David Berri and Nefertiti Walker’s ‘Slaying the Trolls’ provides a compass for common WNBA discourse » Winsidr

As the WNBA continues to grow with more fans, bigger stadiums, new team facilities, and charter flights, online critics and “trolls” of women’s sports continue to add their two cents.

For every WNBA highlight posted by a mainstream network, there are plenty of “no one cares” comments to follow. Or even a slew of “they don’t even dunk” remarks. WNBA followers have all heard the common, sexist and frankly lazy, judgments for years.

David Berri, who co-authored Slaying the Trolls with Nefertiti Walker, hopes the book serves as a compass for encounters with negative discourse online surrounding women’s sports.

“There’s this whole host of troll arguments that are out there,” Berri told Winsidr in an interview. “Throughout the book, what we try to do is go through and point out, when they say this, this is the evidence. When they say that, that’s the evidence and that’s why they’re wrong. The idea is that it’s basically a playbook.”

‘Mansplanations’ on women’s basketball occur all too often, even in the public spotlight. In 2021, former NBA star Shaquille O’Neal had a suggestion for, of all people, Candace Parker on how to make the WNBA equal to the NBA.

“In beach volleyball, the women’s net is maybe half an inch lower,” O’Neal said to Parker on a TNT broadcast. “You think if we just lower the rim so y’all can dunk like we dunk, that will give y’all more ‘oomph’ than you already have?”

Parker quickly disagreed. That means a lot coming from one of the WNBA’s greatest players, but for followers who hear lazy critiques sitting at their local sports bar, or wearing WNBA merch in public, the conversation might be more difficult to navigate.

The slam dunk argument is one of many that Berri and Walker tackle throughout the book. They looked at twenty-first-century data on the number of dunks in the NBA and found that there is no statistical relationship between the frequency of a team that dunks and how much revenue that team sees. The amount of revenue is attributed to many factors, like star power, the team’s market and fandom, and maybe most importantly, winning.

Fans often attend games or watch broadcasts to support their favorite teams and see star players. One of the NBA’s biggest stars, Steph Curry, who competed against New York Liberty star guard Sabrina Ionescu in a 3-point contest at NBA All-Star Weekend in February, rarely dunks. Curry was paid $48 million over the 2022-23 season by the Golden State Warriors and never dunked the ball once, which Berri and Walker note in Slaying the Trolls.

Nevertheless, fans still line up in droves hours early to watch Curry warm-up with his signature circus shots. Similar to WNBA fans who want to see Ionescu’s logo threes, the tough shot-making of Arike Ogunbowale and now, that of Indiana Fever rookie Caitlin Clark.

The WNBA (or the NBA) doesn’t need a dazzling 3-point shooter to get fans through the door either, though. An Ogunbowale, Ionescu, Curry or Clark on the floor certainly helps, but fans want to see their teams win.

The Appetite for Winning

Just recently, the Connecticut Sun and Los Angeles Sparks made history by playing the first-ever WNBA game at TD Garden in Boston in front of 19,125 fans, a sellout crowd. 

The Sparks are toward the bottom of the standings amid a rebuild and battling injuries throughout the season. Connecticut, on the other hand, owns the second-best record in the league and has championship aspirations.

Before the game, Sun guard DiJonai Carrington spoke to the context of the sellout. She acknowledged that her team doesn’t have a “media superstar” like Angel Reese or Clark, although Connecticut’s Alyssa Thomas and DeWanna Bonner are stars in their own right.

“LA’s a great team, but you wouldn’t expect this type of crowd for a game against them right now,” Carrington said to reporters after shootaround at TD Garden. “So I’m just really excited, it really shows how much (Boston) loves sports. It doesn’t matter what sport, what gender. They’re going to show up and show out.” 

“I think it’s super exciting. I did not think we were going to sell out. I thought we were going to cover up the whole top part (of the stadium) above the boxes. Sometimes, that’s what (WNBA) teams do when they play in big arenas.”

