Powerful Women's Basketball Patron Shabtai Kalmanovich Killed

I suppose in Russia, the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Shabtai Kalmanovich, the owner of Russian Superleague team Spartak Moscow which has been the home of some of the biggest players in the WNBA in the off-season, might have been assassinated.

From the bad translation:

The investigation is considering the possibility that Kalmanovich killed in connection with his activities as president of basketball club.

What this means for Spartak Moscow and its staff - Janel McCarville (who landed in Spartak when CSKA folded), Sylvia Fowles, Diana Taurasi, and Coach Pokey Chatman - is not know. More news as we know it.

This article was written less than a year ago: it gives you an idea of just how powerful Shabtai Kalmanovich was, and why people might have wanted him dead.

Update: Sport.Ru confirms the death.

From Janel McCarville on Twitter:

@JanelMcCarville the world is one fucked up place, i cannot believe how low people will sink. the world lost someone great today.. it still hasnt sunk in!!!

Does Euroball Really Pay Better?

On RebKell, uptochallenge asked this question about European leagues:

I find it hard to believe that the average players in Turkey, Poland, Greece, Czech Republic and Armenia make more that they do in the WNBA. I have a friend with daughter who played in Poland last year and the last I heard she was having trouble getting paid. The SI article also noted that even the teams in Moscow play in front of crowds half the size of the WNBA. How can this work in the long term?

I wanted to write a long post about this that I've been putting off for a long time, but I'll just come up with the short version.

You see, there are 13 teams in the WNBA....and a similiar number of teams in Europe. If you look at each of the national leagues of Europe, you will find that the same teams dominate their national leagues over and over again.

Go to the Eurobasket Basketball Rankings for women, which rank all teams. It's going to be the same teams every year. Ros Casares is so loaded that it virtually is a WNBA team. Ekaterinburg is always going to be good. CSKA could always be counted on for a good team.

Once you get beyond a certain point, you find teams that just aren't competitive, the ones that can't contend and really, never will contend. These teams can't afford to pay big players, and they then hope to grow local talent and keep it long enough to at least compete. They might have one or two WNBA washouts or big college names, but that's about it.

And then you have the lower teams of the major national leagues, which are usually in financial difficulty of one kind or another and struggle just to get by. They're like Chamique Holdsclaw's former team in Slovakia - they either have a bunch of 15-16 year olds that are ill paid or they're like Aris Holargou in Greece, where the player went to strike because they weren't getting paid at all.

So for the big teams, how can they afford to pay the teams so much despite even lower attendance than the WNBA? First, these teams usually have some sort of government subsidy. In Europe, there's usually a Ministry of Sports which is a cabinet-level position - the Europeans believe that sports participation promotes health. (I agree, but I don't believe that giving money to pro sports teams promotes anything.)

Second, these sports are heavily subsidized by corporations. The teams become corporation home teams, and if you decry the advertising associated with American sports, well you ain't seen nothing yet. Some of these teams are named after their corporate sponsors. Euroleasing, I believe, is a truck and vehicle leasing company; the corresponding women's power in Hungary is called Euroleasing Sopron. Wisla Can-Pack Krakow is named after Can-Pack, a company that offers metal packaging. It would be as if you had the Phoenix Lifelock or Farmers Los Angeles as official names.

And finally...there's no salary cap as in the WNBA. In Europe, you can buy your way to the top. If you're a mogul and you want to own the best women's team in Europe...there's nothing to stop you. All of the above is why the best players can earn around $250K for a top European team.

13 teams in the WNBA - and really, 13 teams in Europe, if you think about it.

On Player "Retirements"

Q McCall at Swish Appeal writes about Shannon "Pee Wee" Johnson's retirement from the WNBA...but not from basketball:

Since Johnson announced her retirement, I’ve heard multiple people express concern about players choosing to leave the WNBA to play basketball overseas because a) it shortens ones career to be playing professional basketball year-round and b) players make more money overseas.

There are already NBA players choosing to leave the U.S. mid-career to play overseas. As of yet, no all-star caliber player has done that at the peak of their career, but it’s difficult for a U.S. entity to compete with foreign entities given the current economy.

Johnson is certainly on the decline at this point in her career and this problem is by no means at crisis level. But you wonder what kinds of things the league is trying to do to address the problem.

