The WNBA’s Dysfunction, Not Its Depth Of Talent, Is What Keeps The Public Engaged

This article was written by Karen Crouse and published on Sport & State, a new media company founded by Clay Travis that is built around sports, culture, original voices, and live conversation.
* * * * *

The Major League Baseball postseason is under way, the National Hockey League season has started and the Las Vegas Raiders are an unexpected 3-0 heading into their home clash against the 3-0 Kansas City Chiefs in what is generally assumed to be Travis Kelce’s final trip around the league.

And the main topic of debate everywhere two or more people converge to talk about sports this week has been the WNBA. It makes one wonder, is the outgoing commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, silent like a Sphinx?

The NBA’s kid sister is getting more attention for its dysfunction than it ever has for the depth of its talent. My longtime stance has been that the WNBA met the enemy and it is the WNBA, but the 24-hour cone of silence around one of the most consequential player-fan incidents of the 2026 season caused me to reconsider.

It’s genius, really, that this traveling circus of women basketballers has leaned all the way into the motto, attributed to PT Barnum, that there is no such thing as bad publicity.

The vacuum created by the absence of any official word on whether A’ja Wilson will be allowed to play Thursday night when the Las Vegas Aces host the Indiana Fever in a deciding Game 3 of their first-round playoff series was filled by the media classes blaming what happened on the fan’s racism or Wilson’s lack of impulse control, depending on who was doing the talking.

“These players are just utterly unlikable… The only time the WNBA is in the news is when players do absurd things that are indefensible.”@ClayTravis reacts to A’ja Wilson’s interaction with an Indiana Fever fan on Tuesday. pic.twitter.com/rUcutJ5Hq8

— Sport & State (@SportNState) September 30, 2026

(Editor’s note: After this column published, The Athletic reported the WNBA would not punish Wilson or anyone involved, citing an unnamed league source.)

It was filled with the chattering classes nominating Sophie Cunningham for sainthood and wondering why, if female athletes can’t stand the spotlight and its attendant scrutiny, they still expect to be celebrated or compensated like LeBron James.

The airwaves and social media posts were filled with everything but discussions about strategies and matchups and the place in the game’s lore that the Fever can claim if it can complete a first-round takedown of an Aces team that has won three of the past five WNBA championships.

This does not strike me as progress.

Sophie Cunningham making fun of A’ja Wilson on TikTok ???? pic.twitter.com/Q7XoCGmK5w

— BrickCenter (@BrickCenter_) September 30, 2026

At The New York Times, I had a conversation one day with an editor, another woman, that has stuck with me. I was pitching a longform feature about the figure skater Gracie Gold, who checked herself into a treatment center for an eating disorder just months before she was projected to be the face of the 2018 U.S. Winter Olympics team.

It’s a compelling story, the editor agreed, but added that we needed to start searching for uplifting stories on female athletes instead of continuing to drink from the narrative well of the female athlete as a damsel in distress.

The more I considered her comment, the truer her words rang. The range of topics I had written about when the subject was a female athlete ran the gamut from alarming to awful. In other words, not a very broad swath: domestic violence, male stalkers, abusive coaches, unwanted pregnancies, single motherhood and suicidal ideation. Dark stuff.

I started making a concerted effort to find female athletes with light-filled auras who were the heroines of their stories. They were nice narratives, well told, but here’s the thing: the Gracie Gold feature ended up being one of the most read stories published in the sports section that year.

The moral of the story: Distressed damsels pique the public’s interest.

So, back to the WNBA, where the dominant storylines since Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese entered the league together in 2024 could have been repurposed from the Real Housewives franchise. Mean girls and self-anointed enforcers; petty prima donnas and put-upon coaches; press-on nails and pointed index fingers; a spineless leader.

Naturally, viewership has gone through the roof. This season, ESPN’s 29 games averaged 1.37 million viewers, a 17 percent increase over 2025. NBC and CBS ratings of WNBA games were also significantly better than last season.

And what did the league deliver to its burgeoning audience?