The appetite was there to pack the Garden for Connecticut’s 69-61 win over Los Angeles. The Sun isn’t exactly a good 3-point shooting team. They don’t have a quote, unquote, media superstar. But they win, and the fans show up for it. Not only in Boston, either.

According to Across the Timeline, Connecticut averages 8,486 fans at home games this season, which all occur at Mohegan Sun Arena outside of the one game at TD Garden. According to the team, 8,910 tickets sold marks a sellout, which puts Connecticut’s average home attendance just below that maximum threshold. 

People can fall back on their lazy “no one cares” and “there are no fans” arguments all they want. They’re just unequivocally false.

Where do we go from here?

The WNBA still has a long way to go. There’s no denying that. Players need to receive a bigger piece of the pie in league revenue, which will hopefully come soon with a new collective bargaining agreement (CBA). If the opt-out clause in the current CBA is exercised by a deadline set for November, the opt-out would take place after the 2025 season.

Also, the NBA, who created the WNBA and initially subsidized the league, needs to treat the W as an investment with immense growth opportunity. Growth that we are currently seeing in real time.

We’ve all heard claims that the WNBA isn’t profitable through arguments that the league doesn’t make money. But, as Berri and Walker point out in Slaying the Trolls, the WNBA is a private company that doesn’t release its financial data, so how can we take the league’s profitability, or potential lack thereof, as fact? The narrative still stands publicly, though. 

The NBA owns half of the WNBA, while WNBA teams and owners collectively own the other half, which means a WNBA owner, unlike other sports leagues, only owns 50% of their team. 

“In the NBA, the owners of the teams own the league because the league is the teams,” Berri said. “In the WNBA, half of the teams are owned by the NBA and the other half is owned by that owner, which is bizarre. It’s a bizarre way to do it.

“People have said the NBA subsidizes the WNBA. Owners don’t subsidize what they own, that’s not what they’re doing. They invest in what they own. That’s what we call that, if you own something and you put money into it, you wouldn’t say ‘I just subsidized it.’ No, you invested in it because you’re the owner. That’s what you’re supposed to do, you invest in what you own. When you say the word subsidize, what you’re saying is that this is a charity and I’m helping it out because I’m a good person.”

As Berri pointed out, the WNBA isn’t a charity, it’s a business, which the NBA owns and invests in. Creating a narrative that the WNBA is a charity as opposed to an investment limits the athlete’s bargaining power and can potentially limit the share of revenue that players receive, which has continued to be the case historically.

There’s no doubt that the NBA is currently a much bigger business than the WNBA. Even though the WNBA doesn’t have to release its finances, in October of 2018, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said, “on average (the WNBA has lost) over $10 million every year we’ve operated.”

Plenty has changed since 2018 with continued growth in the WNBA. In 2023, Jennah Haque of Bloomberg reported the WNBA was projected to bring in between $180 and $200 million in combined league and team revenue, up from about $102 million in 2019. In June, The Washington Post reported that the league expects to lose $50 million this season. Those reports should change in upcoming seasons after a new, record-setting, media rights deal, plus a new CBA on the horizon.

Even if the WNBA continued to lose tens of millions each year, why would the NBA, a multi-billion dollar business, point that out? Berri asks that question and points out that in the 2021-22 season, the NBA’s Houston Rockets paid guard John Wall $44.3 million, while he never played a minute, which made his salary a total loss. A loss much bigger than that of the entire WNBA’s losses Silver claimed in 2018 and nearly equal to the number reported by The Washington Post in June.

Women’s sports fans unfortunately open themselves up to unwanted discourse just by enjoying the games they love, both online and in public. Berri and Walker’s research, which is all outlined in Slaying the Trolls, provides context. 

Unsolicited feedback is all too common for women’s sports fans. But, there’s a map for it. That is, if the critics are open to it.