This week on The IX Sports Podcast Basketball Edition, hosts Jackie Powell and Howard Megdal break down the New York Liberty’s firing of head coach Chris DeMarco.
But first, the pair started the episode with a discussion of the massive viewership numbers of the WNBA Finals.
1.5 million people tuned in on a Thursday at 12:30 p.m. to watch Game 6, and 3.3 million people watched Game 7 in primetime on Halloween. Megdal said it was “really hard to argue” anything other than the fact that the WNBA is at its strongest viewership position ever.
Powell pointed out that viewership for the series overall averaged 1.88 million — up 30% from last year’s Finals.
Chris DeMarco out in New York
Then, the hosts got to the main event: on Nov. 3, the New York Liberty fired head coach DeMarco.
Megdal said that in conversations he was having with sources across the league, it wasn’t a question of if the Liberty would fire DeMarco — but when. Much of the controversy surrounding DeMarco came from the situation earlier in the WNBA Playoffs when Breanna Stewart asked whether the Liberty had a reset timeout and the official said they did not. It turned out that they did.
There were many questions about how DeMarco and his coaching staff handled the incident. Powell said that when DeMarco, Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu appeared before the press after the game, there was not a clear plan of who would address the incident, and DeMarco did not concretely take accountability for the situation.
“I want to say this at the top. Nobody takes pleasure in anybody losing his or her job. No, that’s not what this is. This is more what was the reasoning behind it, and what does it say about the New York Liberty that they’ve made this decision just a year after having a new coach, they’re going to now have their third coach in three years,” Megdal said.
Watch out for a piece from Powell breaking down the situation here at The IX Sports in the days ahead.
Make sure to subscribe to The IX Sports Podcast for in-depth coverage of women’s soccer, hockey and basketball; and tune in each weekday morning for a quick overview of the biggest headlines on Women’s Sports Daily, like WNBA news and PWHL expansion updates.
