bape_lovers wrote:if Canada has a team, definitely would watch
Toronto would be a perfect market for the WNBA. I remember an ownership group tried to form and they marketed they were going to bring Toronto a team, but it ended up not being a thing.
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bape_lovers wrote:if Canada has a team, definitely would watch
jamaalstar21 wrote:bape_lovers wrote:if Canada has a team, definitely would watch
Toronto would be a perfect market for the WNBA. I remember an ownership group tried to form and they marketed they were going to bring Toronto a team, but it ended up not being a thing.
Doctor MJ wrote:jamaalstar21 wrote:bape_lovers wrote:if Canada has a team, definitely would watch
Toronto would be a perfect market for the WNBA. I remember an ownership group tried to form and they marketed they were going to bring Toronto a team, but it ended up not being a thing.
Needs to happen now. With the WNBA's momentum, they should be looking for a couple expansion locations, and given how Toronto has proven to be super-die hard as a fanbase, they should be at the top of the list.
zike_42 wrote:There are not enough teams in the league right now. The #8 pick of the most recent draft (Shyla Heal) was cut because Chicago and Dallas didn't have enough room to give a rookie time to grow and make mistakes. Imagine if four games into his career, the Knicks waived Obi Toppin. Madness. There just aren't enough roster spots and the WNBA needs to expand.
jokeboy86 wrote:zike_42 wrote:There are not enough teams in the league right now. The #8 pick of the most recent draft (Shyla Heal) was cut because Chicago and Dallas didn't have enough room to give a rookie time to grow and make mistakes. Imagine if four games into his career, the Knicks waived Obi Toppin. Madness. There just aren't enough roster spots and the WNBA needs to expand.
They cant add anymore teams. Though the league is doing better it’s still debatable whether the league or any of its teams are profitable. At this point I think the NBA and its TV partners are a hindrance to the WNBA because its existence is never in doubt no matter how bad things get and sometimes in business, desperation and fighting to survive can lead to inventiveness(can also lead to bankruptcy too) To me the sports market is oversaturated and though I like watching the WNBA its not priority television over other sports for me. At this point I simply don't know what more the league can do to grow their audience because they’ve tried everything. They’ve changed playoff formats, they switched the time of year for the season, they’ve had transcendent college stars
they’ve heavily marketed.
The only thing they havent had is a star who’s takes the Rousey/Carano/Kournikova route and openly tries to crossover to a mainstream audience and is willing to overuse their looks to get that attention. Now this will never happen because that’s an outdated male-centric image of what a female athlete should be and something that would be heavily criticised
shangrila wrote:I think Expansion talk is putting the cart before the horse.
Get what you have now in a sustainable place before trying to do more.
Doctor MJ wrote:bisme37 wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:I watched! I feel like there's a lot of positive momentum with the WNBA now. I think the Bubble phenomenon and all that went with it actually ended up giving the WNBA a boost despite the fact that I wasn't following the specifics last year.
Also glad people haven't gone negative yet. Hate that it's so common. Completely fine to prefer the men's game for obvious reasons, but if you really love the thinking that goes into basketball skill and strategy development, there's plenty to appreciate. Even when I feel like the WNBA is needlessly behind the curve with regards to NBA strategy, I find that interesting because it allows me to apply what I've learned in one sphere to diagnose what's going on in the other.
Yeah I've noticed that too, it's almost like the WNBA is 10 or so years behind on style of play. Most WNBA teams play more in the paint and shoot way fewer 3s than NBA teams. But I can't decide if it's a matter of their league is still evolving or if it's just a matter of there are a ton of really good bigs in the WNBA right now and it makes sense to play through them. Jonquel Jones, Candace Parker, Aja Wilson, Liz Cambage, Delle Donne, Brianna Stewart etc etc are all MVP level players and they are all bigs (4s or 5s).
In any case I think a lot of the NBA fans who pine for the olden days of the league would actually like WNBA if they gave it a chance.
So, it's interesting, people in the WNBA will specifically note the contrast with the NBA when it comes to relying on post offense and kind of shrug with a "things are just different for some reason"...but what I see when I look at +/- data is much of what I used to see in the NBA: Things not working as well as people think they are.
