Lisa Borders, WNBA embrace social change as good business

“We should be able to choose who we love, what we do with our bodies, how we feel about public safety, how we feel about education… we shouldn’t have to defend ourselves and our right to speak up and have perspective on anything we want to talk about. Women are 52 percent of the population in this country, more than half of every community. We’re not yet half of the people in Congress or half of the governors in this country or half of the CEOs, but trust me, my friend, it’s coming. It’s coming.”

That was taken not from a recent Elizabeth Warren fundraising speech, or the dais at the Women’s March, but from WNBA president Lisa Borders, responding to a question at her state of the league press conference Saturday morning in Seattle, prior to the 2017 All Star Game.

And this is no isolated statement. Over the past year, Borders and the league have made a clear decision to buy into the larger progressive energy exemplified by the league’s players, its owners, and what the league sees as both its fans and more critically, its would-be fans.

It is the last part that is perhaps most interesting, and represents the greatest change of the still-new Borders tenure, not to mention the league itself.

Just over a year ago, Borders put the league in an untenable position by issuing fines for those WNBA players who failed to comply with the league’s uniform standards while protesting a rash of violence, both by police against minority communities and targeted police killings. The decision enraged many within the player community, led to a massive public backlash, and ultimately, Borders rescinded the fines.

While that decision-making process has been discussed, it is striking to consider that as recently as last July, player activism was viewed as entirely separate from the daily business of the WNBA.

Contrast that with a week that began in Seattle on Tuesday with a Planned Parenthood rally outside KeyArena in Seattle, organized by Seattle Storm ownership, attended by Chicago Sky player Imani Boyette and clearly embraced by the league. The effort to brand the WNBA as, in many ways, a sporting extension of the progressive movement in 2017 is clear in any number of ways.

“It isn’t so much a conscious decision as much as it is recognizing that our players have important perspectives,” Borders told The Summitt just after her press conference Saturday. “So if organically, we can tap into that energy, we certainly intend to do it.”

That undersells, it seems, both the calculated way Borders and the WNBA typically do business—there’s seldom an action that hasn’t been vetted many times over, let alone a series of coordinated ones—but also the opportunity it seems Borders has recognized. Her Twitter feed often runs far afield of basketball, or even topics the WNBA players have brought up, and into the realm of straight politics she lived in her prior life as an Atlanta politico.

A great deal has changed since July 2016. A league that failed to leverage what is not just high-level basketball entertainment but, truly, a display of empowerment for two dozen women parceled out in two-hour increments would be missing one of the truly significant business opportunities of 2017, one the WNBA is better-positioned to take advantage of than almost any brand in America.

Borders acknowledged having learned from last July. She put the changes in broader perspective of a league that is just 21 years old, which is accurate—the level of embracing Sue Bird’s decision to publicly discuss her sexuality with Mechelle Voepel last week for the first time is miles from the league’s early struggles to decide how much to embrace the LGBTQ community—but represents, more critically, a clear direction for the Borders-era WNBA.

“So we are the middle child in the NBA family,” Borders said Saturday. “Big brother is 71; little brother, the Gatorade League, is 16. We are 21. Like all middle children, I think it took us a while to find our voice. We have found our voice. We’re clear on who we are and what we stand for, and so, yes, I would tell you like any maturing adolescent and any maturing adult, it takes time to get your sea legs, if you will. We have them now. We are clear on who we are, and we are articulating our positions every day.”

Borders also pointed out the difficulty with determining precisely what that voice means in terms of wins and losses. A league that saw attendance rise 4.6 percent last season is not, it appears, having that same success so far in 2017. Borders said “We’re up again”, but declined to give a specific number—according to the Twitter account WNBA Stats and Facts, the league attendance count is down 1.7 percent, year-over-year, so far in 2017. [UPDATE: the league provided their data on this, which compares number of games to number of games. Through 122 games, attendance is up 2.1 percent, according to the league.]

But a percent or two here or there isn’t really the end game of connecting the WNBA with the progressive wing of the country, though as Borders often says, incremental progress matters. There is a clear need for the WNBA, should it get where it wants to go, to grow its audience. And there’s a convertible group of people in this country who, by virtue of their politics, obviously lack an antipathy to women that drives much of the opposition to the league. Getting those people in WNBA arenas, which is the greatest barrier to fandom for the league, offers an enormous growth opportunity. Getting WNBA games on Twitter to reach a disproportionately younger group represents a significant synergy with this effort as well. The audience for these games—averaging 800,000, with several topping one million—far outstrip what the league typically got in the past for even WNBA Finals games on terrestrial television.

If the WNBA does nothing more than convert a greater percentage of people who own “Nevertheless, She Persisted” t-shirts into people who also own Breanna Stewart t-shirts, things like incremental attendance growth and with it, revenue growth, therefore the salaries that can be paid to WNBA players (and keep more of them home in the offseason) and virtually every other area the league wishes to improve upon will follow.

It also means giving up on those who would be turned off by a progressive political message. That, too, feels like little more than an extension of giving up on trying to convert the hardcore basketball fan who expresses disdain for the concept of women’s basketball. After two decades of trying to reach that fan in a variety of ways, that not only makes good financial sense, it’ll come as an emotional relief to an existing fan base and league that’s all too happy to move on as well. Few businesses thrive by spending time trying to win over its most obstinate critics, and a group that claims to love basketball but hate the WNBA has issues with a women’s league that go beyond the talent on the court.

So this is the new realignment for the league: embracing who they are. A political outlook that taps into the 2017 zeitgeist, and the overwhelming viewpoint of its players, staff, front office, ownership groups. A chance to partner with other groups with a similar viewpoint.

The league spent the better part of two decades asking the question: are we a cause, or a business, as if the two ideas are wholly separate.

The WNBA in 2017, under Lisa Borders, is making a different bet: that these two strands are, in Donald Trump’s America, one and the same.