WNBA thread… 28.5 ain’t your pay cut

What amuses me about Doyel's eff up is, if you follow his Twitter feed at all, he's egregiously left-leaning so you'd think not being a pervy meathead to Clark would be a no-brainer.

 

What a change in fortune for a franchise that was playing at the fairgrounds coliseum just a few years ago.

 

They are going to draw more than 8,000

Tickets to Caitlin Clark’s Indiana Fever debut more than double NBA playoff courtside seats

 

In 2024, the A's are drawing 6,000.
2024 MLB Attendance - Major League Baseball - ESPN

A's 2023 attendance of 10,000 a game is referred to as "the good ol' days".

 

That’s a little bit of an anomaly given the shitstorm that engulfed Oakland, isn’t it?

I mean, the historically shitty sports town of Miami is second-lowest, but it’s consistently drawing 14,000-plus to see the Marlins.

 

Doyel is more likely to get a pat on the back than a firing for that performance.

How much attention, and most importantly how many page views, do you think he brought to the Star yesterday alone, and will in the future, based on people wanting to see what he writes and does next?

 

Good for Clark and good for women’s basketball if the attendance skyrockets.

I’ve always enjoyed watching the Mystics, and I’ve been following Elena Delle Donne since she was in high school.

But the Mystics can still barely fill a 4,000-seat arena most days, and that was when Delle Donne, arguably the best player in the game, was still active and they were the best team in the league.

 

The slashed budget A's being horribly run, producing a shitty product on the cheap is not an anomaly. It's pretty much their 21st century DNA.

It's a feature, not a bug.

 

The lame duck aspect is certainly an anomaly.

 

Right, but if you’re plotting when is the best time to play your sports league, you’re looking to avoid the major gravitational events, the ones that suck up all the nation’s attention. Baseball, at this point, is so far from controlling the national narrative that it is not something that WNBA execs need to be wary of. Sure, more people watch it, but not enough "more people" that WNBA can't find a healthy audience in what's leftover. Summer itself — longer days, vacations, etc. — is a greater issue, but presumably still preferable to going head-to-head against the NFL or other basketball leagues. No one's claiming the WNBA is about to rival the NFL in popularity, just that the steady growth in relevance it has seen in the last five years will get an even more significant boost from Clark and this class of draftees.