The WNBA takes a body blow

First, the good news: The Houston Comets will stay in Houston, as unhappy Rockets' owner Les Alexander found a buyer for the team that dominated the early years of the league.

As in Los Angeles, the WNBA's continuity was assured in those two cities when local investors were willing to operate an original franchise. In addition, the presence of those local investors was a sign that a WNBA franchise is, all by itself, worth owning.

But now, the disastrous news: The Charlotte Sting, according to the Charlotte Observer, will be disbanded, and an allocation draft will be held next Monday to disperse their players among the remaining franchises.

Why is this disastrous? Let me count the ways:

• It negates the sale of L.A. and Houston. The league's claim that the WNBA was a viable operation and its franchises were in demand is now completely invalidated. Clearly, if the only option was to disband the team, there were no willing buyers, in Charlotte or anywhere else, for an existing WNBA team.
• It destroys Donna Orender's credibility: Orender has been on the record since she took over as league president that there are plenty of buyers out there, and that expansion is not only inevitable, but profitable for all. Now, however, reality has delivered a right hook to those empty words, as clearly the league couldn't give the Sting away.

  To be fair, those public announcements were part of Orender's job. As the main promoter for the league, she couldn't very well go around saying 'Well, we have a couple maybes and a lot of not-interesteds, so expansion is out, and good luck to any owner who wants to sell a team.' And, after all, two of three owners who did want to move on managed to sell their teams -- only the notoriously inept Bob Johnson was unable to make it happen.

• It makes no business sense. Last year, the WNBA expanded into Chicago. Orender, again spouting the party line, said there was plenty of talent to go around, and the expansion Sky would have no trouble competing. Chicago went 5-29, and was boring as well, a combination that isn't exactly going to make fans burn up the season-ticket phone lines.

  Clearly, it would have made a lot more sense to have moved Charlotte to Chicago last year, rather than expand, or held off expansion until the situation in North Carolina was resolved. (Rumors of the Sting's demise, and Johnson's disdain for the WNBA, have been rampant since he bought the team.) This way, though, the WNBA has the worst of both worlds: The league has a dismal franchise in Chicago that is years away from being competitive, and must now try to spin Charlotte's extinction as part of the growing process.

  A well-run business does not overextend itself one year, and then pull back the next. It is simply a poor allocation of resources.

• It puts a knife in the heart of the WNBA's plan for growth. With attendance flat, Orender has championed expansion as the best way to grow the league. If the league were in 16 cities, Orender reasoned, then it would be a lot easier to get corporate sponsors, and those sponsorships would serve to not only boost the league's revenue, but also increase its visibility -- thus increasing attendance and ratings.

  This is not a bad plan, but it depends on two critical resources: 1) Enough talented players to stock 16 teams; and 2) Enough investors to support 16 teams.

  The Chicago expansion proved part one to be a fantasy, as it's hard to imagine how two or three more teams would manage to find competitive talent if the Sky could only win five games in the first round of expansion. And now, with the elimination of the Sting, it's clear that there aren't even 14 potential owners, much less 16.

• It is a public relations catastrophe. For all of the reasons above, contraction makes the league look foolish and unprofessional, but now those who hate women's basketball have even more shells for their talk-radio howitzers. There is no way to spin this into anything but really, really bad news -- perhaps the worst news the league has absorbed in its ten years of existence.

So what now? It appears that the group running a soon-to-be-completed new arena in Kansas City might want a team in 2008. A group from northwest Arkansas, based in the small city of Bentonville, will have an arena and some serious interest in 2008, or maybe 2009. It's also possible that Seattle will open up in 2008 if, as expected, the new owners of the Sonics and Storm move the franchises to Oklahoma City.

Down the road, if Chris Cohan ever sells the Warriors, the Bay Area is a perfect site for a franchise, and the ongoing arena issues in Sacramento may eventually push the Maloof family to a different location -- and Sacramento has shown that it will support a WNBA team.

But even expanding in 2008 brings its own set of issues. How do you stock the team so it's competitive? If the existing franchises are allowed to keep as many players as they did when Chicago was formed, then the new team will be awful. If the existing franchises keep fewer players, they will lose key members of their teams, and popular ones as well. And there's a very good chance that the top Australians (Lauren Jackson, Penny Taylor and Tully Bevilaqua) will stay home in 2008 to prepare for the Olympics, along with many European players. How do the rosters get filled then?

So no matter how it's presented, this is grim news -- but don't start writing the league's obituary quite yet. If the new owners can make it work in L.A. and Houston, and there's no reason to think they can't; if the Chicago Sky can hang on until they become competitive; and if winning teams continue to draw well, then the league isn't going anywhere. (And even if it folded as the WNBA, a new league would immediately spring up in its place. The fact that 5,000 people will pay to see women's professional basketball on a regular basis is enough to ensure the survival of some kind of a league.)

In the ongoing narrative of women's sports in America, this is a low point, even if it is buried in the back pages and small type. The sports and entertainment industry, however, is paying serious attention, and the WNBA is now in a position where it must try to rebound from a setback rather than build on success.

And now, too, the pressure on Donna Orender has just ratcheted up a notch or two. She not only has to restore her credibility, she also has to craft a new business plan for the league, as clearly her hopes of expansion and increased sponsorship as engines of growth aren't going to be fulfilled.

As I write this, all is silent in New York, Phone calls are not returned, and the web site leads with a feature on the attractive Kayte Christensen. Behind that placid exterior, however, alarm bells are ringing -- and though the fire may not be life-threatening, there's no doubt it's doing a great deal of damage.