Sue Bird on Economics of WNBA

Random musings on this:

I agree that too many people forget the roots of economics when purportedly talking about Economics.  Let's leave that wider problem out of this thread  

I maintain that the W provides a real financial value to the NBA. 

The women's game draws an audience the pro men's game largely does not reach.  It means that more girls consider basketball as a viable "best" sport, and become more interested.  With more professional opportunities that are not overseas, more parents encourage and/or accept the above.  More colleges offer more scholarship to better players and those circles of families and friends.  Many of these also follow the men's game.  Also, the NBA's market has been centralizing more and more to the cities, and the WNBA reaches a higher percentage of the suburban and rural audience. 

Consider: the CPTV years had a huge positive impact on UCONN, even if the earliest audiences were microscopic.  Later, that viewership was staggeringly large for a small-time public broadcaster, as teams and laundry became players and stories and that drew people in.  Similar transformations have happened around the country.  These collectively have raised the profile of the college game ... a lot.  Those audiences have a reason to follow their graduated stars like Candice, Stewie, or Aja.  In time, that investment results in viewers and followers of the NBA as well.  Extremely tough to put an exact figure on that, but it is real.   

My history is an example. When my pre-teen daughter's soccer pals talked her into basketball tryouts during the offseason, we encouraged her to give it her all. She was a pretty good athlete and understood team structure concepts, but had only rudimentary grade-school-gym-class level skills. A coach took her on, with the plan that her effort and enthusiasm would be contagious. The better players talked about hoping to someday play for UCONN ... which they knew because of CPTV. We followed together even after her "basketball career" ended with being a bench player on her middle-school team. Might that have had some influence on her selecting UCONN for her 8-year medical student plan? Who knows. But it gave her a platform to strike up conversation with the players once she arrived ... and build casual friendships ... and go to games. Living and following separately, we enjoyed talks about the latest heroics of the team, and my UCONN fandom was cemented and continues decades later. And having the channels to feed that addiction plus an interest in our alumna, leads me to watch the W ... and see a lot more NBA stuff than would ever have happened otherwise.

Sue says that they should make "as much", but she knows well that this will never happen until the W's audience grows to rival that of the NBA.  Across industries, the top 200 people in their field (W has 144 players + coaches, etc)  usually do earn seven figures.  Naturally, some fields' compensation reaches further than others, but if her point is that the current compensation isn't enough, then that side of the argument is fair.  So too, is the demand side... sell out the arenas and the merch first, proving the value is there, and your bargaining position will be better.  

Sue also does say that they work just as hard. That is a justifiable point of pride and worthy of admiration, but it is not an economic principle.  I think it is a losing argument, as well.  Kyla Irwin, has worked her absolute tail off for basketball for most of her entire life.  Alas, she didn't have the physical gifts to compete at that level.  I suspect Sue would agree that the WNBA salaries should not be diluted by paying hard working people who are just not good enough to be picked up by a team.  

I think the better argument might be that increasing the salaries - especially of the lower end of the WNBA - might encourage more players to make basketball their career, increasing the values described above.

"I maintain that the W provides a real financial value to the NBA."

Yet nothing in your post supports that.