Pretending the WNBA is interesting is just a pretext to have more soap opera shit to create content around.
I don’t love the soap opera aspect of major sports to begin with, but at least there’s the logic of it being newsworthy because it involves athletes in a sport people care about.
This crap in the WNBA (with the help of ESPN and allies) is trying to reverse that. Invent and promote drama crap, and try to get people to pay attention to the league because of that.
I get that women’s sports were under reported. My problem is why pick a shitty one? I would make the argument that women’s tennis, golf, volleyball, and soccer would be far more competitive and engaging.
I think the problem is that the sports that Americans like to watch the most are severely degraded when it’s women playing.
Football dominates, and there is no direct equivalent.
Basketball is what we’re talking about here
Baseball is a distant third, has a real watch ability problem, and its equivalent is even less watchable
Hockey draws far fewer viewers and general interest than even baseball. However, it seems like the women may have a chance here. I don’t like watching regular hockey, so I can’t offer informed commentary on whether or not the women’s game is a good spectator sport..
Everything outside of that has a comparatively small amount of views, regardless of whether it’s men or women playing.
I would say women’s tennis is every bit as compelling to watch as the men’s game. I was stuck in a hospital room during Wimbledon, so that’s how I killed the time, and the women’s finals were way more interesting than the men’s semis that happened on the same day. Seems like golf would be the same thing.
The issue is that neither of those sports generates much viewership or sports talk chatter.
I get the argument for equal opportunity for kids to play sports. For me, it’s a bridge too far to extend that to be that we should be equally interested in watching pros of both genders play.