Turns Out the WNBA Might Be in Good Hands After All [Op-Ed]
I have spent a good portion of this WNBA season tracking the ongoing executive missteps of the WNBA and its commissioner Cathy Engelbert. Under her leadership, the league office has earned a reputation for being sluggish and stubbornly reactionary, routinely failing to address structural and other challenges until they boil over into public crises that become impossible to ignore.
While the executive suite remains stalled in bureaucratic hesitation and blatant incompetence, a powerful shift is happening elsewhere within the league. Teams, coaches, players, and fans are moving the league forward at a pace that is increasingly outstripping the front office. This grassroots movement is rendering corporate leadership obsolete, driving an urgent league-wide evolution that honors and celebrates Black women and protects the inclusive and activist history of the league.
This week, one of the league’s newest expansion teams, the Cleveland Sirens, carried the torch of centering Black women’s visibility in its introductory video to preview a debut that won’t happen until 2028. The trailer for the new team relies heavily on aquatic mythology, showing sirens emerging with a focused determination from the waters of Lake Erie. Having former Cleveland Rockers player Janice Braxton narrate the video provides a crucial link to the city’s past WNBA franchise history, showing that the new organization respects the existing foundation and is intent on honoring it as it builds.
At the center of the video stands a young Black girl player, rocking a pair of A’ja Wilson’s signature A-Two sneakers, as she represents the bridge between the past and the future.
The Sirens’ marketing campaign’s emphasis on sirens as a key part of its representation invokes specific imagery for Black women. Sirens and mermaids connect us back to West African spiritual traditions that offered up Mami Wata, a water spirit who is a protector, seductress, and a force of nature all in one. It introduces a fierce lineage that actively reclaims space and gives voice to Black women in a league that has often ignored and underestimated them.
Cleveland’s creative strategy offers a beautiful masterclass for other cities who are looking to build authentic connections with Black folks and true WNBA enthusiasts. The Connecticut Sun will trade the Northeast for Texas, rebranding itself as the Houston Comets in 2027. Cities like Detroit and Philadelphia are set to welcome their new franchises, opening up fresh opportunities for brilliant campaigns like Cleveland’s to take center stage.
While the future of the league is being built brick-by-brick behind the scenes by expansion teams, the WNBA’s front office is stumbling and failing miserably. These days you don’t need to read one of my long-winded missives or impassioned critiques to understand how mightily Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has fallen from grace, taking the league down with her.
WNBA players have shared they rarely see or hear from Engelbert, and whenever she steps onto a court, a unified and deafening chorus of boos echoes through whatever arena she’s inhabiting. It is a visceral symptom of a deeper, systemic issue, reflecting a commissioner and league who remain deeply out of touch and burdened by increasingly fractured relationships with players and a shortsighted strategy of putting all their eggs in one player’s basket.
The front office has chosen to invest its total energy into Indiana Fever guard Caitlin “Contusion” Clark, a singular, highly subsidized figure, attempting to prop her up as an anointed savior like a marketing WNBA version of Weekend at Bernie’s.
The league office routinely twists statistics and burns through a good chunk of its massive resources to convince the world of an isolated greatness while actively ignoring a massive pool of talent. The league continues to dig in even as devoted enthusiasts now see their chosen player, Contusion Cait, is not matching the expectations they have for her on or off the court.
This manufactured narrative reached a ridiculous peak this week when the WNBA named Clark the Eastern Conference Player of the Week, in the same week it named her teammate, Fever guard Kelsey Mitchell, Player of the Month.
It’s as though the league couldn’t bring itself to give Mitchell her earned, solo recognition without simultaneously handing their chosen savior an award. Even more absurd is how the league was ratcheting up its efforts to force Clark’s name into the MVP conversation, desperately trying to insert her into a race where her performance simply doesn’t fit the basic criteria to be mentioned alongside the true standard-bearers of the game. In fact, Contusion Cait is routinely benched on defensive possessions during close games, something unheard of for any true MVP.
During Thursday night’s Fever matchup with the Aces, the illusion of their Great White Hope shattered under the bright lights of the arena, as the unforgiving discernment of athletic competition proved that hype can be manufactured, but elite athleticism cannot.
During a close end-of-game sequence, it’s incredibly telling that Contusion Cait swallowed her own hype whole, rendering herself completely blind to her strengths and limitations on the hardwood floor.
With the game on the line during what would be the Fever’s final play, she refused to pass the rock. Instead, she was delusional enough to think she was going to score on Las Vegas Aces’ star A’ja Wilson, the league’s reigning MVP and Defensive Player of the Year. Contusion Cait should have passed the ball. Instead, she tried to challenge Wilson, who promptly stole the ball from her and funneled it to Chelsea Gray for the game-winning shot.
It is the perfect microcosm of the current WNBA ecosystem. The league and its anointed savior are so blinded by the greatness they manufactured that it quite literally cost their golden goose and the Fever the win.
