By most accounts, these have been good times for the WNBA. The women’s pro basketball league has seen expansive growth in attendance and viewership over the past several years, and a new collective bargaining agreement has taken team annual salary caps from $1.5 million to $7 million per club.
The league is expanding, and franchises can now be worth more than $1 billion. It’s still a long way from the NBA, but the top women’s team sport in the US does seem to be entering the salad days.
Of course, nothing grows that fast without pains. And at the moment, the WNBA is definitely feeling some. These go beyond the expected, like getting teams off commercial flights to charters or figuring out how to clean up the sport with better officiating. These are standard fare, not dissimilar to what men’s leagues have gone through in their ascent. For the WNBA, the question of the moment isn’t just the game or even its finances, but rather things that go far beyond it.
Perhaps nothing sums this moment better than the current conflict involving Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham and Chicago Sky guard DiJonai Carrington. During a recent game between the two, Carrington fouled Cunningham really hard across her head and neck on the way to the basket, a foul that was reviewed and upgraded to a more serious Flagrant 2, which meant instant ejection for Carrington.
For context, Cunningham is white, Carrington is Black. Not long after the game, Carrington posted on her Threads account the phrase “white privilege” while tagging Indiana, Cunningham’s team.
Not to complicate, but for more context, Cunningham was already a pretty well-known figure, including for being vocal about keeping transgender athletes out of women’s sports.
To inflame even more, Carrington asserted that her white privilege post had nothing to do with her ejection from the previous game for fouling a white athlete, which on its face makes literally no sense.
Of course, this comes in the wake of controversy around the League’s most famous current athlete Caitlin Clark, the third year WNBA star, also for Indiana, and also white, who brought her massive stardom in college up to the pros.
Since arriving in the league, we’ve had exhaustive debate about her race, privilege, whether she’s overrated, how much she’s elevated the League, and on and on. She’s also sold more jerseys and sponsorships than any female athlete without the last name Williams.
It’s nearly impossible for her to go a week without being asked something tangentially about being a white athlete. So regardless of your opinion of Clark, the one thing we can all agree on is her fame has placed an intense magnifying glass on the often controversial intersection of race and women’s team sports.
That’s happened at a moment when the politic of racial discourse in the U.S. is more divisive than ever - and certainly not great for selling a sport product to an increasingly broad public.
And therein lies the rub. I can’t give you an eloquent assessment of the Cunningham/Carrington conflict. Although, Carrington is acting like a small child while Cunningham clearly relishes the controversy and spotlight. So I guess I can.
The bigger challenge is that through its history, the WNBA has always lived in the intersection of sport and social issues - especially race and gender identity.
That might be okay when you’re happy making sports minimum wage, but certainly as of this new contract, the league and its players have far higher fiscal aspirations.
As the NFL and NBA learned a long time ago, divisive politics doesn’t make for good commerce - not for sports, at least.
Regardless of what you think of an athlete’s opinion - liberal or conservative - or how you view the racial dynamic of the league, activism and sports entrepreneurism do not blend well.
For the WNBA to continue upward, it might need to abandon the fighting spirt on which it was built. It also probably means zero tolerance for the kinds of conflicts that are getting the League a whole lot of press these days. That may be the price of success, assuming the American public is ready to shell out even more for a more sanitized sports product. Which, depending on your definition, could mean very good days ahead for women’s basketball.
Keith Strudler is the Dean of the College of Communication and Media at Montclair State University. You can follow him at @KeithStrudler.
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