Whipped Cream Difficulties

If you’re not interested in basketball…well, neither am I. Another story will be coming along eventually.

Sports Illustrated ran a story today that I found interesting about the New York Liberty of the WNBA, and their $500,000 fine (which was bargained down from $1 million).

What did the Liberty do? You would not believe the gravity of this offense. They…

…chartered flights for their players. There was also an unauthorized team trip to Napa.

After someone alerted the WNBA to the Liberty’s violations, possible remedies floated by the league’s general counsel, Jamin Dershowitz, ranged from losing “every draft pick you have ever seen” to suspending ownership, even “grounds for termination of the franchise,” according to a Sept. 21, 2021, communication between the league and the Liberty reviewed by SI.

Yeah. They were seriously considering pulling the plug on the entire team.

I kid a little about this. The thing about charter flights is: they are banned under the terms of the WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement. Same with the trip to Napa. And the league is serious about this. My regular readers may remember the Las Vegas Aces ended up forfeiting a game because of travel issues. (In that case, the Aces did obtain special permission from the league to use a charter flight, but wasn’t able to arrange one.)

Part of the idea is to equalize the playing field between owners with deep pockets and those who treat their WNBA teams as marginal enterprises:

For some owners, the WNBA team has been a place to park losses elsewhere in their corporations. Some view it as pure charity—one WNBA owner proudly proclaims the value of the WNBA team to be zero, according to multiple league sources, and thus all he spends on his team is effectively a contribution toward the greater good of women’s sports. And others have invested consistently in their teams, turning about half of them into consistent profit makers.

And that’s one of the points of the article: there’s a dispute between those two groups.

And while many players continued to loudly call for improving travel conditions—charter flights being the most visible part of that effort—the league found the players had an unexpected source of support for that expense from the new owners who view WNBA teams less as businesses to be managed to the last dollar or places to park losses and more as growth opportunities in a developing economy.
New owners—the Tsais in New York, Marc Lore in Minnesota, Larry Gottesdiener in Atlanta, Mark Davis in Las Vegas—found themselves dumbstruck by how little the WNBA could invest in growth. A sale of 20% of the league’s equity at that moment—especially at a valuation of $200 million—felt like a huge loss, even though new investors outside the league’s owners would not control any votes on the WNBA’s Executive Committee.