While hoping that the NCAA Tournament begins to offer more buzzer beaters than blowouts, catch up on the latest buzz about the business of women’s basketball:
Where’s the WNBPA’s publicity strategy?
In his Wednesday basketball newsletter for The IX, Howard Megdal dropped of number of newsy nuggets relevant to the business of women’s basketball, including thoughts about the ongoing CBA negotiations between the WNBA and WNBPA.
Megdal made a point worth amplifying, especially for the those of us sympathetic to the players’ bargaining position. The WNBA’s new media rights deal, announced to much fanfare last fall, is eight times richer than the league’s previous deal. Megdal posits this data point makes for an easily-digestible public argument for the players, writing:
So how every WNBA player in the world isn’t saying on every single podcast, “We’re not asking for NBA money, we just want eight times what we got last time, since that’s the growth in media rights” is utterly perplexing to me. How is that not the starting point for public posturing?
As Megdal notes, the financials are not that simple, but, if players want public opinion on their side, especially as nefarious online actors aim to intentionally misconstrue the statements of Angel Reese…
