I’m okay with the in-a-perfect-world argument how you shouldn’t be able to own a national sports team in general if you can’t annually afford $20M-25M for chartering. But yeah, for this world & this league, there’s a fuck ton of nuance that’s lost within that argument.
I will say, I’ll give Stewie (and BG indirectly) credit for getting news places like CNN to talk about this… even as it’s probably not worth much.
The bigger a cause is, the less likely raised attention to it actually leads to action.
She’s right in that once you legally allow charters into the league in any regular or semi-regular capacity, there’s no going back. I certainly expect all Finals teams to get chartered from here on out. Any solution that’s out there somewhere needs to be a long-term one. Doing a patchwork job on chartering every season from now until the next round of CBA negotiations where you hope the patchwork job somehow leads to a longterm one on its own seems like an unwise way to go about it all.
There’s also this:
Multiple sources also told ESPN's Ramona Shelburne in January that it's been assumed that Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner may need to fly privately due to security concerns…
However, Griner -- a free agent expected to re-sign with the Mercury if she plays in the 2023 season, as she has indicated -- has not made any special requests on travel.
And maybe because of Stewart’s “efforts” (I say that loosely here, considering they seem to be mostly through tweets), there’s this:
"I'm thinking very hard about how we can do this," she said of charters. "And it's all in the next round of media negotiations and bringing in bigger corporate partners because that's how we -- the teams and the league -- would be able to fund it."
And for those who were unaware of the official stakeholder divisions of the league like I was:
The ownership split of the WNBA is this: 42% by the NBA's 30 NBA teams, 42% by the 12 WNBA teams and 16% by investors from the league's capital raise in 2022. Ownership, investors and the players' union will all be involved, of course, in subsequent CBA negotiations including travel.
One group, which includes the league's newer owners—Tsai, Davis, Marc Lore in Minnesota, and Larry Gottesdiener in Atlanta—sees its teams as attractive investment vehicles. A second group considers them accounting conveniences or charity cases; to the owners in this group, a WNBA team is simply resigned to losing money. "One WNBA owner proudly proclaims the value of the WNBA team to be zero, according to multiple league sources,"
Unless Engelbert vows to find a way to rid the league of Group B owners, the league possibly will only be able to be as strong as its weakest link within that group.
It's really an interesting situation, and the lack of response to my question about who owns the WNBA points up the real issue: We have no idea who's in charge.
The ownership runs the league, and we don't know if the 42% NBA portion is the NBA itself, or includes the owners who also have NBA teams. We don't know who owns the 16% that came with the $75 million.
That group, whoever it is, may be just fine with the league as it is. A tax writeoff for some, a barely profitable operation for others. Or that group may be actively pushing to upgrade, and is seriously exploring finding $25 million for charters. But if that money goes to charters, it's not going for expansion, as it appears that each team's charter cost is $2 million. Two more teams and now charters are about $30 million a year, and I have no idea where that money might come from. (Why should the NBA pay for it? It makes almost as much sense for the NFL to pay for it, or Amazon.)
Why do charters mean no expansion? Because expansion cuts the media and sponsorship revenue for each team by about $2 million, as far as I can tell, so the cost of charters and expansion is $4 million per team. And even Joe Tsai might balk at that.
I think she genuinely cares about trying to fully convert the W into a profitable entity independent from the NBA. Trying to transform the league’s economics was probably long overdue, even as it’s naturally a slow-moving process.
But more importantly, we just don’t know how anymore much veto power she actually has as it relates to the 42% or however much the W is owned by “the NBA”.
The valuation of the Storm at $151 Million implies that the league definitely didn't get value for money when they sold 16% of equity for $75 million. But this is unsurprising.