{"id":264565,"date":"2025-11-01T08:28:22","date_gmt":"2025-11-01T08:28:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/264565\/"},"modified":"2025-11-01T08:28:22","modified_gmt":"2025-11-01T08:28:22","slug":"womens-basketball-needs-all-the-stars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/264565\/","title":{"rendered":"Women\u2019s Basketball Needs All the Stars"},"content":{"rendered":"

It was not so long ago that Paige Bueckers represented the future of women\u2019s basketball. In 2020, she was the top recruit in a class that included Caitlin Clark<\/a>, Angel Reese<\/a>, Cameron Brink, and Kamilla Cardoso. As a true freshman, at the University of Connecticut, she showed preternatural poise and projected a sense of inevitability. She could slip her willowy frame through traffic, and finish at the rim. She had exceptional skill in the midrange, and shot over forty per cent from beyond the three-point arc. She was an adept passer and an above-average defender, and had an instinct for clutch moments. In a 63\u201359 overtime win over the No. 1 University of South Carolina, she had thirty-one points, six steals, and five assists\u2014and scored her team\u2019s final thirteen points, a stretch in which she missed only one shot, when she was fouled. (She sank the free throws.) She was the undisputed national player of the year that season, and led UConn to the Final Four, crushing Clark\u2019s University of Iowa team along the way.<\/p>\n

Bueckers\u2019s appeal was easy to see, on and off the court\u2014the smoothness of her game, and the loveliness of her personality, an attractive blend of confidence and guilelessness. She seemed to be the latest in a long lineage of great players out of UConn, the next step in the game\u2019s evolution, and the one who would take the sport to the level that many believed it could reach. She had the potential to break through into popular culture. New \u201cname, imagine, and likeness\u201d rules for N.C.A.A. athletes meant that she stood to capitalize financially in a way that no female basketball player had yet been able to. In 2021, she signed with one of the biggest sports agencies, became the first college athlete to ink a deal with Gatorade, and filed a trademark for her nickname, Paige Buckets. It was reported at the time that she could make a million dollars in endorsements.<\/p>\n

It was not lost on her that she benefitted from being white, and white in a way that appealed to advertisers\u2014a loose, lanky frame, long blond hair, and alabaster skin. But she accepted the premise, which you often hear from those around the W.N.B.A., that to be a woman in basketball was to be an activist for social justice, and she talked about redirecting the spotlight and using her platform to raise the profile of all the Black women in basketball who had long been overlooked. \u201cThey don\u2019t get the media coverage that they deserve,\u201d she said at the ESPY Awards in 2021, in her acceptance speech for Best College Athlete in Women\u2019s Sports. \u201cThey\u2019ve given so much to this sport and the community and society as a whole, and their value is undeniable.\u201d Six months later, she fractured her knee and tore her meniscus, and, after getting surgery to repair the injuries, was sidelined for two months. UConn tumbled out of the Top Ten for the first time since 2005. Then, before the 2022-23 season, she tore her A.C.L. The spotlight shifted abruptly away from Bueckers, away from the team, and the narrative around the ascendence of women\u2019s basketball<\/a> changed with the stunning spontaneity of one of Caitlin Clark\u2019s half-court shots.<\/p>\n

How much does a single player matter to the future of a team sport? That question loomed over the W.N.B.A. All-Star Game earlier this month. On the one hand, the event showcased the league\u2019s growth, or \u201chypergrowth,\u201d as the commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, put it. Joe and Clara Tsai, who had reportedly bought the New York Liberty for something like ten million dollars a few years ago, had recently sold a stake in the team at a valuation of four hundred and fifty million. Fees for expansion teams are set at two hundred and fifty million, and the league can\u2019t keep pace with the number of investors eager to establish new franchises. A television deal worth $2.2 billion is about to go into effect. The All-Star Game averaged 2.2 million viewers, a hundred-and-fifty-eight-per-cent increase over 2023, the second-largest audience ever for the event. On the other hand, that number was more than a million less than the game\u2019s viewership last season, when Clark had been on the floor. This time around, Clark was captaining her team from the sidelines, and critics of the league seemed eager to point out the precipitous drop in ratings. It might not have just been the critics, either. In his Substack<\/a>, the sportswriter Ethan Strauss pointed out that publications with deep N.B.A. sources have been running stories about how audiences shrink when Clark sits.<\/p>\n

The context for all this is the ongoing negotiations over the league\u2019s collective-bargaining agreement, which expires at the end of October. Before the All-Star Game, all the players, including Clark, walked onto the court wearing T-shirts that read \u201cPay Us What You Owe Us.\u201d Clark makes $78,066 in salary from the Indiana Fever this season. Everyone agrees that she is worth more\u2014many millions more\u2014to the W.N.B.A. than that, but just how much the players collectively deserve is harder to determine. Less than ten per cent of the W.N.B.A.\u2019s annual revenue goes to player salaries. In the N.B.A., by contrast, around half the league\u2019s revenues go to its players. \u201cWe\u2019re not asking for the same salaries as the men,\u201d Minnesota\u2019s Napheesa Collier, the reigning All-Star M.V.P., said in an interview<\/a> in March. \u201cWe\u2019re asking for the same revenue shares. And that\u2019s where the big difference is.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0. We\u2019re asking for the same cut of the pie.\u201d But the W.N.B.A. has a unique ownership structure, in which the N.B.A. has a forty-two-per-cent stake, and it\u2019s not always clear what the revenues actually are, or how N.B.A. teams that also own W.N.B.A. teams apportion resources. Leagues often obfuscate finances during labor negotiations, but, in the case of the W.N.B.A., the numbers are particularly difficult to understand. That $2.2-billion media-rights deal, for instance, is hardly a clean figure: the two leagues\u2019 media rights were bundled together, and N.B.A. owners decided how much of their seventy-seven-billion-dollar media-rights deal should flow to the W. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin, who had been tasked by the Women\u2019s National Basketball Players Association to analyze the league\u2019s finances for salary negotiations, recently wrote a Times opinion piece<\/a> titled \u201cHow Underpaid Are W.N.B.A. Players? It\u2019s Embarrassing.\u201d It is not in the league\u2019s interest to agree, of course.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It was not so long ago that Paige Bueckers represented the future of women\u2019s basketball. In 2020, she…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":264566,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[7425,402,142263,14934,99,50610,434],"class_list":["post-264565","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-athletes","tag-basketball","tag-n-c-a-a","tag-salary","tag-sports","tag-w-n-b-a","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264565","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=264565"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/264565\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/264566"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=264565"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=264565"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=264565"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}