• A Phoenix Mercury player, Alyssa Thomas, while ostensibly scrambling for a loose ball, pushing her fist into the neck of Clark, the Indiana Fever point guard, like she was working a bowl of rising dough, while Clark was flopping on the ground in a sequence that drew no foul.

• An inability to define what the “W” in WNBA stands for. The league-wide waffling on what exactly a woman is prompted Enes Kanter Freedom, an ex-Utah Jazz player, to declare his intentions to enter the 2027 WNBA Draft because, as he wrote on X, “If simply declaring who you are is all that’s required, then I meet every single requirement necessary to compete in the WNBA.”

What a drama queen!

A’ja Wilson should be suspended immediately, along with every teammate who followed her into the stands.

She left the court, walked into the baseline seats, and confronted a fan.@WNBA Rule 12A is clear: if a player deliberately enters the stands during a… pic.twitter.com/sgbj1FTG0d

— Enes Kanter FREEDOM (@EnesFreedom) September 30, 2026

• The Coach of the Year, Cheryl Reeve of Minnesota, expressing support, with her voice and her choice of T-shirt, for transgender athletes, after the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham asserted in an interview with ESPN that she wanted “to protect young girls in a locker room, or young girls in sport who shouldn’t have to go against biological men.”

Cunningham was stating a belief shared by over 70 percent of the population, according to a Pew Research Center report, and, yet, the backlash she received was so bracing, her supporters began organizing “Support Sophie Cunningham” rallies outside arenas when the Fever were on the road.

• Green sex toys raining down at various arenas like Clark three-pointers.

• And, in July, a betting scandal featuring Paige Bueckers and Reese, whose $400 wager on a game between their teams — a blatant rules violation — was recorded on video and posted to … checks notes … the WNBA’s official X account. The video was deleted shortly after it was published, presumably after someone read the part in the new collective bargaining agreement that states that any player found guilty of wagering (directly or indirectly), or of offering or attempting to wager, money or anything of value on the outcome, score, or any other aspect of any WNBA competition is, at the discretion of the commissioner, subject to a fine, suspension, and/or dismissal and disqualification from any further association with the league.

Angel Reese said she’ll be requesting her Apple Pay after the game from Paige Bueckers. So the WNBA posted a video of players making a $400 bet and then in the post game presser a player bragged about winning the bet?! Dumbest league in sports history. pic.twitter.com/VUKrraaAWX

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) July 30, 2026

Engelbert decided discretion was the lesser part of valor and opted not to enforce the rule. The takeaway was that the sorry episode would surely galvanize league officials into policing its rules better and improving its crisis communication.

Which brings us to Wilson, a four-time league MVP and the heartbeat of the defending champion Aces who, like Bueckers and Reese before her, seemed to clearly violate a rule on the books in the fourth quarter of Game 2 when she waded into the second row of the seating section behind the basket to confront a male fan who had pointed a finger at her after she barreled over Cunningham and left her splayed on the court.

Cunningham was whistled for the foul, and, really, there’s a whole column to be written on the substandard officiating in the league. The fan took a step toward Wilson and indicated that it was her — she was the one who deserved to be penalized. He didn’t throw a green sex toy at her. He didn’t spill a beer on her. He simply pointed, and took a step in her direction, and that was enough to set Wilson off.

In the end, Wilson did receive a technical for unsportsmanlike conduct. The rulebook is clear on what should have happened next. It states that a player who deliberately enters the spectator stands will face automatic ejection and the incident will be reported to the commissioner.

But Wilson was allowed to stay in the game. She scored eight of her 22 points after the ugly scene. Any further consequences for Wilson would appear to be up to Engelbert, and her track record on discipline is clear. She has none, so expect Wilson to be in the lineup Thursday and for the game’s television ratings to skyrocket.

Unless, by some miracle, the game is played cleanly and with good sportsmanship. Then the viewers will turn the game off and go scrolling for their next source of outrage.

More from this network:
Domains for Sale · GOTPeople.org · TheDSAPlatform · The Truth About Socialism

Donate to GOTPeople.org