Tina Charles is the most salient example of this. She'll probably get some MVP votes on the back of her scoring so much, but it wasn't creating massive life to offensive effectiveness. We can point to similar things with Sylvia Fowles, Candace Parker, etc. The WNBA's in this weird position where they can acknowledge Taurasi is the best scorer of all-time and how much she fits with current NBA trends, but many teams are still convinced that the retrograde path is serving them best.
I'm leaving out Jones, Delle Donne & Stewart because they are excellent shooters who just happen to be "big" sized in the WNBA.
I'm leaving out Wilson & Cambage because I want to see how they play out in the playoffs. That's basically the ultimate power lineup and they are clearly a title contender with it, but there is clearly redundancy to the fit there.
Doctor MJ wrote:shangrila wrote:I think Expansion talk is putting the cart before the horse.
Get what you have now in a sustainable place before trying to do more.
What’s the horse?
What specific threshold are you looking to see crossed before you see expansion as a wise action?
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shangrila wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:shangrila wrote:I think Expansion talk is putting the cart before the horse.
Get what you have now in a sustainable place before trying to do more.
What’s the horse?
What specific threshold are you looking to see crossed before you see expansion as a wise action?
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
When individual teams are financially viable?
When the league itself doesn't require subsidies from the NBA?
When the viewership numbers people are posting are sustained for, at minimum, an entire season, rather than a couple of weeks?
When they can afford to have their brawls inside the stadium rather than at the food truck outside?
I don't know. I get that people want it to do well. I personally don't care either way, but that means I certainly don't want them to fail. That said, they get their first glimmer of hope in, what, their entire history and people are suddenly talking about expansion? It's too soon and saying that isn't some indictment on the product.
When the viewership numbers people are posting are sustained for, at minimum, an entire season, rather than a couple of weeks?
Doctor MJ wrote:jamaalstar21 wrote:bape_lovers wrote:if Canada has a team, definitely would watch
Toronto would be a perfect market for the WNBA. I remember an ownership group tried to form and they marketed they were going to bring Toronto a team, but it ended up not being a thing.
Needs to happen now. With the WNBA's momentum, they should be looking for a couple expansion locations, and given how Toronto has proven to be super-die hard as a fanbase, they should be at the top of the list.
bisme37 wrote:So uhh I guess my pick of Connecticut winning the title didn't exactly work out.
Doctor MJ wrote:bisme37 wrote:So uhh I guess my pick of Connecticut winning the title didn't exactly work out.
Amazing how quick things can turn around, eh?
We'll see it how it all plays out, but I'm reluctant to say that this Chicago team is now a juggernaut. While I understand that the addition of Parker makes the Sky sound like a super-team, they still don't look like one to me. Feels to me more like the Sun's regular season dominance didn't translate to the playoffs like you'd hope and expect.
5paceman wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:bisme37 wrote:
Yeah I've noticed that too, it's almost like the WNBA is 10 or so years behind on style of play. Most WNBA teams play more in the paint and shoot way fewer 3s than NBA teams. But I can't decide if it's a matter of their league is still evolving or if it's just a matter of there are a ton of really good bigs in the WNBA right now and it makes sense to play through them. Jonquel Jones, Candace Parker, Aja Wilson, Liz Cambage, Delle Donne, Brianna Stewart etc etc are all MVP level players and they are all bigs (4s or 5s).
In any case I think a lot of the NBA fans who pine for the olden days of the league would actually like WNBA if they gave it a chance.
So, it's interesting, people in the WNBA will specifically note the contrast with the NBA when it comes to relying on post offense and kind of shrug with a "things are just different for some reason"...but what I see when I look at +/- data is much of what I used to see in the NBA: Things not working as well as people think they are.
Tina Charles is the most salient example of this. She'll probably get some MVP votes on the back of her scoring so much, but it wasn't creating massive life to offensive effectiveness. We can point to similar things with Sylvia Fowles, Candace Parker, etc. The WNBA's in this weird position where they can acknowledge Taurasi is the best scorer of all-time and how much she fits with current NBA trends, but many teams are still convinced that the retrograde path is serving them best.
