RebKell's Junkie Boards

[ArtBest23]

NCAA women’s basketball attendance during the 2015-16 season set an all-time record with 11,366,943 patrons attending games across all three divisions, eclipsing the 11 million mark for the ninth straight season.

Division I attendance in 2015-16 came in at 8,286,356, the highest total in the 35 years of NCAA women’s basketball, eclipsing the previous best of 8,177,111 set in 2012.

http://www.ncaa.com/news/basketball-women/article/2016-06-07/womens-basketball-sets-attendance-record-across-all-three

http://i.turner.ncaa.com/sites/default/files/external/gametool/brackets/2016_wbb_attendance_final_data1.pdf

[pilight]

That suggests there is an audience for WBB. The WNBA just has to figure out how to tap into it.

_________________
I'm a lonely frog
I ain't got a home

[tfan]

[mildred]

For most schools, attendance figures are misleading.
From NCAA: Attendance figures for official box scores and/or NCAA reports can be calculated by turnstile count, tickets sold or estimates. NCAA championship tournament figures always are compiled by tickets sold.
By letting schools "guess" the numbers are going to be higher.
Does the WNBA use turnstile or in today's world scanned tickets? I'm sure they count season tickets even if those people don't show up.
I remember when Jim Foster started at Ohio State, he changed the policy of attendance figures. OSU was including PSL tickets from the men's game in its women's attendance figures. I think he encouraged the school to use the butts in the seats approach.

[ArtBest23]

[ClayK]

[purduefanatic]

[LitePal]

The original theory was that the NBA arenas were empty during the summer. As the ABA found out, playing during the regular season was not an advantage. They were then competing with the other sports, whereas the WNBA pretty much had summer to themselves. It was also believed that it could appeal strongly to families as the kids would be out of school.

If all WNBA teams switched to arenas that were more financially realistic, the move might work. Then again, would the entertainment dollar be spent on pro womens basketball during the womens college basketball season?

Who exactly are the WNBA's audiences?

[ClayK]

[dtrain34]

Basically what's being said here is that there is no real market for the WNBA beyond the summer time placeholder with 1/3 as many teams as the MNBA that allows The League to claim it is doing something with women's basketball.

The fans the W draws won't come in the winter because those darn colleges are playing then? Same applies to the men's NBA, colleges play during their seasons. The men pros are playing in the winter? Same applies to the Russian Premier League that pays the WNBA stars REAL salaries.

The ABL was far from perfect, but what it did have going for it was a group of people who had rolled the dice and their careers on women's basketball. Would they have survived of the NBA hadn't gone all dog-in-the-manger?

We'll never know but we do know the NBA raided the ABL by paying several marketable stars $250,000 for the first W season. Top salary today, not adjusted for inflation, is $107,000. We do know the ABL tried the idea of, if not smaller arenas, smaller markets. It was not wedded to NBA cities like all the WNBA teams other than Connecticut and the failed Tulsa franchise have been.

[LitePal]

When did the NBA "raid" the ABL? The only time I can remember that players jumped was when the ABL folded and there was a dispersal draft. And who was a marketable star at that time? There is simply no such thing, then or now. The biggest moment came when Nykeisha Sales, Kristen Folkl and Ticha Penichero all said that they were going to the WNBA and not the ABL. The top 3 players in the class all decided against the financial instability of the ABL.

I do love how ABL apologists insist that the NBA somehow worked to destroy their league. The ABL did the job all on their own with a ridiculous business plan and more importantly, NO FANS. I attended several Stingray games at the CSULB Pyramid. On at least two occasions, there were less than 100 fans in attendance on a weekend night. I never saw more than 600 fans in attendance and yet, the Times would report 3,000. The salaries were completely out of control, as were travel expenses because the audience wasn't there.

The WNBA at least was able to ride Olympic interest for a few years but since womens sports appears to be cyclical, the current interest level seems to be where it belongs. The ABL couldn't even do that.

This isn't Title IX, it's economics.

[pilight]

The W lured Nikki McCray, the MVP of the ABL's first season, with a big contract. She played in the W in 1998, while the ABL was still operating.

_________________
I'm a lonely frog
I ain't got a home

[ClayK]

I watched the ABL up close in San Jose, and communicated with the people who ran the league.

They did their best at one level, but the business model was fatally flawed (you can't pay workers more than the income they generate) and they completely whiffed on the media side of the equation.

To me, that's a huge piece of the summer season: If you play in the winter, no one will show your games because the men draw bigger audiences, at all levels. In the summer, there's only baseball, and networks have hours of programming to fill.

The NBA/college comparison doesn't work for me, because the audiences are different. College students go to men's college games -- if they didn't, I don't think their attendance would be that great, and those college students aren't going to NBA games.

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[LitePal]

Nikki McCray was not a marketable star, IMO. I'd suggest someone like Dawn Staley who remained with the ABL til its demise.

The salary comparison interested me so I looked it up. "Moreover, (Kate Starbird's) salary is about triple that of the highest-paid players in the W.N.B.A., where base salaries ranged from $20,000 to $50,000 last season, according to Katherine Wu, a spokeswoman for the league. But even though salaries in the A.B.L. average $80,000, with a minimum of $40,000, Rebecca Lobo, Sheryl Swoopes and some other W.N.B.A. marquee-name players earn more through endorsements.

