PHILADELPHIA — Face it, Philadelphia could have no better cheerleader for a WNBA franchise than Dawn Staley, current iconic player-turned-coach of her sport.
South Carolina’s coach, just off another NCAA title, a year after coaching the USA to Olympic gold, isn’t currently available to play, coach, or run a team in her hometown. But she has a bully pulpit and is not afraid to use it.
When Staley appeared on Amazon Prime last month as a color analyst at the WNBA’s Commissioner’s Cup, she asked WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert on the air about expansion, except her question was specific: What could Philadelphia do to be awarded a WNBA franchise?
The commissioner, herself from South Jersey, answered the question with an appropriate amount of commissioner-speak, mentioning data analysis being performed, how Philly is on the expansion list, also mentioning the San Francisco Bay Area, Toronto, “there’s a lot of others. Portland, Denver, Austin.”
This part of Engelbert’s answer was interesting: “We’ve been contacted by a lot of cities, including ownership groups in Philly. We need to find the right arena, situation — the right ownership groups that are going to be committed for the long-term and really just help us grow the sport.”
That last part … bingo. Start there. Find the right ownership group. But let’s help the WNBA a bit with its rigorous analysis by asking another pertinent question — is Philadelphia, in fact, a good women’s basketball market?
The answer requires nuance. Philly, the largest market without a WNBA team, has always been a first-rate incubator of women’s basketball playing and coaching talent, up there with any region in the world. But it has never proven itself as a game-in, game-out market. You can’t just open the doors and expect fans to flock in.
When this becomes the question — is Philadelphia a good women’s sports market? — Staley herself sees the nuances. She’s lived through them. She doesn’t scoff at such a question.
“It’s a great sports city,” Staley said in a telephone interview. “Whether we’re ready for a WNBA team, it’s so hard to gauge. There’s so much stuff going on in Philly. I think that’s a good thing. There’s also this thing that’s missing.”
She meant women’s sports, missing here on a top professional level. Yes, Staley continued, the market is there. She believes she can reach out and touch it.
“If it’s done right,” Staley said.
What did she mean by that?
“Philly teams have got to compete,” Staley said.
She didn’t mean championship or bust, she added, “but at least for the playoffs. A losing team — that ain’t going to go over in Philly.”
While not in a position to take a formal WNBA role right now, given her South Carolina duties, Staley still is the top consigliere out there for any group trying to figure out the market where Staley played in high school and professionally, before she coached at Temple. She’s kept her fingers on the pulse on her hometown. Who knows, maybe someday she’ll be back.
Still a young league
Is Philadelphia a good women’s basketball market? Is such a question even answerable?
“Nope, it is not — not in the slightest,” said David Berri, an economics professor at Southern Utah University who has closely studied the WNBA.
He’s not just talking about Philly.
“The WNBA is a 25-year-old league,” Berri said. “The National Football League is the world’s biggest league. It was founded in 1920. When the Eagles were founded in 1933, it was the dumbest investment in history, in the middle of the Depression — 90 percent of the teams went out of business. It was exactly the same story in Major League Baseball. Of the first 18 franchises, 16 of them failed. Fifteen of the first 23 NBA franchises failed. This is the story of sports leagues.”
He means they start without a fan base, making them unprofitable from the get-go.
“You’re not building a taco stand,” Berri said. “You need a customer who is addicted to your product. You can’t possibly be looking at profits that first year or second year or in five or 10 years.”
Then, Berri said, professional sports history suggests it flips the other way.
“You eventually will have a business that no matter how stupid you are, you will sell tickets, which is unlike other businesses,” Berri said.
Berri argues that women’s sports “absolutely” can find an audience, it just takes time. The American Basketball League, which had a team in Philly in 1997-98, went out of business during its third season.
“Of course they failed after three years,” Berri said. “If your expectations are you’re going to make money after three years — there’s no example of that.”
Right now, Berri said of the WNBA, “their attendance matches up almost perfectly with the NBA after 25 years.”
Short-lived Rage
Part of the reason Philly doesn’t have a WNBA team may be chalked up to accidents of timing. If the WNBA hadn’t begun at roughly the same time as the ABL, who knows? The ABL was the first league to get to Philly, in 1997. Also, the Sixers weren’t looking to be a WNBA ownership group immediately, when the initial WNBA ownership was entirely NBA ownership in existing NBA markets.
It’s ancient history now, maybe not completely relevant, but if you’re looking for proof that Philadelphia is a great or even good women’s basketball market, attendance for the Philadelphia Rage during the season and a half of its existence in the ABL does not provide it. That team was at or near the bottom of that league in attendance, even with Staley at point guard before she jumped to the WNBA.
The Rage had moved to Philadelphia in 1997 after one season in Richmond and used the Palestra and the Liacouras Center as home venues. In 1997-98, the Rage averaged 3,238 fans per game, eighth among the nine ABL teams, which collectively averaged 4,333.
