Women's tennis, women's volleyball (indoor and outdoor), women's track, and women's soccer I think are sports a large majority of us look at as high end and you don't think you are watching lesser players. Those players are elite, and we view them as such. I would even argue we look at women's college basketball (the top teams) as great teams and we respect them and know the best girl players.
Bu then on the flipside the WNBA, despite having the best of the best women's basketball players, has almost always been looked at as an inferior product no one has much of an interest in viewing.
Why is this?
It's because of the WNBA's entire marketing program the last decade+. Many office people should have lost jobs.
We've been over this before here on NT (and it has gotten better over the years) but their biggest mistake was "We Got Next." We knew the WNBA was going to have to align themselves with the NBA, there was no question there. But the route they went for years of "We are equal to men" and splicing NBA highlights with WNBA highlights, wearing close to the same NBA uniforms/logos, and also throwing in the WNBA players in the NBA All Star weekend, etc turned off so many people that the league has been playing catch up ever since and great players like Griner, etc are having to use Europe as the place to make their money and have fans get really interested.
There are hundreds of thousands of NBA followers who are still offended by that initial marketing push, who now say "no chance in hell you are catching me watching WNBA" like it is a pay back for what the NBA put them through. I admit back in the day I was one of them. Meanwhile other top women's sports have shown if you can make yourself a stand-alone product, let it grow organically showcasing the best players in the world, people will watch and also won't look as them as "oh god it's women." I do think the WNBA is slowly getting bigger and bigger which is a good thing. And these latest ladies coming in cannot hurt.
