{"id":948840,"date":"2026-10-28T02:12:10","date_gmt":"2026-10-28T02:12:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/948840\/"},"modified":"2026-10-28T02:12:10","modified_gmt":"2026-10-28T02:12:10","slug":"madeline-hill-charlotte-wilder-lament-embarrassing-wnba-finals-schedule","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/948840\/","title":{"rendered":"Madeline Hill, Charlotte Wilder lament ’embarrassing’ WNBA Finals schedule"},"content":{"rendered":"

Game 6 of the WNBA Finals will be played Thursday at 12:30 p.m. ET in Atlanta after the NBA and WNBA negotiated a solution to play the game at State Farm Arena ahead of a scheduled Atlanta Hawks regular season matchup.<\/p>\n

The WNBA is the target of yet another wave of ridicule, as the league could crown a champion before west-coasters are finished with breakfast<\/a>. At the root of the mess is the reality that Atlanta Dream management clearly did not account for the possibility of their own team making the Finals.<\/p>\n

In the latest episode<\/a> of\u00a0The Sports Gossip Show, hosts Madeline Hill and Charlotte Wilder lamented the \u201cdeeply embarrassing\u201d situation and explained how it is emblematic of how women are so often treated in sports.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it speaks to something that a lot of women are all too familiar with, which is \u2026 companies not taking you as seriously as they would if you were a man,\u201d Wilder said.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis would never happen to the Hawks. And I understand that there are also different considerations when it comes to who operates a venue, how these things work. This is squarely on the Dream and the WNBA for not making sure this wouldn\u2019t be a problem, and having to scramble now. It\u2019s deeply embarrassing, and it\u2019s what you deal with especially as women in sports. Because you feel crazy. Like, this is the WNBA Finals.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Hill highlighted how Dream players were treated as an \u201cafterthought\u201d by their own team and league, arguing that even the worst NBA team would never be caught unprepared in this way. Women in sports, Hill said, are not given the \u201clatitude\u201d to have backup plans and be supported with guaranteed resources.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt every turn, there\u2019s some obstacle that you\u2019re going to face and you don\u2019t even know what it is yet,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd the obstacle was actually from, if we\u2019re talking about time, rewinding in time, back when your employer just didn\u2019t believe that you wouldn\u2019t make it to the Finals so it was clearly an afterthought.\u201d<\/p>\n

Even in a season of continued viewership growth and a Finals that is surpassing expectations<\/a>, the Dream are being reduced to a laughingstock in the sports news cycle because of a lack of foresight.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s women not being taken seriously and not given the same legitimacy and airtime that the men would get in this situation,\u201d Hill added. \u201cI just guarantee you that if you go in the room where the Hawks were having their scheduling conversation, they have blocked off the NBA Finals.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWomen are not given that same latitude, and I\u2019m sorry but they are just not treated the same way. And this is what happens.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a more positive note, the NBA and WNBA were able to work out solutions for earlier games in the series despite the fact that the Dream are not part of the Hawks ownership group and are lesser tenants of State Farm Arena. Next season, all Dream games will be played in the larger building.<\/p>\n

While these sorts of scheduling conflicts have been common in the WNBA\u2019s history, Wilder expressed optimism that the situation can be a \u201cturning point\u201d for the league as it realizes the need to prioritize fan access across its entire calendar.<\/p>\n

\u201cHopefully all of these things and all of the noise that became the sort of political, culture war garbage surrounding the W from people acting in bad faith, I hope that this can become more of a turning point,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Game 6 of the WNBA Finals will be played Thursday at 12:30 p.m. ET in Atlanta after the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":948841,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[322462,732,49,48,324687,324688,82,148543,630],"class_list":["post-948840","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-2026-wnba-finals","tag-atlanta-dream","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-charlotte-wilder","tag-madeline-hill","tag-sports","tag-the-sports-gossip-show","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948840","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=948840"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/948840\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/948841"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=948840"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=948840"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=948840"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}