WNBA players take a back seat
It’s on the NBA, not the hoops union, to even things up
This is what second-class citizenship in pro sports looks like: Last summer, the Minnesota Lynx lost home-court advantage for the entirety of the WNBA playoffs despite having finished the regular season with a league-best 27-7 record. They were forced off their regular season-long floor in St. Paul’s Xcel Energy Center to make way for the local NHL franchise, the Wild.
The Wild wasn’t in the playoffs. It wasn’t even playing critical regular-season contests. It was playing games that didn’t count in its pre-season. Or, as Allen Iverson would say, “Not a game, we talkin’ about practice.”
No matter, the Lynx — as successful a WNBA team as the league has witnessed, having captured four of the league’s previous six championships, which made it easily Minnesota’s best pro team — were shooed along with their fans to a gym at the University of Minnesota.
Imagine that happening to the Lynx’s male counterparts in the NBA, the Golden State Warriors.
But that’s how women’s professional basketball players in the U.S. are treated, which is why a few days ago one collection decided, finally, enough was enough.
The Las Vegas Aces last weekend went to bed in Washington rather than sleepwalk into Capital One Arena to play the Mystics after a 25-hour ordeal flying commercially from their home base. Worse, the league on Tuesday added injury to the insult by ruling the game the Aces refused to play, even though the team pointed out that travel-induced fatigue could make them more susceptible to getting hurt, a forfeit. That wouldn’t happen in the NBA, where the collective bargaining agreement prohibits the league from forcing its labourers to play a game if they must travel two time zones on the same day their tipoff is scheduled.
The forfeit not only dropped the Aces two games behind the last playoff spot in their division with just a half-dozen to go, it left them that much further back in the race to post-season bonuses in a league that Forbes writer Dave Berri estimated rewards them with no more than 25 per cent of revenue.
While the WNBA is part of the NBA, it isn’t governed by the federal Title IX education law that mandated the same accoutrements in college for women athletes as for men. Instead, its success is largely based on the good graces of those who run the men’s league.
So the Aces’ No. 1 draft pick this year, A’ja Wilson, the national player of the year from South Carolina, is no longer treated to the same charter flights, single hotel room occupancy, per diem, etc., as Sindarius Thornwell, who was a star for the men’s team during Wilson’s time in Columbia, S.C., and just finished his rookie NBA season for the L.A. Clippers. She can’t get Thornwell’s money, either. He got a three-year, US$3.8-million NBA contract. She signed a three-year WNBA deal worth at least $165,000.
WNBA players should borrow some of the grit from the national women’s hockey team, which threatened a boycott that forced its federation to treat them more like the men.
Silver recently lamented that the WNBA has a marketing problem, to which Washington Mystics star Elena Delle Donne so brilliantly took exception. Truth is that rests with the NBA, particularly now that it has broken its original commitment not to have its calendar compete with the women and has now cannibalized the women’s season. To be sure, the Aces lost their practice facility at Thomas & Mack Center in Las Vegas because the NBA Summer League took it over. Again, as Iverson said, “We’re not even talking about the game, the actual game, when it matters. We’re talking about practice.”
What the Aces dared to do wasn’t narcissistic. It was necessary. Their players union should opt out of its collective bargaining agreement at season’s end while this iron is hot rather than wait for it to expire next year and get the NBA to the table to correct these basic concerns.
The NBA may not have to pay women ballers like their brethren, but it can at least treat them more equitably
WHAT THE ACES DARED TO DO WASN’T NARCISSISTIC. IT WAS NECESSARY.