This was such a good point that I wanted to write a blog post about it.

Actually, if this is news to the people expressing concern, they haven't been watching. I believe this has been going on for several years now. In particular, some foreign players who travelled to the WNBA between 1997 and 2000 returned to their home countries and played for several years.

Part of the problem is the paradox of lesser European leagues which pay better money. In Europe, from my understanding, teams are subsidized by both corporations and the respective European governments. Teams in Europe looking to win big in their respective national leagues or in Euroleague play will hire big WNBA stars for six figure salaries - a player can earn more overseas despite playing in front of smaller crowds.

This paradox doesn't exist in other major sports. For example, suppose a big-name baseball star has clearly hit his declining years to the point where he is a marginal talent at best. There's just no other league that's going to pay him the million-dollar salary to which he is accustomed. AAA isn't going to pay that. The player might be lucky and play in Japan, but most American baseball players aren't accustomed to playing overseas and learning a new language.

So they retire. Better to retire than play for lesser cash in a sub-standard league. Would Joe DiMaggio or Ted Williams have played longer if there was an overseas winter baseball league which might have had lesser talent but which paid better? I think Teddy Ballgame probably would have played into his forties if there was such a thing.

Johnson's case is not the case of a player saying, "I have a few more productive years in the WNBA, but I'll just go to Europe and play for more money to preserve myself." Pro athletes just don't think like that. Every pro athlete thinks "I am one of the best in the world." And I believe that the WNBA is the best women's basketball league. Athletes - at least American athletes - are probably going to play there until it becomes obvious that they can't hang anymore. Then, and only then, they'll head for Europe full-time.

(Note the large number of ex-US college players that play full time in Europe. For those players, it's definitely not a case of "I can make more money in Europe." It's a case of "I can't get on a WNBA roster.")

When a major American college player - a potential first round WNBA draft pick - eschews the WNBA to play in Europe full time, then I'll be worried. But not until.

Is the Charity Stripe More Charitable to Europeans?

Thought exercise: The WNBA championship is at stake, and you're down by one free throw with one second left. You'll get two free throws, and if you make both of them, you might be WNBA champs.

If you were the coach of the team at the free throw line, given your drothers, who do you want at the line?

a) an American player, or
b) a European player?


While reading the WNBA messageboards, and the various end of the year reviews/criticisms from other sources/detractors, one of the criticisms that came up more than once compared WNBA players with their European counterparts. The general theme was that European play was to be praised and WNBA play was to be condemned.

In particular, focus came on free throw shooting. Fans bemoaned the WNBA players for not hitting large numbers of free throws, while praising the Europeans for a more team-oriented game.

I decided to see if this criticism had any basis in fact. Last year, the WNBA shooting percentage was 75.2 percent - out of every four attempts at the charity stripe, three were hit. (Incidentally, the NBA's free throw shooting was 75.5 percent in 2007-08, which is statistically the same).

I then looked at how well the Euroleague teams had done in the first round. Euroleague consists of the (hypothetical) 24 best teams in women's basketball in Europe. Each of these 24 teams played 10 first round games, and I looked at the combined free throw percentage.

The results? European free throw shooting was 73.4 percent, slightly worse than American free throw shooting. You'd probably have to track Euroleague vs. WNBA over time to determine if this deficit is consistent, but it existed in 2008. Based on the small sample size, and one season, the first hypothesis is that the European women shoot either a) exactly as well as or b) marginally worse than the American women at the free throw line.

Why the misconception? I think it's because of the bias held by many WNBA fans - "team play is much better and more emotionally satisfying than individual play" (oddly enough, in the NBA the reverse bias is true, despite claims to the contrary). European players are seen as the ultimate team players, for a number of reasons. If you follow the line of bias, fans conclude that European ballers must be better than WNBA players on the lesser known of the "Four Keys" of Dean Oliver, namely free throw shooting and turnovers/team passing. (Shooting percentage and offensive rebounding are left to the Americans.)

But at first glance, it looks like the ladies of Europe are no better at free throws than the Americans. And these are the best teams in Europe. As for free throwing in general among the worst teams, I've seen stuff in the boxscores that can turn your hair gray....