predicted the league will soon move to 50 games<\/a> while pushing back on Simmons\u2019 insistence that the calendar change.<\/p>\n\u201cThe question is do we want to go into November and and crossover with the NBA and college basketball?\u201d Engelbert said. \u201cPeople don\u2019t understand, there\u2019s not much you can do on the front end because we love the college draft, we love the rookies.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo we\u2019ll look at the back end and how far can we go and how many NFL and college football Saturdays can we go into and we\u2019ll evaluate all that under the CBA.\u201d<\/p>\n
The WNBA schedule is brutal on rookies, but there\u2019s no reason it couldn\u2019t change. There\u2019s no fighting March Madness and the academic calendar. But this year, Paige Bueckers was drafted eight days after she won a national title with Connecticut. After that, she got just more than a month before Opening Night. Typically NBA teams report to camp about three weeks before their first regular-season game. That feels like a place to shave a week, with the season starting the second Friday in May.<\/p>\n
Start with the 118-day structure this year, running from May 16 to Sept. 11. Bump up to 50 games in that same span and teams still get 2.4 days between games, still more than the NBA gets. If the season instead started May 8 (the second Friday in May), it would end Thursday, Sept. 3. But ideally, the goal would be to have the W\u2019s typical Sunday postseason tipoff air the week before the NFL season begins.<\/p>\n
If the W crunched the season down to 111 days, it would have 2.2 days between games \u2014 still more than the NBA. Then, the league would get that Sunday to itself across its network partners like ABC, CBS and NBC before having to tackle the football beast.<\/p>\n
New broadcast partners at NBC and Prime Video will pose further challenges. Neither has announced its schedule, but it stands to reason that they could book games on Monday and Thursday nights, respectively, once the NBA season ends. That would give the league a desirable yet limiting problem of having national broadcast partners for every day of the week besides Tuesday. This type of careful scheduling is particularly important in the fall, when the biggest WNBA games are going up against football. The W should aim to have as many playoff games as possible on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday. Too often, ESPN likes to use the WNBA playoffs as football counter-programming. The league clearly has the leverage to push back on that to maximize its own reach.<\/p>\n
Catering to these windows and nationalizing the sport would keep the broadcasters happy but likely result in more of the scheduling quirks that Sabally called out. This is what most leagues face as they grow and answer to more overlords.<\/p>\n
The far bigger issues for WNBA players is the overall physical toll of the year. Many still play overseas in the winter and spring to supplement their income; the newly formed Unrivaled league requires less travel and fewer games but still doesn\u2019t qualify as \u201crest.\u201d Meanwhile, many teams still do not run their own training facilities. Rosters are limited to 12 players and there is a hard cap, making it perilously difficult to put a team on the court some nights. All this, more than the schedule, is a failure of the WNBA to keep its players healthy and at top speed all summer.<\/p>\n
Every league plays too many games. Yet none of them cut back. The NFL, stuck at 16 for decades, is suddenly marching toward 18 \u2014 and international travel for every team. Perhaps a schedule reduction is a card to be played at some point as pitchers keep blowing out their UCLs and NBA players\u2019 Achilles\u2019 go to mush. But that is not where the WNBA is.<\/p>\n
In fact, the WNBA is barely tapping into its potential as a national marquee sports product. The coming broadcast deal and CBA will show how popular it can really be. While that growth occurs, Sabally and her fellow players will have to deal with a schedule that is, despite its flaws,\u00a0still heavier on rest than the NBA while managing to bake in May rest for rookies and a weeklong All-Star game plus a stretched-out postseason.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, the Phoenix Mercury played a back-to-back in Las Vegas and San Francisco. These are rare in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":100521,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,11628,4659,82,630],"class_list":{"0":"post-100520","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-cathy-engelbert","11":"tag-satou-sabally","12":"tag-sports","13":"tag-wnba"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100520","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100520"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100520\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/100521"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100520"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100520"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100520"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}