Why the WNBA Is Dying...and What David Stern Can Do About It

After ten years of trying, David Stern and the other league executives should have learned that you can't force a professional sport on Americans. (Major League Soccer, anyone?) When the time is right and the people are ready, they'll tell you themselves.
Before then, you're only wasting your time.

I remember the first WNBA game. It was a Saturday afternoon in June 1997, and the New York Liberty played the Los Angeles Sparks on network television. I was in a hotel room in Detroit, preparing for a family wedding and looking forward to what I hoped would be the beginning of something big.

My gut reaction to what I saw:

All that hype, and this is what you give us?

And it's been downhill ever since.

I went to DePaul University, so I know what it's like to cheer for and rub elbows with talented female basketball players. The women's game, done right, is just as exciting as—and even more fundamentally-sound than—the men's game.

But it's not identical to the men's game, and it cannot be played, coached, or marketed as such. The WNBA has never grasped this fact—and that's why the WNBA will die if it doesn't change, no matter how much money and patience it gets from its parent league.

Look at the country's most successful women's college basketball programs: Tennessee, North Carolina, UConn, and LSU. They thrive because their players aren't treated as men with ponytails. Instead, their teams have developed their own distinct identities, fan bases, and styles of play.

Today, the biggest problem facing the WNBA is the extent to which each franchise is joined at the hip (or more exactly the pocket) with the NBA team in its home city. This past week, for example, the Charlotte Sting ceased operations less than a month after the league had gained ownership rights from the same group that operates the Bobcats.

Here in Chicago, Bulls owner Jerry Reinsdorf refused to get involved with the WNBA for the league's first eight seasons, leaving the country's third-largest market without a franchise. When a private ownership group was finally assembled to launch the Sky in 2005, the team was resigned to playing its home games at the University of Illinois' Chicago Pavilion, a cramped, dingy arena that certainly doesn't qualify as what anyone would call "fan friendly." Thus far, Chicagoans have stayed away in droves.

(By comparison, the local professional softball team, the Bandits, enjoys robust fan support. It doesn't hurt that they play at a beautiful park on the Benedictine University campus in suburban Lisle...or that they have great players.)

Chicago has had its share of professional women's basketball teams over the years, most notably the Condors and the Hustle. Without exception, those squads have ultimately ended up six feet under the hardwood—and the Sky are more than likely to join them if things don't change in the very near future.

The same, unfortunately, can be said of the WNBA as a whole. Two of the league's original franchises are already gone (the Sting and the Cleveland Rockers), and a number of others are struggling. In the end, they'll need more than a few long-shot money balls at the NBA's All-Star Weekend if they want to survive.

Here's hoping Commissioner Stern and Co. get their act together before it's too late.