Rethinking the WNBA, NBA seasons — Kelly Krauskopf talks Indiana Fever

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For most of her life, my wife has been a casual baseball fan, and a basketball agnostic. This remained true despite my career which included covering the NBA, WNBA, college men’s and women’s basketball as a primary focus at various points. She wasn’t hostile to it — she just didn’t care.

But over the past five years, her interest in the WNBA, specifically the New York Liberty, grew and grew. Certainly, seeing my daughter go all-in on the Liberty played a role, but sources close to the situation tell The IX that the screaming levels from them both during the 2024 playoffs in the house were at decibel levels previous unheard here. By the WNBA Finals, my older daughter, who’d been forsaking sports lately for other pursuits, was hooked as well.

But it was a round earlier, during the semifinals, when my wife asked me the question that prompted today’s column: when the WNBA season was over, how should she go about starting to follow the NBA?

She brought it up again when I returned from the WNBA Finals. Naturally, the process to go about following the NBA is much easier at this point, even now, than following the WNBA. Her husband didn’t need to go found a newsroom that covered the league, with beat reporters in every market. All I had to do was point her in the direction of the nearest team — she indicated an interest in finding a local rooting pursuit, and the house tends to be agnostic toward the Knicks I grew up rooting for since Jim Dolan left the Liberty by the side of the road.

So it came to pass that Rachel and I attended a Sixers-Grizzlies game earlier this month. And friends, it was not super-inspiring. I assured her that there would be a gap in intensity between the crowd at an early-season game in the NBA and the crowd she’s been part of just a few weeks earlier: Game 2 of the WNBA Finals at Barclays Center.

Even with this warning, it was a rough night. The Sixers were missing their two best players, got outrebounded by 20, and many fans left early. After the game, which I had the unfamiliar sensation of leaving when fans did, rather than attend a postgame, I missed an altercation between Joel Embiid and an Inquirer columnist.

Instead, we ran into the great Kate Scott as we walked toward our car. I still haven’t completely forgiven Kate for leaving women’s basketball broadcasting simply to take over the play-by-play role for the Sixers, occupying a seat once held by the legend Marc Zumoff, and absolutely crushing it, but it was still delightful to see her. I explained Rachel’s new passion project to her, and she assured Rachel that she should stay the course.

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My wife has been through worse as a fan. She cut her teeth at Westchester County Center Liberty games, and her loyalty is such that despite Brittany Boyd’s endless turnover problems, I had to convince her that she’d come to enjoy watching New York’s new point guard even more: Sabrina Ionescu. (For the record: she is now convinced.)

But her conversion into what is still a casual Sixers fan — she wears Liberty gear to games, and had what I’d call as more of a passing interest in last night’s Knicks-Sixers NBA tilt — led me to wonder: just how much should we expect to see the NBA try and capitalize on the WNBA’s popularity surge?

In many ways, that is little more than taking the conventional (and wrong) wisdom and turning it on its head: it is the WNBA that is the helpless league, you see, only propped up by the altruism of the NBA. Sabrina participating in the NBA All Star festivities last year was thought of as merely the latest effort by the NBA to promote the WNBA — which, to those of us who believe the NBA should always be doing that, and more often, isn’t a bad thing in and of itself.

But yesterday afternoon, I received this email offer:

This is what happens when WNBA League Pass experiences a 366% increase, year-over-year, in subscriptions, according to the WNBA. Moreover: this is how it was always supposed to go, as Kelly Krauskopf, Indiana Fever president of basketball and business operations — not to mention the WNBA’s first director of operations back in the 1990s — explained when I asked her about this cycle.

“When we started, David Stern’s vision was to own basketball year-round,” Krauskopf said. “So think about the NBA through the the traditional basketball season — going right into the WNBA, into the spring and summer. So there’s a year-round cycle for the sport of basketball that is NBA or WNBA. So that was the vision early on. And I think that’s really where we are. There’s a lot of crossover in fan bases, more so than than the early days.”

