WNBA Enters New Terrain
The most competitive season in the WNBA’s eight-year history is going to end differently.
The champion this season will not come from Houston, Los Angeles or Detroit. There are fresh faces playing for the league title, from Connecticut and Seattle, who begin the Finals here tonight.
There is a sense that the league is on better footing because of it, a feeling that having more teams capable of winning a championship is important to overall health and growth.
“I think this [Finals] reflects the parity that we’ve known all along the WNBA has this year,” Seattle Coach Anne Donovan said. “Half a game separated several teams from making the playoffs this year, or determined their seeding within the playoffs. And the fact that nearly all the series have gone three games, and the fact it will go down to the wire here as well, is a good reflection of the kind of play we finally have in the league.”
There are plenty of intriguing scenarios in this best-of-three series. Start with the point guard duel between established Seattle star Sue Bird, who won two NCAA titles at the University of Connecticut, and swiftly emerging Sun rookie Lindsay Whalen. Both Donovan and Storm forward Lauren Jackson want to end the season in triumph after enduring tragedy -- Jackson’s maternal grandmother died in Australia two weeks ago and Donovan lost her mother to a heart attack in New Jersey in January.
That Connecticut reached the Finals is a pretty good story in itself. The Sun began the year with seven new players, including five rookies, and many thought they were a year or two away from contending for a championship. But after surviving a raucous regular season where no dominant Eastern Conference team emerged, the Sun was the conference’s top-seeded team and has defeated Washington and New York to make the Finals.
“This is the Finals, so everyone thinks it’s just been great for us,” Sun center Taj McWilliams-Franklin said. “But we’ve been in and out. Washington, the first game, we looked like a mess. Now we look beautiful because we’re in the finals. We’re still a work in progress.”
Even though Seattle finished second to the Sparks in the Western Conference in the regular season, its players had said from the beginning this was their year. And now, having removed Minnesota and Sacramento from its playoff path, the Storm could bring Seattle its first pro basketball title since the SuperSonics won the NBA championship in 1979.
Still to be determined is whether many will be watching.
Because of the Olympics, the WNBA season, which normally ends in early September, was extended into October. Now the league is caught in the vortex of other sports. Baseball is in the playoffs. College and NFL football rule the weekends, along with NASCAR, which is grabbing attention with its final 10-race series to determine its champion.
The one WNBA game broadcast on ABC got a 0.5 rating (an estimated 30,000 homes). ESPN2, which has broadcast five games, showed an 0.3 ratings average for those games.
The cable and satellite dish audience is estimated to be about 25% less than the network television audience.
“It will be difficult going up against baseball and football,” television analyst and Hall of Fame player Ann Meyers Drysdale said.
“But if Connecticut wins, there will be more interest because of the success of the [University of] Connecticut men and women programs. And if Seattle wins, it’s a great story because Anne Donovan would be the first female coach to win a championship in this league.”
Donovan dismisses that historical aspect -- “I’m all about winning the championship” -- but her players don’t.
“She’s the best coach in the league,” Jackson said. “She has put a lot of time and effort into getting everything working for us. She deserves this.”