She the North? Canadians can dream
By all logical standards, Kia Nurse is one of the most recognizable faces in Canadian women’s sports today.
There’s a huge mural of her looming over downtown playground courts. She walks the red carpet at the MMVAs, has just completed an excellent WNBA rookie season and will be a key contributor to a Canadian basketball team headed off to the world championship in late September.
She’s a big deal and familiar to tens of thousands of sports fans, there can be no denying that.
It’s a bit jarring, then, to hear the Hamilton native rattle off one of her concerns for the future.
“I could become virtually irrelevant in a couple of years,” she said, “because no one sees me play anymore. And I think that’s something that’s a problem, considering there’s so much talent and there’s so much excitement around women’s basketball right now, and we don’t show it.”
The context of Nurse’s comments after a national team practice in downtown Toronto on Thursday was the current status of the WNBA, both as part of the Canadian sporting culture and on a larger sports entertainment scale.
The league, now in the playoff portion of what’s generally considered the best season in its 22-year history, has been a hot topic of basketball conversation for weeks now. And, of course, it’s led to some discussion of whether or not it could succeed in Toronto, although there are no plans afoot for anyone to try to somehow attract a franchise.
“I would love to be able to be at home and play in Toronto,” WNBA veteran Natalie Achonwa said.
“That can only be a dream, but also a dream for the WNBA. To be at a point where they’re expanding into another country would be amazing. Hopefully we get to that point and Toronto can have a WNBA team.”
Without having any due diligence done and with the economic questions unanswered, the presumption is that, yes, it could be a success and would unquestionably fill a hole. “Where WNBA teams are placed right now, if you’ve ever come to a Connecticut game or go to games in Minnesota, those are places where … you see tons and tons of young women,” Nurse said.
“And for them to be able to have a vision of what it’s like, or a person physically in front of them playing, I think that’s a big thing, because in Canada I can’t even watch the playoffs right now. And that’s really annoying … young women don’t get the opportunity to see that.”
Before anyone even remotely considers the possibility of a Toronto-area WNBA team, the league and its players have some issues to work out.
Too much time has been wasted worrying about the WNBA versus the NBA, this player against that, and the differences between the two leagues. It’s a complete waste of energy and takes away from the real issue: Finding some way to make the WNBA a more financially sustainable product that can pay its players more money. To worry about anything else takes away from the larger issue.
“It’s not that we want to compare ourselves to NBA players and what they make — we understand,” said Achonwa, who just finished her fourth season with the WNBA’s Indiana Fever.
“We’re the most educated professional sports league. Most of the WNBA players are college graduates. We understand that it’s not that we just feel like they should give us more money. It’s the piece of the pie we want. NBA gets about 50 per cent of their revenue; we make less than 25 per cent of it. We want a bigger piece of the pie.”
And the players and the league have to keep trying to drive the narrative away from men versus women, WNBA versus NBA, and focus on improving all kinds of facets of the women’s game.
“I think it’s a choice to want to learn more because we’ve said it, people have said it,” Achonwa said.
“It’s always changing what the conversation is about and if you want to learn, you’ll learn. If people want to listen and not be like, ‘Oh, you don’t deserve what the NBA earns.’ That’s not the conversation. We’re not saying that.
“The players are knowledgeable. If you ask, they know what they’re talking about and take the opportunity to listen and engage in conversation. There’s room for growth.”