Politics

The 2024 WNBA season may have been the best ever. Now for the playoffs.

Published

2 years ago

November 12, 2024

The 2024 WNBA season may have been the best ever. Now for the playoffs.

UPDATE (Sept. 22, 2024 10:45 a.m. E.T.): The WNBA announced Sunday that A’ja Wilson was the unanimous choice for league MVP.

When she was interviewed on CNBC’s “Power Lunch” on Sept. 9, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert was asked about racist and homophobic bullying from different players’ fan bases and gave an answer that was insufficiently empathetic and filled with corporate jargon. Her response upset players and fans in that it didn’t seem to sufficiently condemn the bullying or stand up for the league’s players.

And to be clear, they care for reasons other than the exciting play of rookie phenoms Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese.

While she didn’t adequately answer the question about a topic that affects the well-being and safety of the WNBA’s players and has since apologized for not doing so, there’s no denying the truth in something Engelbert did say in that interview: “There’s no more apathy,” she said about the WNBA. “Everybody cares.”

And to be clear, they care for reasons other than the exciting play of rookie phenoms Caitlin Clark and Angel Reesethe subjects of so many headlines this WNBA season. This season wasn’t just about the league’s future but also about its exciting present and its iconic past. And the WNBA playoffs, which tip off Sunday, will make that clear.

A’ja Wilsonwho plays center for the back-to-back champion Las Vegas Acesput together one of the most dominant seasons in league history, becoming the first WNBA player to reach 1,000 points in a full season and putting up the best numbers of her career, averaging 26.9 points per game, 11.9 rebounds, 2.6 blocks, 1.8 steals and 2.3 assists. This season might be the last we see of Diana Taurasi, the league’s all-time leading scorer.

The New York Liberty, the only original franchise without a title, is still looking to win one. The Connecticut Sun, which has been in two of the last five WNBA finals, is also still looking for its first championship. The Minnesota Lynx is a team that few predicted would be in the running for a WNBA championship, and the team will begin the postseason with the No. 2 overall seed. And despite underperforming during the regular season and forcing Wilson to take on a much heavier load, the Aces are entering the playoffs hoping to three-peat.

To Engelbert’s point about there being no more apathy, this season, six teams recorded an average attendance of more than 10,000 fans per game, which hadn’t been done since the league’s second seasonin 1998. ESPN reported that the 2024 WNBA regular season has been the most viewed regular season on its family of networks, which includes ESPN2 and ABC, since the network televised games during the league’s inception in 1997. The ION Network, which began showing WNBA regular-season games in 2023, reported on Thursday that the league doubled its viewership on the network this season and aggregated 23.72 million total viewers.

Engelbert also announced two new expansion franchises for the WNBA, one in Toronto and the other in Portland, Oregon. The ownership group that will oversee the Portland team paid a $125 million fee for the team. Compare that to the $10-14 million Joe and Clara Wu Tsai spent in 2019 to buy the New York Liberty, an original WNBA franchise. The Portland ownership duo of Alex Bhathal and Lisa Bhathal Merage are paying around 8 to 10 times more.

In addition to who will win the 2024 WNBA championship, there’s so much more to look forward to before these playoffs end. Will Wilson, a shoo-in to win her third MVP award, be the unanimous pick of the members of the media who vote for the award? The only time that’s ever happened was in the league’s inaugural season in 1997, when the award was granted to Cynthia Cooper-Dyke.

Is this it for the 42-year-old Taurasi? The Phoenix Mercury, with its social media posts titled “If This Is It,” is encouraging us to think so, even as Taurasi says “I don’t know.” She said, “The last couple of weeks have been a little nerve-racking for myself. I don’t want to make any emotional, rash decisions. I know the end is near. When that is, I don’t know.”

Will Wilson, a shoo-in to win her third MVP award, be the unanimous pick of the members of the media who vote for the award?

On Thursday afternoon, the team posted photos of the free T-shirt fans received at the Mercury’s final regular-season home game. The front features a silhouette of Taurasi with text calling her the greatest of all time, and on the reverse is a long letter to the WNBA legend thanking her for 20 seasons of stellar WNBA play. Taurasi’s family, friends and former coaches were all in attendance on Thursday night to watch her be celebrated by her home crowd for potentially the last time.

The 2024 WNBA season has given us a long list of compelling storylines, people and teams to root for and against. This has always been the case throughout the league’s history, but the issue was the lack of mainstream attention. In the past, networks have refused to put these games of meaning and consequence on television because of a bias that the casual sports fan doesn’t want to watch women’s sports.

The executives at the top of the league who preceded Engelbert didn’t try hard enough to alter those biases.

The dual phenomenon that is both Clark and Reese took the WNBA’s exponential growth in recent years to new heights. Clark led the league in assists this year with 8.4 per game, as did Reese in rebounds, with 13.1 per game. Both rookies broke records. Clark broke the rookie season scoring recordand Reese set the record for the most consecutive double-doubles.

