It Is What It Is

Tim Lemke over at Tim Lemke Sports has a few words for the WNBA haters:

Every once in a while, some wise guy tries to disparage the professional women's basketball league by throwing out revenue and attendance figures, tv ratings and the like and placing them in the context of more popular, established male sports. And it's totally unfair. The WNBA is not going to generate a mass audience. You won't find tens of millions of people tuning in to watch the Liberty play the Mystics. You won't have sold out arenas, and most WNBA players aren't going to become multi-millionaire superstars. And that's ok. The WNBA is what it is: a nice, viable product that offers quality entertainment to a certain segment of the population. It's a way for top female athletes to continue playing basketball after college, and it provides a good, family-friendly entertainment option that isn't too expensive. It would be nice if the WNBA could avoid folding and relocating teams, but to suggest that the league should not exist because it is not on the same scale financially as the NBA or other major, male-dominated sports is just silly. The league can thrive, but it will just have to do it on a smaller scale. And that's fine.