As ever, there is important nuance here. The WNBA cannot become reliant on NBA viewers as the sole or even primary driver of interest. The trope that the women’s sports audience can and will be only a subset of the men’s sports audience — ignoring the many people, including a ton I know who read this newsletter, who love women’s sports but do not care about men’s sports at all — needs to stay retired. After all, by average home attendance, same building, the Indiana Fever just outdrew the Indiana Pacers.

But it’s also worth keeping in mind that as the two leagues continue on their current trajectories, the investment, motivations and therefore outcomes may change. The WNBA in 2024 averaged 1.2 million viewers on its ESPN family of network regular season broadcasts. The NBA, with what are often more appealing TV windows and 24 games on ABC alone, averaged 1.56 million viewers in 2023-24. So far in 2024-25? It’s really early, but down year-over-year in some key metrics.

The two leagues, as we’ve covered here extensively, bargained together on their newest media rights deal. The new pact is for a reported $76 billion over 11 years. That comes to just under $7 billion per season.

The WNBA is to receive $200 million of that per year, approximately 1/35th of the AAV of the deal. The deal includes the ability for the parties to re-visit that value after three years. It’s generally assumed that the way that re-thinking goes is, should the WNBA’s popularity continue to increase, or even simply stabilize at current levels, that there’s no enforcement mechanism forcing the media partners to pay more, and the long-term nature of the deal will instead be a bargain for all broadcasters involved well into the 2030s, the price the WNBA pays for a deal that dramatically reshaped its bottom line and provides stability.

But there’s another possibility here, and it should be awfully intriguing to all involved. The NBA has taken steps through the years to consider reducing its 82-game season, a grueling campaign that many fans, players and front office members alike think is simply too long. Meanwhile, the WNBA has increased its season size from 34 to 36 to 40 to 44 games, and just added an extra two potential games to the WNBA Finals.

In a world where the NBA games are the ones with the vastly larger audience, the WNBA merely a vassal of the older brother league, this is an intractable problem. But we don’t live in that world anymore. In a world where ratings are rapidly reaching parity, there are clear advantages to both increasing the calendar footprint of the WNBA and reducing it for the NBA, with the former allowing the W an easier way forward to maximize games without forcing players to play too frequently.

I spoke to a half-dozen figures around the WNBA, who all placed the optimal season length at around 50 games. But with a longer calendar to utilize? That could change. There’s absolutely no reason a true 50-50 breakdown of the WNBA and NBA campaigns — say, 60 games for the WNBA from June through December, an NBA season from January through June, and drafts each June that allow for all college players to experience a proper offseason of rest ahead of embarking on their professional careers — wouldn’t benefit all involved.

And as an added bonus? You may have heard that NBA owners own approximately 42 percent of the WNBA. It’s true! Now that can serve as a carrot — here’s a way to make more money. It would likely call for a redistribution of the media rights payout in three years’ time, but can happen in other, organic ways — greater investment in individual team infrastructures by NBA/WNBA co-owned teams, for instance, is already a part of the new reality.

And when the good-faith discussion happens in three years, instead of the NBA and WNBA asking networks to pony up more for the rising WNBA audience, it can simply offer it as value added to the networks while renegotiating how that is distributed between the two leagues with… itself. Adam Silver, who helped write up the original business plan for the WNBA while working under Stern, has a keen understanding of the opportunity here.

It all makes Cathy Engelbert’s decision to negotiate jointly with the NBA this round look like a potential big financial winner for the WNBA. And it may end up being a real life game-changer. For everyone.

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This week in women’s basketball

PJ Brown on Arizona’s special sophomores.

Get to know Penn freshman Katie Collins. 

Paul George caught up with Napheesa Collier.

Reports of Kelly Graves’ demise? EXAGGERATED.

Kelsey Mitchell opens up about losing her father.

Noa Dalzell’s got a weekly WNBA column! Love it.

And Atlanta hired Karl Smesko – lots more on this to come – so revel in this Emma Baccellieri profile of his FGCU program from last year.

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Five at The IX: Kelly Krauskopf, Indiana Fever

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