The ABL folded midway through the 1998-99 season. At that point, Philadelphia averaged just 1,495 fans a game, worst in the league.
Cathy Andruzzi, GM of the Rage, believes a longer run would have proven Philadelphia as a strong market, that the 2000 Final Four in Philly did, in fact, prove it, not just by the sold-out crowds, but the local corporate commitment to the event.
“I think the challenges were just being patient with the growth,” Andruzzi said, speaking of the Rage and the ABL in general. “I knew we could get sponsorships, because we did get sponsorships.”
A Final Four is a one-off event, two crowds in three days. The fact the Wells Fargo Center sold out isn’t a surprise. Final Fours do that, men’s and women’s.
But that event was significant. Ike Richman, PR impresario at the time for the host site, said, “That was an eye-opener for a lot of people,” referring to the excitement generated locally by that Final Four, which was made to order, featuring Penn State and Rutgers and the championship game pitting the two Goliaths of the sport, Tennessee and Connecticut. It even was a PR dream, Richman said, featuring Pat (Summit) vs. Geno (Auriemma).
“We just had to go to Pat’s and Geno’s for a photo opportunity,” Richman said, so they did, hitting the rival cheesesteak joints.
But what about sustained attendance? Looking at women’s college basketball home attendance for the last pre-pandemic season of 2019-20, no Philadelphia-area team was in the top 50 nationally. You don’t expect Villanova or Temple to compete with South Carolina or Oregon or Iowa State or Connecticut or Louisville, the top five nationally, the ones above 9,000 a game … but Toledo? (Toledo was 26th nationally, averaging 3,844 per game.) You want to say that Toledo doesn’t have the same pro competition in the winter, maybe so … but Central Florida (29th, 3,776) provides other entertainment options. South Florida (42nd, 3,002) makes the list, too.
Is any of that relevant?
“Things have changed,” said Brooke Queenan, a former WNBA player, a West Chester East and Boston College graduate and vice chair of the board at Philadelphia Youth Basketball. “I think the fan base has changed. Some of the investment in women’s sports have changed.”
In her mind, Queenan said, the top women’s stars always were dynamic personalities, but she’s seen a bigger spotlight lately on a player such as Sue Bird. Queenan thinks that’s both because the WNBA has done a good job lately of promoting its stars nationally, and those stars are adept at creating awareness.
But what about Philly?
“Philly really is a sports city,” Queenan said. “And basketball is iconic in Philly. Philly has always been a very progressive city.”
“Philly seems to be obsessed with sports more than other markets,” Berri said. “That’s what you want. You want fans who are susceptible to the addiction. … That’s ultimately what fandom is, thinking about this stuff, talking about it, being hopelessly irrational about it.”
Is there room here for another addiction? Is Philly open to women’s sports?
That is still to be determined. Berri goes back to the calendar.
“Prior to Title IX, it was almost impossible to have a talent base, so your history really starts in 1972,” Berri said. “So 1972 is basically 1900 for men. This matters because fans get an awful lot of entertainment value from historical context. This player reminds me of that player. You have to have the history to make the comparison.”
“I think you can attract new fans to women’s basketball,” Queenan said of Philadelphia, adding that there are enough stars currently in the WNBA to make it possible to drop them in new markets and get the ball rolling.
Winning matters. The Chicago Sky averaged a league-worst 3,932 fans in 2009 as a sub-.500 team, still working to find the right venue. This season, the Sky are at 7,180, fourth in the league, after winning the 2021 WNBA title. Is Chicago a good women’s basketball market? The correct answer: it depends. The Indiana Fever are struggling to draw fans these days as they struggle to win games. The league leader in attendance, Seattle, with 10,631 has star power in Bird and Breanna Stewart.
Berri said with no financials released by the WNBA or NBA, it’s hard to have firm answers on revenues or profits, but, Berri said, “My guess, they’re slightly profitable,” noting the salary base for the summer league isn’t high — a point of contention for many players forced to play the bulk of their season overseas for more money.
Berri also suggested that the next WNBA television contract could bring a windfall, using Major League Soccer as a comparison. “They got $2.5 billion over 10 years — and the WNBA gets better ratings.”
You can’t help but think Philly missed an opportunity in recent years. If Elena Delle Donne could have been catching passes from current WNBA assist leader Natasha Cloud here instead of in Washington, that would have been a big start for a local franchise. It’s easy to believe Delle Donne, originally with Chicago, would have forced a trade to Philly instead of D.C. if there had been a franchise here, given the proximity to Delle Donne’s Delaware roots. It’s easy to believe Cloud, a Cardinal O’Hara and St. Joseph’s graduate, would have become an important figure in Philly as she has become in Washington. Cloud has been outspoken about her personal efforts in trying to help get a franchise in Philly.