If Kate Starbird was making 150K+ a year, no wonder the ABL died so quickly.

http://www.nytimes.com/1998/01/16/sports/pro-basketball-second-time-around-is-sweeter-for-abl.html

[pilight]

[LitePal]

Incorrect. Dawn Staley was taken 9th in the dispersal draft by Charlotte. She did not come over to the WNBA before the folding of the ABL.

[pilight]

[dtrain34]

Just to follow up, there were also a handful of stars who went directly to the W because of huge contracts for money no longer available today. Bait and switch, though I get Clay's point that you can't pay players more than you take in at the gate.

My ultimate point is not that the ABL would have been big time by now if not for the NBA, my point is that many women's basketball fans have fallen right in line with what the NBA wants -- acceptance of a placeholder league that reinforces its dominance over professional basketball in the US (they also bought the CBA and merged it into the D League and yes I know Isaiah Thomas and others had run the CBA into the ground before that).

A WNBA apologist on Twitter boasted of the league's ultra competitiveness when stars of two Final Four teams Jamie Weisner (OSU) and Talia Walton (UW) were cut. Well, of course they were cut. There are just 144 jobs (compared to 450 in the men's League), many populated by veterans in the midst of long careers.

The male version of Weisner or Walton makes the team and is maybe even getting decent minutes in the 30 team, 15 player roster, MNBA and no one says that league isn't "competitive." The W is falsely competitive, a marketing device which promotes already known players from powerhouse college teams, few Steph Currys from mid-majors, few Klay Thompsons from lesser P5s, which is more a symptom of the imbalance in talent at the D1 level than intentional on the W's part, but its reality.

Fans who just want some games to watch on TV are more than happy. The players who do make it ARE great. If you don't like baseball what else is there to watch sportswise during the summer?

But it terms of developing a true women's professional operation, with teams where more people can drive to games (It's 1250 miles from Seattle to LA, with no team in between), where we don't get one of the supposed best-ever American players skipping our national league to rest up for her REAL team in Putinland because the W is her moonlighting gig, the NBA isn't really into that. They found a niche for pro WBB and will keep it there as long as they can.

[pilight]

The NBA doesn't want the W to become successful enough to exist on its own. If the W does too well, the NBA could lose control of it. The W gets fed just enough to keep it alive, not enough for it to get stronger.

That's why they let ESPN lowball them on the TV deal. WNBA ratings already exceed MLS ratings and are not far from the US ratings for the NHL. So naturally MLS received a TV deal seven times the WNBA's and the NHL got one 17 times the size.

_________________
I'm a lonely frog
I ain't got a home

[ClayK]

I agree that the NBA wants the WNBA under its control so that no league emerges to challenge it on the men's side (the biggest danger to any American sports league) ...

But I also wonder if a winter women's league would have enough financial and media muscle without the support of the NBA.

The ABL was under-capitalized and couldn't find a TV outlet that would pay it any money, and I'm not sure any fledgling women's basketball league would today.

So is an under-my-thumb WNBA better than no quality American women's professional league at all?

_________________
Oṃ T�re Tutt�re Ture Sv�h�

[summertime blues]

Just a thought....I wonder if a late summer-early fall schedule, leading up to the college season, might draw better crowds than the current summer season. Maybe, maybe not.

_________________
Don't take life so serious. It ain't nohows permanent.
It takes 3 years to build a team and 7 to build a program.--Conventional Wisdom

[ArtBest23]

[LitePal]

Interesting about Staley in that I found nothing about her ABL situation online but I stand corrected. I also saw that her contract had expired in August so I don't know if she gave notice to the W or if she was waiting out the inevitable cancellation of the ABL but she was a die hard ABL proponent early on.

A friend worked at Long Beach while the Stingrays were on campus. The ABL was so poorly run that they had no way for fans to buy tickets with credit cards at the box office. This was eventually solved but it was indicative of how poorly they ran things. The organization folded but not after saying that they would have had to sell double the capacity of the Pyramid at about twice the ticket highest price in order to break even. When it was over, the Stingrays president said something to the effect, I'm glad it's over.

The ABL failed because there wasn't/isn't that sort of interest in professional womens basketball and despite their alleged superiority oncourt, it was impossible not to see the second hand nature of their production quality, especially compared to the W.

With the economic failures of the W, if they don't understand that theirs is indeed a niche sport, they are clearly doomed to the same fate.

Having read a few ABL obits, it almost depressing how many people really want to believe an NBA hit on the ABL. Everyone acknowledges that the lack of TV and advertising were a primary factor. But TV has less time for a niche sport in the fall as they are competing with other sports and network series but even more importantly, the ABL placed teams outside of the biggest markets. No NY, No LA, No Chicago, at least initially. So national advertisers would not hit the biggest markets.

Nobody killed the ABL but the ABL. You have to start to realize that just because you enjoy something doesn't mean the whole country will share that same enthusiasm.

[GEF34]

[GEF34]