FILE - In this Sept. 12, 2014 file photo, Chicago Sky's Elena Delle Donne is seen in action in Game 3 of the WNBA Finals basketball series against the Phoenix Mercury in Chicago. On Wednesday, Nov. 5, 2014, the Lyme Research Alliance announced that Delle Donne will be the first national ambassador for the Lyme Research Alliance. The two-time all-star professional basketball player missed 17 games during the season because of a recurrence of Lyme disease. She has suffered from the disease since 2008. (AP Photo/Kamil Krzaczynski, File)

When the NBA backed and promoted the WNBA beginning in 1996 and for its first season in 1997, many men's basketball fans proclaimed that they were having an undesirable product forced down their throats through various partnerships and TV advertisements. The NBA responded to this criticism with full-fledged support, indicating that they believed in the cause of a women's basketball league and would continue to do so for the foreseeable future. Over time, naysayers have become progressively more OK with the idea of a few commercials and cable time slots, perhaps because that such matters had very little effect on their own viewing habits.

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Unfortunately for the WNBA, its continued presence has not led to a great surge in interest. That state of affairs concerns the NBA, enough so that commissioner Adam Silver said Thursday that he and his colleagues expected it to be much more popular. From Lindsey Adler for BuzzFeed:

“We thought we would have broken through by now,” Silver said during an interview as part of the Sports Business Journal’s Game Changers conference in Manhattan. “We thought ratings and attendance would be higher.”

In 2014, the WNBA-wide average attendance per game was 7,578 fans. The Phoenix Mercury lead the league with an average of 9,557 attendees per game in 2014, and the Tulsa Shock, who will move to Dallas-Fort Worth before the 2016, had the league-worst attendance with an average of 5,566 fans per game.

“I think we might have been ahead of ourselves 20 years ago in terms of what we were doing,” Silver said. [...]

The commissioner pointed to people of influence outside the realm of professional basketball with an ability to help the league grow, specifically media and business partners who he said have largely ignored the WNBA. [...]

Saying his comments frame the growth of the WNBA as part of a cause, rather than simply a sport, Silver noted that many companies use feel-good decisions — think Starbucks’ announcements of employee benefits — as marketing tactics to attract consumers.

Silver’s case for positioning the women’s league as a cause to attract more fans were in contrast with comments made by WNBA President Laurel Richie on an earlier panel at the same conference.

“We have, on occasion, sold the WNBA too much as a cause,” Richie said. “We at the W are focused on building a genuine and sustained fanbase….That’s where our sustainable growth comes from."

In addition to those attendance numbers, the WNBA averaged roughly 240,000 viewers for its ESPN broadcasts during the 2014 season. While those figures may seem small (and they are), the WNBA averaged more viewers than Major League Soccer as recently as 2013. The NBA's new mega-dollar TV deal also stipulates that ABC, ESPN, and ESPN2 will continue to air WNBA games through 2025.

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Nevertheless, those measures cannot always be separated from the impact the NBA relationship has had on the league's sustainability. Silver's comments echo broad concerns that the WNBA has not developed independent popularity and sits at roughly the same level that it did a decade or more in the past. His words stand out because they admit some degree of failure, not because the observations are shocking.

The most interesting and debatable aspect of this situation is Silver's contention that various marketing and advertising partners should consider a sports league to be a cause. Frankly, it is difficult to imagine anyone deciding to watch a basketball game primarily as a moral act. It is certainly true that women (old, young, very young, whatever) may opt to watch the sport due to positive representation of the gender and to support women's athletics in general, but the sustained interest that Richie and the WNBA desire will not arise from weak connections of the sort Silver seems to want. For one thing, telling fans that the league is good for them will probably not change the minds of fans who were turned off due to feeling that the league was forced upon them. (The garden-variety misogynists are probably beyond hope.)

On a deeper level, though, it would seem especially difficult to promote the WNBA's corporate beneficence when their most visible employees continue to make relatively low wages that require them to play a second season overseas after the finals conclude in October. For the record, Adler also quotes Silver as stating that the league cannot afford to raise player salaries, which probably shouldn't come as a surprise given his comments on similar issues in the NBA. This tact seems to be a more strenuous application of the same mindset that has guided the NBA's involvement with the WNBA from the very beginning. I suppose it's hard for an organization to shed its paternalism when it is still serves as a de facto father.

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