It may be parochial to suggest a local pro team needs local players. That’s not how it works for the Phillies or Eagles or Sixers and not how it has worked in women’s professional sports. Stewart is a star in Seattle because she’s a star, not because she’s from Seattle. Same for A’ja Wilson in Las Vegas. Could Kahleah Copper sell tickets in her hometown? It’s good to remember Staley didn’t over two decades ago. But Copper helps sell tickets in Chicago, since she’s an important player on a championship team.
It’s also worth remembering that Delaware regularly sold out its Carpenter Center, capacity 5,000, when Delle Donne played for the Blue Hens, regularly out-drawing Delaware’s men’s team.
When it comes to attracting ownership, Queenan said, the star power of the league can be seen as a plus.
“They’re well-versed in social justice issues. They’re really articulate about women’s equity issues,” Queenan said of top stars, “and they’re also really good basketball players.”
Tobias Harris of the Sixers has pointed out that WNBA players actually are leading the way in being social activists, with the men following behind.
“It goes to show that if you have a platform and a voice, you can use it in a productive way,” Harris said in February at a Penn panel “addressing racial awareness, race and sports,” adding that “we stole a lot of ideas [from WNBA players] because it was working.”
Why that matters? Some fans are turned off by activists. Others gravitate to them. That’s the fan base the WNBA would be looking to capture. To suggest the nation’s fourth-largest market doesn’t have enough of such fans is not demographically possible.
They’d still be looking for a winner, though.
A basketball market
Why didn’t Philly take a WNBA franchise when the league was first founded? NBA commissioner David Stern led the way in setting up an ownership model that was strictly NBA owners. Philly passed out of the gate.
“Back in the day when the WNBA was being launched, I told David that my plate was full just trying to restore Philly as a basketball market,” said Pat Croce, the Sixers president at the time, noting that the Sixers had “only” about 3,000 season ticket-holders at the time.
The WNBA was founded in 1996, with play starting in 1997. Remember that Allen Iverson didn’t get to the Sixers until 1996. Iverson was the top overall draft choice because the Sixers had finished 18-64 in 1995-96.
If there was a small, local window of opportunity, it was a few years later, in 1999, when the WNBA, at 10 teams at the time, decided to add two more, with four more franchises being added a year later.
“I wanted to be part of the expansion in 1999,” said Billy King, the Sixers general manager at the time, noting that the ABL had folded by that time. “Ownership would have supported it.”
Whether that actually would have come to pass, it became moot. The WNBA chose Orlando and Minnesota.
“When they passed, I told Pat we should not go for it (in the next round),” King said.
At the time, the principal Sixers owners were a partnership between Flyers owner Ed Snider and Comcast. Who knows if they would have stayed the WNBA course?
“Ed would not have been happy,” one of the people involved said of Snider losing money on a WNBA franchise.
So maybe that window opened for a moment and closed just as quickly. All ancient history now. Val Ackerman, the first commissioner of the WNBA, and now commissioner of the Big East, recalled that when Stern was “adamant on expanding, he had owners saying, ‘I’m interested, can I have a team?’ Because it was in-house, there was no expansion fee.”
There did need to be “a willingness to take losses,” Ackerman said, in addition to the tremendous amount of work involved.
And now?
“We took 100 cities, put them through a lens of about 20 to 25 different metrics, think about demographics and psychographics and NCAA fandom and viewership, current WNBA viewership — there’s actually some cities out there that really are strong on their current WNBA fandom — Fortune 500 companies, arena situations, diversity of the population and all that,” Engelbert said in a recent interview with Swishappeal.com. “So that’s how we’re determining it. We’re narrowing that down now, but also we want to find the right ownership groups, the right groups, and we’re trying to transform the economics of the league to set new owners up for success. We don’t want them to come in and fail.”
Psychographics? The study and classification of people “according to their attitudes, aspirations, and other psychological criteria, especially in market research.”
You want to spin Philly through that lens, maybe it lands on Staley’s definition … Not patient. Have to win. And you need a plan for when the novelty of it all wears off.
Staley herself coaches the team with the greatest current attendance in the sport in this country, college or pro. That took time to build at South Carolina. When Staley first coached Temple, “our attendance grew as we got more successful, but we weren’t competing for the national championship,” Staley said, saying attendance “wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t great.”
She’d like to think, she added, that if she came back to Temple now, the attendance would be higher. (Note to Owls fans: Staley is not suggesting she’s coming back, just that her star is brighter now, even in her home city.) Winning matters. In that way, Philly isn’t so different from other markets. Icons sell tickets.
“You’ve got to give us hope,” Staley said of Philly as a fan base. “If we fall short, we’ll be highly disappointed, but we’ll be OK. But you’ve got to give us hope.”
