RebKell's Junkie Boards

[Oldfandepot2]

The differences in salaries between the WNBA and NBA are ridiculous.

http://www.bustle.com/articles/74603-the-ncaa-womens-basketball-championship-isnt-over-why-doesnt-it-get-as-much-attention-as-the

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Cave Canem!
We must listen to each other no matter how much it hurts. Bishop Desmond Tutu.

[Durantula]

It is a huge disparity but every couple of years you hear about the WNBA potentially folding and that is with these low salaries. Could you increase everyone's salaries and keep the league viable without major increases in attendance?

The biggest issue to me is two fold: fewer girls are playing basketball and you would be surprised how many women do not follow college basketball once their career is over. They might follow the team they played for but if they move to a different town they aren't going to adopt the local team as theirs and buy season tickets and I don't think they become big WBB fans down the line. Someone here mentioned in a post how they knew about a team in the NCAA tournament and they were playing a high seed with prominent players and they knew nothing about them. I think for girls they just like to play the sport but in terms of interest in the overall game at a national level the interest isn't there. You see a lot of men in the crowd at women's games but there should be so many more women especially the former players.

[beknighted]

The WNBA's TV contract is something like $12 million a year, so call it $1 million per team. The NBA's new contract is $2.66 billion a year, or around $83 million per team. That kind of explains it.

The good news is that the WNBA's finances have improved meaningfully, with the NBA admitting that 6 teams made money each of the last two years. (Most sports franchises officially lose money, thanks to accounting tricks.) Still, I wouldn't expect salaries to ramp up particularly fast.

[pilight]

[tfan]

Even after the new ESPN deal, the Sparks owners had to get rid of their team due to unsustainable losses.

[dtrain34]

The lack of popularity of the WNBA is almost analogous to pro soccer for either gender (although here in the Northwest the Timbers, Sounders and Caps ARE a pretty big deal):

Kids play soccer and GBB but they don't turn into fans when they grow up.

One of those aforementioned D1 players who was unfamiliar with her team's highly-rated NCAA tourney foe prior to the scouting report was, along with her fourth grade AAU team mates, beside herself with joy when the Seattle Storm won its first championship. The next time the Storm won she was in high school.... "hey, you might want to come in here and watch this, the Storm are about to clinch the championship...." "Huh, that's good, I'm going over to Ashley's house, OK?"

This is kind of a non sequitir as I'm not sure how it could help make fans out of players, but:

How about the WNBA plays during basketball season?

It may avoid conflict with the men's NBA and WCBB by playing during the summer but it's going up against baseball and early season football now and those are sports people expect to see that time of year. Of course with the current salaries that would dilute the product as few top pros would abandon their foreign teams and in some cases, adopted homelands, for the W's lowly wages.

[ClayK]

That's a huge gender difference, for whatever reason: High school male basketball players are almost invariably basketball fans, watch games on TV, can talk about teams and players, and will make time to watch the NCAAs and NBA playoffs.

High school female basketball players are very seldom fans, and very seldom watch games on TV. (The elite players, who are looking to basketball as a career, are in a different category, but there aren't many of them.) And those who are fans, are fans of men's teams and male players, as evidenced by the fact that girls don't buy basketball shoes branded by female players, but rather get the LeBron or Curry or whatever male model is the hottest at a given time.

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Oṃ Tāre Tuttāre Ture Svāhā

[pilight]

[ClayK]

[ArtBest23]

The women's NCAA final had 3.2 million viewers.

The men's NCAA final had over 28 million viewers and was by far the most highly watched show on TV for the week. (12 million more than the second place show, NCIS).

The men's semifinals drew 22.6 million and 15.3 million viewers; the women's semis drew 2.4 and 2.0 million.

Why does the financial disparity surprise anyone?

[GlennMacGrady]

Some in the media and elsewhere want to ascribe the salary differential to discrimination or sexism. That is uninformed or tendentious.

Basic free market economics explains the differential: supply vs. demand, revenue vs. costs, profits vs. losses. If anything, the WNBA has been economically free-riding on financial support from the NBA throughout its history.

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http://www.youtube.com/MagicBusBasketball

[dtrain34]

Yep, if sexism were the problem, we wouldn't hear much about tennis or golf, which have been huge for years, or Ronda Rousey, who pretty much made up her sport and pushed for UFC to sanction female fights with no tradition whatever compared to the UConn-UT-Stanford history in WBB.

[terpsforever]