I'm leaving out Jones, Delle Donne & Stewart because they are excellent shooters who just happen to be "big" sized in the WNBA.
I'm leaving out Wilson & Cambage because I want to see how they play out in the playoffs. That's basically the ultimate power lineup and they are clearly a title contender with it, but there is clearly redundancy to the fit there.
I think there is more value going into the post in WNBA vs NBA. A center can do work without virtually every player on the court being a 6'7+ super athlete. With the offenses and ball movement, you might have said the NBA was previously behind the WNBA.
bisme37 wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:bisme37 wrote:So uhh I guess my pick of Connecticut winning the title didn't exactly work out.
Amazing how quick things can turn around, eh?
We'll see it how it all plays out, but I'm reluctant to say that this Chicago team is now a juggernaut. While I understand that the addition of Parker makes the Sky sound like a super-team, they still don't look like one to me. Feels to me more like the Sun's regular season dominance didn't translate to the playoffs like you'd hope and expect.
It's hard to evaluate the Sun now. I saw them as the dominant team they were in the RS but they didn't even win a playoff series. Got to the semifinals simply because of getting byes in the first two rounds. So who knows what this team really was?
Doctor MJ wrote:5paceman wrote:Doctor MJ wrote:
So, it's interesting, people in the WNBA will specifically note the contrast with the NBA when it comes to relying on post offense and kind of shrug with a "things are just different for some reason"...but what I see when I look at +/- data is much of what I used to see in the NBA: Things not working as well as people think they are.
Tina Charles is the most salient example of this. She'll probably get some MVP votes on the back of her scoring so much, but it wasn't creating massive life to offensive effectiveness. We can point to similar things with Sylvia Fowles, Candace Parker, etc. The WNBA's in this weird position where they can acknowledge Taurasi is the best scorer of all-time and how much she fits with current NBA trends, but many teams are still convinced that the retrograde path is serving them best.
I'm leaving out Jones, Delle Donne & Stewart because they are excellent shooters who just happen to be "big" sized in the WNBA.
I'm leaving out Wilson & Cambage because I want to see how they play out in the playoffs. That's basically the ultimate power lineup and they are clearly a title contender with it, but there is clearly redundancy to the fit there.
I think there is more value going into the post in WNBA vs NBA. A center can do work without virtually every player on the court being a 6'7+ super athlete. With the offenses and ball movement, you might have said the NBA was previously behind the WNBA.
I think there's some truth in what you say about essentially the geometry of women's basketball on a 10 foot hoop compared to men's basketball, but I also see evidence that they are overestimating the effectiveness of post offense in ways that remind me of where we were with the NBA not too long ago.
Re: "With the offenses and ball movement, you might have said the NBA was previously behind the WNBA." Interesting thing to discuss.
I think what I'd say is that I think the WNBA has always been more egalitarian in its shot allocation than the NBA, and when I see really great passing teams like the Maya Moore Lynx or the Taurasi-Taylor Mercury, I'm struck by the fact that players like Moore & Taurasi are more well rounded than your typical A-list NBA player.
I'm cautious though about saying the WNBA was ever developmentally ahead of the NBA in terms of tactic refinement. The closest thing that comes to mind for me was that Cynthia Cooper was essentially a 2010s type of superstar back in the '90s at a time when no one really like her existed in the NBA. However, that wasn't a league-wide thing, that was Cooper coming back from Europe where 3-point shooting was more advanced than in the US, and as a result just burning through the WNBA that wasn't remotely prepared for someone like that.
(Tangent: People sometimes bring up about Cooper "Yeah but she wasn't even the best player on USC", not realizing that back in her USC days there was no 3-point line in women's college basketball. The reason why Cooper went so under the radar for so long in the US - never allowed to be the focal point of the US Olympic teams - is because they were still largely thinking like it was still 1984 until Cooper shocked the WNBA becoming by far the best player despite not even being classified as a franchise cornerstone initially.)