True to form, the league office put next to no effort into celebrating Gray’s historic, unprecedented feat of becoming the first player in WNBA history to nail the three-pointers to send a game into overtime and then win it in the extra period.
Instead, the subsequent coverage focused heavily on Clark’s post-game presser, framing her as a valiant hero falling on her sword for not playing better, followed by unconfirmed, viral online rumors of her staying in the arena to practice tirelessly for hours after the loss.
Outside of Thursday night’s game, the league’s lopsided strategy of pouring their all into Contusion Clark manifests most exhaustively on television screens, where WNBA fans are subjected to an endless, repetitive loop of State Farm and other prominent commercial spots featuring Contusion Cait that do absolutely nothing to promote the wider sport or the league.
Audiences have grown deeply tired of the stale corporate marketing cycle that treats this single fledgling player as the representative of the entire league, especially when Clark’s peers are landing exciting commercials, including for products more deeply aligned with WNBA fans and basketball culture.
The league missed out on a golden opportunity to lean into one of its brightest and most talented stars who has also proven to be a marketer’s dream when it failed to heavily promote the release of Atlanta Dream star Angel Reese’s signature Barbie doll.
On Monday night, the Atlanta Dream, understanding the power of Reese’s voice and connection to Black women of all ages, turned State Farm Arena into a sea of pink for the franchise’s Barbie Night, timed to the recent historic release of the doll. The signature Barbie doll wears Reese’s jersey number, and even one of her custom sneakers, capturing Reese’s presence both as an athlete and as a cultural icon.
Black women and girls of all ages showed up in droves with the collector’s item in tow, eager to have the basketball star autograph a piece of history that intentionally reflects their own likeness. Even watching from afar, it was clear that the arena was transformed into a massive, joyful affirmation of a strong fanbase of Black women and girls the WNBA’s executive leadership has increasingly overlooked and often taken for granted.
The celebratory space the Dream created stands as a powerful counterweight to a grueling season where Reese has arguably become the most heavily scrutinized Black woman in professional sports. She has spent months navigating an onslaught of intense public critiques that don’t deter her from pouring herself into being an active role model. Instead, she balances relentless public pressure with an unwavering commitment to community giving, evidenced last month when her Angel C. Reese Foundation partnered with Saints House to provide housing and resources for young mothers transitioning out of foster care.
This exhausting juxtaposition is a reality that Black women in all walks of life know intimately, recognizing the unfair burden of having to overperform while defending their humanity from constant public dismantling. In a league that often refuses to see her or protect her, Reese is busy making sure the next generation of Black women coming up behind her are completely visible and valued.
The most tangled storyline to emerge in the league this week centers the debate over trans athletes in women’s sports. Once again, the league missed out on an opportunity to stand up for inclusiveness and chose to remain silent. Ignited by Indiana Fever player Sophie Cunningham’s recent interviews advocating excluding trans women from women’s sports, the response has been a master class in deflection and has exposed a massive void in leadership for the league and the Fever.
Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White claimed she was not educated enough on the topic of trans athletes to weigh in with an opinion. The league office ignored her failure, then days later, it inexplicably handed her the Coach of the Month honors for July, bypassing more worthy candidates and effectively validating a leader who openly admits to not being read in on a subject impacting the most vulnerable segment of the very population she is hired to lead.
Meanwhile, Clark has dodged the subject entirely by passing the buck to governing bodies. This stubborn refusal to weigh in on the politics reveals a cynical calculation. The league and the Fever franchise have spent years rolling out the red carpet for a right-wing demographic that quickly transformed themselves into rabid Clark devotees. Now, that same fanbase is turning on Clark, the Fever, and the league, demanding all three confirm their conservative anti-trans values.
Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve did the opposite, aligning herself with the foundational activist roots of the WNBA by educating herself and siding with inclusion above all. During her team’s high-stakes matchup with the Fever, she donned a “Trans Kids Belong” t-shirt to reinforce her support and demonstrate the moral courage the WNBA senior leadership lacks.
In the meantime, and while the WNBA’s executive leadership continues to fall behind as it’s being outpaced by its teams, coaches, and players, I will continue to root on A’ja as she earns another MVP league title. I will be rooting for Angel as she continues to make her mark in spectacular fashion on and off the court. And, I will be praying every night to the basketball gods with a very greedy and selfish request. It’s a prayer that rides that wave of the powers that teams have a little too conveniently.
On behalf of my hometown team, the Los Angeles Sparks: please find a way to defeat all odds stacked against us and sign JuJu Watkins. Keep the hometown basketball phenom here in L.A. to ignite the Sparks’ climb back into championship territory. Every good fairytale needs a hometown hero to save the day. Let JuJu be ours.
SEE ALSO:
The WNBA Is Allowing Its Arenas To Become Political Battlegrounds
Caitlin Clark’s White Woman Grievance Spiral Could End Her Career
