WNBA’s Game 6 Scheduling Problem Speaks To Much Larger Issue With Big Brother NBA

The WNBA already has a national anthem problem and a public perception issue. To add insult to indignity, it now has a Finals scheduling snafu. By tying the best-of-seven series at two games apiece with a victory Saturday, Golden State brought a Game 6 in Atlanta into sharp focus.

Apparently, nobody with the WNBA or NBA had looked that far ahead, because the NBA’s Hawks already have a game at State Farm Arena, where the Dream have been playing in the postseason, slated for the same night, Thursday, as Game 6. It boggles the mind that the scheduling logistics were not arranged, and rearranged, and arranged again, like the faces of a Rubik’s Cube until all the dates lined up, but here we are.

Wanna buy tickets for Game 6 of the WNBA Finals in Atlanta? No one knows yet where or which day it’ll be. Story with @alexaphilippou on yet another scheduling mess that everyone is trying frantically to solve. https://t.co/lUadoMoMMN

— Ramona Shelburne (@ramonashelburne) October 25, 2026

The oversight, while baffling, is also illuminating. Little sisters of arrogant big brothers will recognize the pattern instantly. In professional basketball as in professional golf, you have the big-league basketball male sibling showing utter disregard, bordering on contempt, for its big-league basketball kid sister.

I’ve seen the scenario play out amongst my girlfriends with older brothers, and while covering the golf beat for The New York Times, I saw it rear its ugly head in the Augusta National power brokers’ indifference to the LPGA. I was in the press room during the 2018 Masters when Augusta National’s chairman, Fred Ridley, announced that starting in 2019, a 54-hole international women’s amateur would be played the week before the Masters, with the final round taking place on the hallowed grounds of Augusta National.

Never mind that the women’s first major, which always included the top women’s amateurs, also took place the week before the Masters, across the country in California, which meant Augusta National would be siphoning the top amateur golfers and most of the media from one of the LPGA’s legacy events. I’d later find out that the LPGA commissioner at the time, Mike Whan, wasn’t even invited to the table when the women’s amateur tournament was proposed, discussed and rubber stamped.

Funny, isn’t it, how powerful groups of men, after climbing and clawing their way to the top of the food chain, can starve the groups of women climbing and clawing to catch them?

The WNBA has given me, a straight white woman, scant reason to feel any kinship to its product or its principles. But I must admit, after hearing about the scheduling bind the league finds itself in, I do feel sympathy for its plight. This is a league that continues to be subsidized by the NBA, whose team owners control, more or less, half of the WNBA.

If the NBA cared about helping the WNBA stand on its own in any meaningful way, it would have prioritized the WNBA Finals games over its regular-season contests, meaning this would be a Hawks and Cleveland Cavaliers problem, not a Dream and Valkyries riddle to solve.

Putting embarrassing optics aside and just looking at this from a purely business perspective, how did the WNBA not figure out a Game 6 date/time that would work for State Farm Arena as soon as the series was tied 1-1?

— Rachelle Morris (@rachelle_morris) October 25, 2026

The WNBA has options: hold the game at the Dream’s regular-season home, the 3,500-seat Gateway Center Arena; schedule Game 6 as a matinee before the Hawks’ night game; or push Game 6 back to Friday in Atlanta, which would necessitate a Game 7 being held on Election Day Tuesday. Given the two teams’ refusal to remain on court for the playing of the national anthem, I’m guessing the conflict with in-person voting would be a non-issue.

But even after that problem is rectified, a bigger issue looms: the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, is coordinating the search for a new WNBA commissioner, and given the league’s myriad problems, this decision is of paramount importance. It’s not hyperbole to say the direction of women’s professional basketball rests on the hire. If Silver and Co. are this cavalier about a scheduling issue, what hope is there that they will make an inspired choice to lead the WNBA into a bright, abundant future?

If the WNBA wants to rebound from all of this year’s bad publicity, it can’t keep letting itself get boxed out by its big brother.

Follow Karen Crouse on X at @Kayceeunplugged

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