Clark’s Indiana Fever averaged 17,035 fans per home game this season, the highest attendance average across the league. Reese has expanded her personal brand and helped expand the WNBA’s. She partnered with well-known brands like Reese’s candy and Reebok, launched her own weekly podcast and even appeared in a commercial promoting the highly anticipated movie musical “Wicked.” She and Clark are expected to be honored as members of the WNBA’s All-Rookie team, with Clark most likely to earn the rookie of the year honors.

And while there’s been a lot said about how veteran WNBA players have responded to the attention Clark and Reese have attractedthere’s an understanding that the exposure and sometimes uninformed hot takes serve a purpose.

“I think that is a sign of growth,” Lynx star Napheesa Collier told me on Sept. 16. “And having all these controversies, while sometimes obviously it’s really frustrating, it gets people talking … and you need people discussing what’s going on. So for better or worse, and what they’re talking about, I think it’s great for the game overall.”

But don’t forget there’s still work to do, including making sure games of consequence during the final week of the regular season are shown on national television, the league continues to find ways to protect its players from online harassmentthat 50-50 revenue sharing becomes a reality rather than a targetand so much more.

If anything, this season was a glorious rebuke to all the haters who claim that nobody cares about the WNBA.

Jackie Powell

Jackie Powell has covered women’s basketball since 2019, including college basketball, WNBA and international and high school prospects. Her work has appeared in Bleacher Report, Yahoo Sports, The Next, Sports Illustrated, Hartford Courant, SLAM, Harper’s Bazaar, and she hosts the Locked on Women’s Basketball podcast every other week. She also is a Lady Gaga stan, a connoisseur of pop music and a mental health advocate.

Politics

World Cup fuels ticketing reform demands

Published

9 hours ago

June 21, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Demands are growing for a political reckoning over ticket scams at the World Cup — and beyond.

The National Independent Venue Association and Fan Alliance, organizations representing and advocating for entertainment venues and artists respectively, sent a joint letter to Congress on Thursday, calling on lawmakers to ban speculative and ghost tickets, cases where resellers flog tickets they don’t actually have.

The letter — addressed to Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer — includes nearly two dozen accounts of fans who say they were scammed out of thousands of dollars trying to get tickets to the World Cup, which began last week. The groups are also asking fans to share their own stories with elected officials via the Fix the Tix Fan Action Center that launched last week.

“Every one of these stories erodes the public’s faith that consumers should and will be protected from fraud,” NIVA Executive Director Stephen Parker and Fan Alliance founder Donald Cohen wrote. “We urge Congress to work with us to prevent fraud like this in the future and finally enact ticket resale consumer protections that will protect Americans and ensure affordability.”

The letter flagged fans like Dacy Gillespie, who bought World Cup tickets for her sons on Christmas, only to learn on match day — months later — that the seller couldn’t deliver them. And Skylie Shore, who Parker and Cohen said spent well over $6,000 on tickets to the Scotland-Haiti match on June 13, but was forced to wait outside the stadium because she couldn’t access them as fans marched in on gameday.

“These examples reveal a consistent pattern: consumer deception, speculative ticket sales, and broken-hearted American families at the hands of resale ticketing companies like StubHub,” Parker and Cohen wrote.

In a statement, StubHub spokesperson Jack Sterne said that the platform does not allow speculative ticket sales, and blamed FIFA for users’ difficulty in accessing their tickets.

“We understand that attending the World Cup represents a significant investment in time and money, and we take our responsibility to every fan who books through our platform seriously,” Sterne said in a statement. “Many of the issues fans are facing trace back to the event organizer’s technology infrastructure, newly announced transfer restrictions, and a new app that was launched just a month ago.”

In response, FIFA said in a statement that the organization “can guarantee the validity and delivery of tickets purchased through its official platforms” and that FIFA.com/tickets “is the official ticket sales channel” for the tournament.

NIVA and Fan Alliance are urging congressional leadership to place universal price-gouging limits on ticket resale, enact stringent fines on perpetrators and a violation-reporting mechanism for ticket scams, and require secondary ticketing platforms to produce data on ticket fulfillment and consumer complaints.

The groups are not the only ones monitoring for evidence of shady ticket practices. Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway issued a consumer guidance in advance of the tournament, urging match-goers to beware of fraud and promising to hold offenders accountable. And the FBI in May put out a public service announcement, warning fans against purchasing tickets on copycat websites modeled on FIFA’s.

“With the World Cup coming to Kansas City, excitement is high and, unfortunately, so is the potential for fraud,” Hanaway said in her statement. “Missourians should be able to enjoy this once-in-a-generation event without fear of being deceived. My office will hold accountable anyone who seeks to exploit our families, and we stand ready to assist anyone who encounters suspicious activity.”