There is no rest for women’s basketball right now, and the momentum remains palpable.
Fresh off a college season and NCAA Tourney where TV audience records were coming in hot from week to week, the sport flows right into the pro ranks, and that begins tonight with the WNBA Draft -- an event that already feels like one of the league’s most high-profile moments yet (and be on the lookout for new WNBA creative airing on ESPN).
There is star power unlike ever before surrounding Caitlin Clark, who is set to be taken No. 1 overall. The former Iowa star is fresh off a record-setting career at Iowa and the NFL-esque numbers she was able to deliver in March Madness. She’s already linked up with marquee WNBA sponsors like State Farm, and her Q Score is likely in rarefied air (if you didn’t catch it yet, check out her great cameo on “SNL” with Weekend Update host Michael Che -- a rarity for athletes not named Peyton Manning).
As ESPN’s lead voice on the NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament and the WNBA, Ryan Ruocco has been sitting at the perfect nexus point to see the explosion in popularity for women’s hoops -- and he has BIG expectations for tonight’s event from the Brooklyn Academy of Music (with a live audience for the first time in years).
“It’s going to feel like the biggest draft ever, without question,” Ruocco told me. “Part of it was having a live audience -- and the venue this year -- was always going to make it bigger. And then you have the most-anticipated star coming out of college that we’ve had in the WNBA era. ... It’s also a time when everything has been trending positively for a while, and we’ve been making steady, incremental progress when it comes to the WNBA and these events. ... The ground has been fertile for that big pop if that right star came along. Caitlin is that star.”
Keep the numbers coming
A record TV audience for a WNBA Draft tonight? Count on it (I expect the event to be well over 1 million viewers for the first time; it was 572,000 last year). And that’s just a precursor to what’s coming with Clark’s games in the early days of the WNBA season. But how high can the numbers go? At least for the Indiana Fever’s opener on ESPN2, Ruocco expects that game to “obliterate” the previous ESPN2 WNBA record.
“If she comes out of the gates and scores like 30 in her first two games, then that Saturday ABC game on the opening weekend against the Liberty, where she’s playing at Barclays Center for the first time, that number probably gets even more of a pop,” he added. “Metricly, what she has done, we haven’t seen before. Even when we’ve had high expectations, she’s blown through them. ... [The WNBA] is different than college, and it’s different than a win-or-go-home tournament, but as long as she’s playing well, there’s going to be some pretty strong, sustained interest throughout the season.”
A best possible outcome for the league itself is that as fans tune in to watch Clark, they also see some great play from the rest of the league -- which still features great stars in Diana Taurasi, Candace Parker, A’ja Wilson, Sabrina Ionescu and others (not to mention new additions like Angel Reese). “[Clark] draws people into what’s a great product,” said Ruocco. “So maybe they wouldn’t have been normally, but they watch Caitlin, and they get into it and they’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, the Liberty are so fun to watch, and Breanna Stewart is unbelievable, and the Las Vegas Aces are absurdly good.’ The league is at a point in time where they can capitalize on those casual viewers with an incredibly entertaining product.”
Which market could add value?
In terms of which markets might make sense as expansion targets, Ruocco brought up Portland and Toronto as potential spots that could grow the league’s media prowess. But what about a former WNBA market? “If you could bring back the Comets and call back to that history and nostalgia from the beginning of the league, I think there’s value in that,” Ruocco said of the Houston market.
Commissioner Cathy Engelbert hit on a few issues during her press conference before the WNBA Draft
