The Sixers and Mayor Parker want the WNBA in Philly. How do we know Philly wants the WNBA?

For any new WNBA franchise, including one in Philadelphia, Caitlin Clark’s presence and popularity won't necessarily translate to success.

by Mike Sielski | Columnist

Published Sept. 28, 2024, 5:00 a.m. ET

Time to ask an impertinent question: Do we know for certain that a WNBA franchise would succeed in Philadelphia?

The 76ers and Mayor Cherelle L. Parker said Thursday that they not only want a WNBA team here but have discussed the possibility with the league’s decision-makers. Where would the team play? Glad you asked: at the Sixers’ new arena at 10th and Market, of course. Neat, tidy, perfect. Right? It might be. One of these days, it just might be. But might is as far as anyone can or should go in projecting the success of the WNBA in this region.

Pop “WNBA Philly” into the search functions of X/Twitter and Instagram, listen to the league’s loudest advocates, and you’d think the whole world agrees that the city should have been home to a franchise yesterday.

It’s easy to get swept up in the cheerleading and wishcasting that pass for so much sports coverage these days, and it’s even easier to presume a trending topic on social media is an accurate representation of a bigger, broader reality. That reality is worth exploring, because merely preaching Philadelphia should have a WNBA franchise doesn’t confront, or even acknowledge, that the situation would not be quite as neat, as tidy, or as perfect as many hope it would.

Going door to door

There’s no doubt that Philadelphia and its surrounding communities have a rich women’s basketball history. The Immaculata Mighty Macs. The Philadelphia Catholic and Public Leagues. Elite high school and AAU programs throughout the Southeastern Pennsylvania suburbs, South Jersey, and Delaware. Dawn Staley, Geno Auriemma, Cheryl Reeve, and hundreds of other accomplished coaches and players. A foundation for a WNBA franchise has been laid here.

All those elements, though, were in place — and were, in some instances, stronger and more influential — the last time a major women’s basketball franchise was here. Yet when the Richmond Rage of the American Basketball League relocated to Philadelphia in the summer of 1997, indifference greeted the team and never abated.

The ABL was the rival to the WNBA, and while the ABL didn’t have the financial and marketing support of the NBA — which the WNBA did — it did have plenty of great and familiar players: Teresa Edwards, Jennifer Azzi, Kara Wolters, and more. That star power didn’t matter. The ABL folded after less than three years, and even with Staley on the roster, the Rage drew fewer than 3,300 fans per game in their first season and fewer than 1,500 in their second. The team was so desperate that general manager Cathy Andruzzi and her staff would go to local high school and college basketball tournaments, trying to drum up interest among girls and young women.

“This is like a presidential campaign,” Andruzzi said at the time. “We’re going door to door.”

Obviously, the state of and circumstances surrounding the sport are better now. The WNBA has been around for nearly three decades. It doesn’t have to be built from the ground up. Its regular season runs from mid-May to late October; a WNBA franchise here would have to battle primarily with the Phillies and the Union for eyeballs, interest, coverage, and revenue. The ABL scheduled its games during the fall and winter, in the thick of the NFL, NBA, NHL, and men’s college basketball seasons. In a lot of ways, that league was set up to fail.

That said, it’s not as if the Rage were positive outliers in an otherwise ill-fated effort. Philadelphia was offered the opportunity to back a professional women’s basketball franchise, and Philadelphia, like the rest of the ABL’s host cities, said, No, thank you.

Reality and expectations

Would Philly-area basketball fans turn down another chance to support such a franchise? Probably not, but in keeping with this homage to the 1990s, let’s paraphrase a former U.S. president: It depends on what your definition of the phrase turn down is.

Yes, the WNBA has been gaining fans, gaining viewers, gaining cultural traction. Everything has been moving in the right direction for the league, and there’s no denying that one player in particular, Caitlin Clark, has supercharged that growth. Except that for any new WNBA franchise, including one here, Clark’s presence and popularity are the quasi-problem. They have warped the understanding of just how rapid that movement and how great those gains have been.

Two sets of data, both revealed last week, drive home this point. Michael Mulvihill, who oversees Fox Sports’ research and analytics teams, noted that, across all the networks that broadcast WNBA regular-season games, Clark’s games averaged almost three times as many viewers (1.178 million) as those without her did (394,000).

Meanwhile, the Associated Press’s Tim Reynolds compiled attendance figures for Clark and non-Clark games this season. Her team, the Indiana Fever, had drawn 16,084 per home game at the time Reynolds crunched his numbers. Each non-Fever game had drawn 8,552. “That’s Caitlinmania,” Reynolds wrote. What’s more, half of the WNBA’s 12 teams averaged fewer than 8,700 fans, and just one — the New York Liberty, the franchise in the nation’s largest market — averaged more than 11,000.

None of those statistics means that a WNBA team can’t thrive in Philadelphia. What they do suggest is that any expectations regarding that team would have to be tempered. Ticket prices, a terrific in-game experience, a strong connection between the team and the community, an openness to the benefits and unavoidable challenges and drawbacks that accompany a larger audience and increased media attention: All of these factors would take on extra importance in the franchise’s early years. All of them would determine, without debate or doubt, whether the WNBA could plant its flag in Philly and claim victory.