”
Indeed the WNBA has always sought, from Rebecca Lobo to Lisa Leslie, Candace Parker, Sabrina and Caitlin Clark, to present a certain image to the broader public. Feminine, typically straight, hopefully white, relatively apolitical whose basketball could stand on its own merits.
As Ionescu started to struggle and Wilson continued to ascend, the conversations regarding coverage and marketing equity among players in the WNBA started to become louder as former players relayed their experience with being told to potentially betray themselves in order to maximize their opportunities.
In another universe, WNBA leadership would’ve seen that flare up of dialogue within their space and realized that a Magic vs. Bird moment might not work in this era. The media environment is too fragmented, the W’s franchise brands not strong enough to overcome and help keep the racial undertones on a relatively stable track.
Instead, in Cathy Engelbert’s WNBA, the league was delighted with the unfolding rivalry. The Liberty, led by Stewart and Ionescu, on one end and the Aces, with Wilson at the center, on the other. While those discussions about race, privilege and ‘face of the league’ resentment still happened, they were largely contained within a reasonably sized but extremely engaged portion of WNBA Twitter (a community, mind you, that has an outsized influence in the league’s existence). In only the rarest moments did the dialogue break containment, but the notion of a player who hasn’t ‘earned’ their media coverage through wins or titles existed long before Caitlin Clark arrived in the WNBA.
So why Clark? Why did this player animate the country in a way that another NCAA record breaking scorer, Kelsey Plum, did not?
The Steph Curry-esque pull up three pointers and free-wheeling movement around the perimeter brought in those that enjoy the art of fluid basketball. Iowa, one of the most historically rich and well-supported women’s hoops states in the country, gave her a built in fanbase. And the Big Ten, which hadn’t had a homegrown player of this caliber since Lindsay Whalen dazzled fans at the University of Minnesota, promised a wide TV distribution and a national network partner in FOX to push it all.
It didn’t matter that her title chances were spoiled by LSU in 2023 and South Carolina a year later. Clark had captured a massive fanbase comprised of a broad coalition of diehard WNBA fans and newly casual observers to the less savory elements including opportunistic national sports media figures and cynical political operatives looking for another battleground for the American Culture War. While Angel Reese was pilloried in the press for an innocuous gesture towards Clark at the end of the national championship, the Iowa superstar went out of her way to try and quiet the noise.
"I don't think Angel should be criticized at all," she said to Outside the Lines shortly after the 2023 National Championship. "I'm just one that competes and she competed. I think everybody knew there was going to be a little trash talk in the entire tournament. It's not just me and Angel. We're all competitive. We all show our emotions in a different way. You know, Angel is a tremendous, tremendous player. I have nothing but respect for her."
It was precisely the kind of comment that should’ve ended the discourse then and there. The next NCAA women’s basketball season came with the same level of intrigue around Clark but mostly avoided the off-court dialogue that enveloped the 2023 Final Four weekend. Had the WNBA wanted to, there could’ve been a chance to rethink the marketing of the league moving forward. Clark was arriving with Reese, as well as a cadre of potential superstars, with at least four more draft classes behind them stacked to the brim with talent.
A creative mind, with proactive intent could have worked with Clark, Reese and even current stars of the league to figure out a marketing strategy that would maintain the celebratory tone that they’ve always had towards their players.
But in Cathy Engelbert’s WNBA, the ideas are stale. The reflexes are slow and when there’s a reaction it’s often one that over-indexes. A flagrant foul won’t be called in the run of play so they tack on a suspension to make themselves look serious, far after the damage is done. It didn’t matter that decades had passed, or that the media landscape had changed and the overall cultural climate of this country doesn’t feel any healthier than it did in the late 1970’s, it wasn’t stopping the W.
Magic vs. Bird worked, so this would too.
It’s now year three of the Caitlin Clark experience and the animus online is as bad as ever. The cranks with microphones are laughably suggesting that Clark do anything from make her own league to play in an even-more-physical European league. That then inflames the bigots, who aren’t typically even fans of Clark but want the permission structure to harass players — specifically black and queer ones — through social media. These parasites thrive in the nebulous and uncertain nature of this dynamic. Everyone, from the league to the franchises to the individual players’, and their plan of how to handle this torrent of online abuse is different. And in that disunity, the worst elements of every side of this issue get to cherry pick who and what gives them permission to behave the way they’re behaving.
