By Wesley Morris at
Jesse D. Garrabrant/NBAE/Getty Images
The WNBA draft never looks like a sports event. It looks like a scene from a hotel jazz club. There is none of the beery pandemonium and emotional overkill that happens every summer when the men have their draft. The league's president, Laurie Richie, doesn't have to read the players' names over a chorus of boos. There aren't 20 people reaching for hugs and half-hugs and there's no irrational sense that, despite the financial bonanza, a bunch of guys are going to fight for all of Panem. Indeed, the presiding mood at the WNBA draft is less Hunger Games and more "Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for Dee Dee Bridgewater."
The basketball centerpieces and matching tablecloths notwithstanding, the women treat you to a classier, more straightforward evening.
In case you were out living a life of leisure, here's what you missed in sports on Thursday.
Blake Griffin tore his meniscus at a Team USA scrimmage and will miss the Olympic Games in London. Which is particularly sad when you consider that, aside from Dwight Howard, Russell Westbrook, Christopher Paul, James Harden, and maybe, maybe Tyson Chandler, he had the team's most British name.
The Minnesota Lynx beat the Atlanta Dream on Friday to claim the organization’s first WNBA championship. The 15th WNBA season, in the books. So now what? While this assuredly isn't true for all of the players, I'm assuming some members of the Dream and Lynx will join the rest of us in what could be a long fall … and winter … and spring full of non-stop banter about the NBA lockout and the present and future condition of the fractured league.
Sounds miserable.
Fortunately for the players of the WNBA, there is another option. An option that not only keeps these talents on the hardwood, but also irreversibly transforms the league from something that is oft overlooked to to a profitable, wildly popular enterprise.
There is some great basketball being played by gifted athletes right now. I’m not talking about the games at Rucker Park or in the lockout-free gyms of L.A., Houston or Philadelphia, where the likes of Melo and La La are speed-dialing their press agents following every neo-conversation … No, these contests are on live on network TV from Minneapolis and Atlanta: the WNBA Finals. And it’s now way past the time that news media get hip and give these women their due. The league has teams in 12 cities, and most hometown dailies don’t assigns a beat writer to all of the teams' games. Well, it’s time to wake up, dudes. (And don’t blame this on the fact that the sports world is run by men.)
But why change now? The WNBA (in my opinion, by far the most meaningful legacy of the ballsy and ingenious NBA commissioner David Stern) needs to survive and thrive. The fact is, thousands of women and families attend games in major cities every year, and that means there are consumer products to be hawked and revenue to be generated. But the “old way” of selling the league needs to die.
