Women’s Basketball Needs All the Stars
Not so long ago, Paige Bueckers represented the future of women’s basketball. In 2020, she was the best recruit of a class that included Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, Cameron Brink and Kamilla Cardoso. As a real first year, at the University of Connecticut, she showed a supernatural balance and projected a feeling of inevitability. She could slide her willow frame into traffic and finish at the edge. She had exceptional skills in the mid-range and pulled more than forty percent beyond the three-point arc. She was a follower passer and a defender above average, and had an instinct for clutch moments. In a victory from 63 to 59 in overtime against the University of South Carolina n ° 1, she collected thirty -one points, six interceptions and five assists – and scored the last thirteen points of her team, a section in which she only missed, when she was at fault. (She sank the free throws.) She was the undisputed national player of the year that season, and led Uconn in the Final Four, crushing the Iowa University team in Clark along the way.
The call of Bueckers was easy to see, on and off the field – the sweetness of his game and the beauty of his personality, an attractive mixture of confidence and group. She seemed to be the last of a long line of great players from Uconn, the next step in the evolution of the game, and the one that would carry sport at the level that many thought that he could reach. She had the potential to break into popular culture. The new rules of “name, imagination and resemblance” for the NCAA athletes meant that it was to capitalize financially in a way that no basketball player had yet been able. In 2021, she signed with one of the largest sports agencies, became the first university athlete to conclude an agreement with Gatorade and filed a brand for her nickname, Paige Buckets. It was reported at the time that she could win a million dollars downstream.
It was not lost for her that she benefited from being white and white in a way that called upon advertisers – a loose and disgusting setting, long blond hair and alabaster skin. But she accepted the premise, whom you often hear from those around WNBA, that being a woman in basketball should be a social justice activist, and she spoke of redirecting the spotlights and using her platform to enhance the profile of all black basketball women who had long been overlooked. “They do not get the media coverage they deserve,” she said to Implement Rewards in 2021, in his acceptance speech for the best university athlete in female sports. “They gave so many things to this sport and to the community and to society as a whole, and their value is undeniable.” Six months later, she broke her knee and torn her meniscus and, after undergoing surgery to repair injuries, was sidelined for two months. Uconn has dropped top ten for the first time since 2005. Then, before the 2022-23 season, she tore her ACL, the spotlights abruptly moved from Bueckers, far from the team, and the story around the female basketball ascendant changed with the astonishing spontaneity of one of the fire of Caitlin Clark.
To what extent is only one player important for the future of a team sport? This question took advantage of the WNBA stars match at the beginning of the month. On the one hand, the event presented the growth of the league, or “hyperprowth”, as the commissioner said, Cathy Engelbert. Joe and Clara Tsai, who would have bought the New York Liberty for something like ten million dollars a few years ago, had recently sold a team participation in an assessment of four hundred and fifty million. The costs for expansion teams are set at two hundred and fifty million, and the League cannot follow the number of investors wishing to establish new franchises. A television agreement worth 2.2 billion dollars is about to enter into force. The All-Star game was on average 2.2 million viewers, an increase of one hundred and fifty eight years compared to 2023, the second audience of the event. On the other hand, this number was more than a million less than the audience of the game last season, when Clark was on the ground. This time, Clark captain of his team team, and criticisms of the league seemed to underline the precipitated decrease in the dimensions. It was perhaps not the criticisms either. In his substitution, the sports editor Ethan Strauss stressed that publications with deep sources of the NBA have embarrassed the stories about how the public shrinks when Clark is seated.
The context of all this is the negotiations underway on the collective agreement of the League, which expires at the end of October. Before the star match, all the players, including Clark, entered the field with t-shirts that read “pay us what you owe us”. Clark achieves $ 78,066 in Indiana fever wages this season. Everyone should be worth more – a lot of millions of people – to the WNBA than that, but how difficult players are more difficult to determine. Less than ten percent of the annual WNBA income return to the wages of the players. In the NBA, on the other hand, about half of the league revenues go to its players. “We do not ask for the same wages as men,” said the Napheesa Collier du Minnesota, the MVP reigning stars, in an interview in March. “We ask for the same income actions. And this is where the big difference is … we ask for the same cup of the pie. ” But the WNBA has a single property structure, in which the NBA has a participation of forty-two%, and it is not always clear what are the revenues, nor how the NBA teams who also have WNBA teams distribute the resources. The leagues often obscure finances during labor negotiations, but, in the case of WNBA, the figures are particularly difficult to understand. This $ 2.2 billion agreement on the media, for example, is hardly a clean figure: the media rights of the two leagues have been grouped, and the owners of the NBA decided on the part of their seventy-seven billions of dollars. Times Opinion piece entitled “How are the players of the underpayed WNBA? It is embarrassing.” It is not in the interest of the League to agree, of course.
During the stars weekend, Clark, for its part, seemed to have a fabulous moment. She was on social networks, to the other players ribmed. She was surprised to distort her teammate Lexie Hull a glass during the three -point competition. She appeared, on several occasions, on the live flow of seventy-two hilarious and hilarious of the so-called Stud Budz, animated by two players from Minnesota Lynx, Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman, who came to the All-Star game with matching and immaculate and immaculate pink hair, chaotic energy. “I was streaming [Stud Budz] All night last night, ”said Clark, gushing like a groupie.
The irony is that Clark’s injury offered a chance to see what the league might look like in the mixture rather than its center. An agent told me once on the way she spent an evening during a weekend of the WNBA All-Star years ago in little-frequented cocktails, before going to a hotel room and listening to some of the greatest players of all time of commercial war on the unworthiness of being a woman in professional sports, because there was nothing else to do. This time, Diplo played at an exclusive party funded by sponsor, and the players closed the clubs. Stud Budz has become viral. And part of the chatter brought to Bueckers launching his relationship with his former teammate from Uconn Azzi Fudd.
It was not at all surprising that Bueckers was the n ° 1 choice of the WNBA draft this year. She had been presented as one since she was in high school. But she did not take the path that someone expected. It was an arduous rise in his second major knee surgery at the court, and from there to the national championship this season, during which the ruthlessly effective UCONN team dismantled the South Carolina to win the twelfth title of the school. Recovered in a Dallas Wings team Monday, and despite several games with a concussion, Bueckers immediately emerged as a leader, and Tuesday equaled Clark for having reached three hundred points and a hundred assists in the least games. I thought of something she had said before her last season in Connecticut, when she was asked about the replacement of Clark as the main attraction of female university basketball. “I hope honestly next year, I’m not the focal point and the only person attracting attention,” she replied. “I hope that as a media, as players, we can spread love a little more.” The players did their part during the stars weekend, and not only because they stood together, but because they seemed to have fun doing it. ♦