Meanwhile, those who feel Clark’s very presence is an existential threat to the original culture and soul of the WNBA, pile onto the Fever superstar’s teammates. Those players’ character, and their very moral code, is called into question with regularly increasing vitriol. They’ll ask Clark to loudly denounce the bad faith actors in her fanbase, who are unlikely to listen or care, as they haven’t listened or cared before. And that rejection of directive gives her skeptics the space to say she is indeed winking, nodding, or giving tacit permission for other players around the league to be harassed at will.
After we’ve sufficiently tired ourselves out, everyone goes back to their corners, preparing for another round of death spiral discourse, frustrated that this is still a conversation while the WNBA celebrates the ratings it will drive. It doesn’t matter if the audience is comprised of bad-faith, low-engagement viewers watching for the car crash, it’s all about the number that can be presented to owners and investors.
It’s how you measure success in Cathy Engelbert’s WNBA.
The embattled commissioner of the league is good with numbers. Just ask the players that inked some of the biggest contracts in women’s sports history this spring. In terms of what the business demanded, Engelbert did exactly what she was asked to do: get the WNBA in the black financially, get a CBA done and expand the league further. There’s an easy argument to be made that all of these things were a result of the players and labor that make the operation go, but it’s important to give credit where it’s due. Somebody had to usher the league as a whole through this time of immense financial windfalls. She did well, as the WNBA is positioned to explode in the next five years.
It’s in the interpersonal side of the business that Engelbert has failed and failed again.
In the seasons following the ‘Wubble’ in 2020, her WNBA immediately worked to elevate Ionescu as the next great superstar of the league, tried to market Liberty (Celtics) vs. Aces (Lakers) as their own Bird (Stewart) vs. Magic (Wilson), then tried to do it again except marketed it solely around players (Clark and Reese). Without the strong fanbase traditions to help buoy the more star-centric elements of their respective fanbases, the WNBA very quickly lost hold of the narrative and allowed it to spin completely out of control.
Instead of taking Clark and Reese’s lead from their college years and burying everything where it stood, Engelbert and her senior leadership leaned in. In a national election year rife with culture war topics, the most cynical mind could see a world in which the WNBA forced its way onto major news rundowns by being tied in with the political news of the day.
This wasn’t a secret. The Commissioner was happy to tell anyone who would listen, so long as they had access to a CNBC set and a slew of TV cameras.
Clark’s transformation from player to grievance avatar reached completion as multiple league-wide changes were allowed to become a referendum on her in some way, shape or form. Whether it be charter flights, PR statements, stadium security or freedom of movement rule changes, the league has let the problem fester until they’re spurred into action. She’s the superstar that tipped the scale but everyone before her had done so much groundwork that the league was largely overdue on certain things.
By virtue of being the scale tipper, one wouldn’t be wrong to suggest her presence is what brought about these changes. They also might not be wrong to point out that Clark herself isn’t the sole differentiator when franchises had been publicly lobbying the league for certain changes for years.
Those arguing the latter point do so out of a desire to welcome change but on somewhat honorable merits. All are welcome in the new WNBA, but the growth didn’t occur in a vacuum.
But that’s not enough in Cathy Engelbert’s WNBA. You have to pick a side.
So what comes of this latest incident between Alyssa Thomas and Caitlin Clark? The Fever and Mercury play again in less than two weeks. The officiating problem hasn’t been solved and likely won’t for another year or two or as long as the WNBA is viewed as a feeder program for their partner league. The temperature hasn’t come down at all, as Fever guard Sophie Cunningham alleged on her own podcast that the Mercury are the ‘unfriendliest group in the league’. And there’s a question about whether or not Clark’s nagging back injury will still be a factor come next week.
It’s eaten up what was an otherwise great weekend of WNBA basketball and may swallow up the Commissioner’s Cup Final on Tuesday as well. But when Indiana plays Phoenix again, the numbers will likely be higher.
The basketball fans will be watching, with a palpable sense of dread that something will happen and the discourse cycle will fire up again, taking more attention away from the growing game and stars within it. The TikTok video clippers and AI goblins will be waiting by their computers to earn some Elon-bucks by stoking more culture war flames. Christine Brennan will draft up a book promotion disguised as an opinion. Their presence in the game makes the experience worse, the players more unhappy, the discussion around the league cruder and the work more tedious.
But their viewership numbers will rate on Nielsen all the same.
Because that’s all that matters in Cathy Engelbert’s WNBA.
