Stern Still Has WNBA Buried in Back Pocket

There are two sexes. There is one basketball.

The ball belongs to David Stern.

The NBA may be from Mars and the WNBA may be from Venus, but David Stern is from Madison Avenue and that, in the end, is what matters.

Title IX is in the cool embrace of the bottom line and they fit quite snugly in the NBA commissioner’s vest pocket.

The WNBA breathes because of him.

The WNBA could stop breathing because of him.

He is the savior. He could be the destroyer.

Stern will nurture the WNBA, demolish it or permit it to wither on the three-point vine.

The choice will be his.

To believe otherwise is to underestimate Stern’s power. Those who doubt Stern’s negotiating pectorals need only seek counsel from former ABL management or NBA union bosses. He is the Shaq Daddy of the boardroom. The cheerful little man can salary-cap you like a bug.

On Friday, the WNBA finally confirmed what the WNBA union already did a week ago. A tentative collective bargaining agreement was reached last Friday, barely sliding under Stern’s season-killing tag. Calling the one-sided deal a CBA is a misnomer. More accurately, it’s the SBA: the Stern bargain-less agreement.

On April 8, Stern issued a take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum for April 18 and, sure enough, a five-year deal was struck on April 18. The union scratched out the kind of concessions only Woody Guthrie-era fruit pickers would accept and then marched away singing, “This land is Stern’s land. This land isn’t my land. From California to Madison Square Garden....”

The veteran minimum salary went from $40,000 to $42,000. The rookie minimum remained at $30,000. There will be a 4% annual pay raise from the current average salary of about $50,000, and a league cap of $8.7 million this year. In other words, the entire league will make about the same as two NBA players at the average $4.5 million salary.

The women will have to play nearly three years to equal Kevin Garnett’s $25.2 million. Heck, Bryant Reeves got $13 million and Larry Johnson $9.6 million not to play this season.

Given the upper hand, Stern showed the WNBA players his tight fist. They buckled at the sight. This does not make Stern an evil man. Any good businessman wants to keep his costs down, especially in the early years of a venture still losing too much money and in a tough economy. Stern also knows there is no other place for the women to run. They can only jump overseas. Otherwise, this is David’s game. This makes him the most powerful person in women’s basketball. More powerful than Pat Summitt or Geno Auriemma. The NCAA can guarantee women basketball players get an education, but Stern can ensure they hit a hardwood ceiling.

He is a powerhouse.

“That’s an understatement,” said University of Hartford Athletic Director Pat Meiser-McKnett, former Penn State coach and one of the few women in charge of an entire Division I athletics program. “And how you view him in this makes it easy to have mixed feelings about the whole thing. But the bottom line is for the many failures along the way, at least, it has a chance of being a viable product under his leadership. I happen to be one who believes over the long haul it will strengthen as it has in the collegiate ranks.

“We’re in critical times. I want to believe five years from now those in the bargaining unit can say, ‘We made concessions, but look where we are now. We did the right thing. We didn’t fight to the death.’ Right now, there isn’t a strong power base. There aren’t two other entities saying, ‘David, step aside. Give us a chance.’ ”

The initial decision to play during the summer seemed artificial. Surely, it was selfish, using NBA franchises to operate WNBA teams and fill arenas in the off-season. Yet carving a niche in a less-crowded spot on the sports calendar may eventually prove ingenious.

On the other hand, Stern’s original forbiddance of franchises outside NBA markets was controlling and wrongheaded.

Withholding a team from Connecticut until this year was stupid.

Expanding so quickly to 16 teams was overambitious, even delusional.

The WNBA has lost two teams and two more moved, one to a gambling casino.

Even after committing $12 million to subsidize the league this year, Stern cannot guarantee the number of teams for 2004.

Call me a cynic. I don’t believe the WNBA averaged 9,228 full-priced tickets last season. Building interest beyond obvious pockets remains a huge problem.

“If I would have had a crystal ball in 1996, I would have predicated a merger between the WNBA and ABL,” said Pam Batalis, the former ABL vice president of sales. “The ideal would have been a combination of the best of both models.

“Why the union so early on? Trailblazers aren’t usually in a union. They’re there for the love of it. The ABL never needed a union.”

Then again, the ABL paid significantly better salaries and didn’t forbid players to strike endorsement deals with companies that competed with 18 league sponsors. At least in the new agreement, it will be reduced to a half a dozen.

“Pressure is building,” said Batalis, a vice president for Brand Keys, a New York marketing firm. “The entity isn’t profitable in Year 7. Nobody can tell when it can be. It’s totally acceptable to say, ‘Nobody is getting a raise right now. We need to let revenues catch expenses.’ I admire the level of NBA commitment. Even our ABL investors shut off the spigot. They’ve hung in there.”

For how long? Nobody knows when more NBA owners will say they don’t want to carry Stern’s burden.

The scariest part is nobody knows if Stern, without a CBA, really would have shut the door on the season, padlocked the league for good and allowed history to judge the cobwebs.

His genius for marketing and planning is unquestionable. What about his passion for women’s athletics? Is it nearly as strong as his business acumen?

It’s a vital question. Because, make no mistake, it’s David’s basketball.