Players helped defeat part-owner’s Senate bid
Loeffler ran for Congress from Georgia, blasted Dream; pressure mounts for her to sell
On Tuesday morning, the Rev. Raphael Warnock made a final pitch to Senate-race voters in Georgia with a video on social media that prominently featured WNBA players campaigning on his behalf against the Republican incumbent, Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who also happens to be a co-owner of a franchise, the Atlanta Dream.
The players got what they wanted. Warnock, a Democrat, defeated Loe±er, who owns a 49 percent stake in the Dream. This was an outcome that six months ago would have been considered an upset. The attention WNBA players brought to Warnock’s campaign is widely considered to have played a role in his victory.
Now, with the Senate race over, the question turns to what’s next for the players and the league — and to what should be done about an owner who publicly blasted her own players and who, as she embarked on a political campaign with tactics that many considered to be racist, said the values of the WNBA did not align with her own.
News of Warnock’s victory Tuesday was greeted with glee by many basketball fans and WNBA players, several of whom posted celebratory messages on social media.
“This isn’t the first time that we’ve seen an owner or even a sponsor of a team not align with a team’s thought process,” Dream guard Renee Montgomery said in an interview Wednesday. “So it’s always going to be a battle, but right now I’m just excited for a win.”
WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert told CNN over the summer that she would not force Loe±er to sell her stake, even though the league’s players’ union has indicated it does not want her to own the team any longer. Loe±er has said repeatedly that she is unwilling to sell and called
herself a victim of “cancel culture” as players were speaking out against her.
A representative for Loe±er did not respond to a request for comment.
This leaves the league at an uncomfortable impasse. The majority owner of the team, Mary Brock, has been exploring a sale of the Dream, but it is unclear how far those discussions have gone. It is also unclear what role Loe±er has in those negotiations or whether her stake would be part of a sale. In August, ESPN reported that Baron Davis, the former NBA player, was part of an investment group interested in buying the Dream.
In July, Loe±er criticized the league for dedicating its 2020 season to social justice. The WNBA, taking a cue from players like Angel McCoughtry of the Las Vegas Aces, said its games would honor the Black Lives Matter movement. At the time, Loe±er was trying to show her loyalty to President
Donald Trump in a race in which she was being attacked from the right by Trump’s preferred candidate for the seat, Rep. Doug Collins.
Loe±er spent much of the rest of her Senate campaign lashing out at Black Lives Matter, accusing the movement of holding “anti-Semitic views” and promoting “violence and destruction across the country.” That prompted the WNBA players’ union to tweet: “E-N-OU-G-H! O-U-T!”
Engelbert told ABC in July that “Kelly’s views are not consistent with those of the WNBA and its players.” Loe±er’s rhetoric also drew a response from all of the players on the Dream, who signed a letter saying that the team was “united in the movement for Black Lives.”
But Loe±er dug in. In August, led by players like the Dream’s Elizabeth Williams and the Seattle Storm’s Sue Bird, teams across the league took the dramatic step of wearing “Vote Warnock” shirts before games. The demonstration elevated Warnock’s profile among people who had not been following the race, and prompted a flood of donations to his campaign.
The move came at a time when public polling put Warnock’s support at less than 10 percent and showed him in fourth place in a large field. Warnock’s fortunes turned, and he finished in the top two on election night in November, forcing a runoff required by Georgia state law after Loe±er did not receive 50% of the vote.
But Loe±er remains a member of the WNBA community; some players have said that this is untenable and that they hope she leaves the league of her own accord.
“If what she has said in all of her campaigning is true and her views are the way that she has made them out to be in the media, there doesn’t seem to be any benefit to her to be the only owner of a WNBA team,” Blake Dietrick, a guard for the Dream, said in an interview Wednesday. “That, in turn, means there is no benefit to us.”
Asked if the league should be more assertive if Loe±er does not sell her stake, Dietrick said: “I think that the issue changes a little bit when she’s no longer technically a public figure. If she isn’t campaigning or speaking those views that so vehemently contradict the league constantly in the media, maybe it’s slightly different. I’m hopeful that change happens. I know that there’s a lot of logistics that go on in terms of what the league can and cannot do.”
Montgomery, who sat out last season to focus on causes like police brutality and voting rights, said that she was reveling in Warnock’s victory more than thinking about Loe±er’s role with the team. But like Dietrick, she said she hoped that Loe±er would step aside on her own.
“I just think that if someone is so opposed to the WNBA and what the WNBA is trying to stand for, and so opposed to Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream and so opposed to everything the Atlanta Dream stands for, I just don’t understand why you would want to be a part of it anyways,” Montgomery said.