Game 6 of the WNBA Finals starts at 12:30 p.m. ET tomorrow. How did this happen?
CBC Sports' daily newsletter breaks down the scheduling fiasco that caused Game 6 of the WNBA Finals to be moved to a weekday afternoon, and what it means for a league that can't seem to avoid controversy.
Finals scheduling fiasco is the league's latest controversy
Jesse Campigotto · CBC Sports
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The hottest topic in sports discourse this week is the WNBA Finals.
Not the actual games, though. Not whether two-way star Angel Reese can lead the Atlanta Dream to their first-ever championship. Not whether the Golden State Valkyries can win the title in just their second year of existence. Not even whether this is maybe not the most exciting matchup as these teams are averaging only 69 points per game apiece in the series after Caitlin Clark's Indiana Fever averaged 96 in the regular season.
Instead, everyone is firing off takes about the unusual start time of tomorrow's Game 6 and whether the league should have moved it to a different time and/or place. That's right, to paraphrase Allen Iverson: We talkin' about… logistics?
To be fair, that start time is extremely bizarre: 12:30 p.m. ET, which puts it at 9:30 a.m. ET in the Bay Area as Golden State looks to finish off the series with a win. While this may conjure nostalgic black-and-white images of stickball-playing Brooklyn kids ditching school to listen to the 1955 World Series on the transistor radio, a weekday afternoon championship game is obviously quite suboptimal in today's broadcast-focused age.
So, why is this happening?
It starts with the decision to move the Dream's home Finals games from their usual 3,500-seat arena to the 17,000-seat home of the NBA's Atlanta Hawks. It paid off as both of the Atlanta-hosted games so far were sell-outs — including last Saturday's Game 4, which was moved up 2½ hours to 1 p.m. ET because the Hawks had their home opener that night.
The earlier start time on Saturday wasn't a big deal because sports fans are accustomed to weekend matinees. But weekdays are a different story, and the WNBA found itself in quite the pickle when Golden State won that Game 4 to even the best-of-seven Finals at two games apiece and guarantee a Game 6 in Atlanta on Thursday.
The Hawks, who are the primary tenant at State Farm Arena, are scheduled to host the Cleveland Cavaliers there on Thursday night, and getting the NBA to bump that game to another day or change it to a matinee was a non-starter. Pushing Game 6 to Friday night was nixed because the cable USA Network, which is sharing the U.S. broadcast rights for the Finals with NBC this year, had already committed to showing horse racing's Breeders' Cup and WWE wrestling that evening. Plus, a potential Game 7 is slated for the next day on the other side of the country in San Francisco.
Pair of options
So, that left the WNBA with a pair of options, both unappealing in their own way: keep Game 6 in primetime and go back to the tiny arena, or start it early enough to clear out in time for the Hawks but risk alienating the national TV audience.
They went with the bigger gate. And cue the outrage from fans, pundits and even the owners of the Dream, who published a rather emotional open letter last night claiming they flagged these potential scheduling issues two months ago and "reiterated" them during the playoffs but their concerns "did not receive the attention nor the urgency that they deserved."
The players, though, are mostly taking it in stride. "Call in sick," Golden State guard Veronica Burton urged her team's fans, while forward Kiah Stokes joked: "Don't y'all know know to fake a cough?" Atlanta Coach Karl Smesko, tongue in cheek, called for a national holiday.
But this is no laughing matter for the WNBA, which is once again under fire for something that is happening off the court.
Between the lines, the league has never been better, with Clark and other stars like Reese, fifth-time MVP A'ja Wilson, high-scoring guard Paige Bueckers and super rookie Olivia Miles pushing the quality of play to new heights and driving unprecedented attendance, TV ratings and general interest in the WNBA. But the league has also been dogged by culture-war proxy battles like whether it should promote Clark as the face of the majority-black league and what Fever standout Sophie Cunningham thinks about the hot-button issue of trans people in women's sports.
You could argue that the WNBA didn't start these fires, and that it's fallen victim to opportunistic (and extremely online) culture warriors who don't actually care about women's basketball and are just using it to further their own ends. That's broadly correct. But, as I wrote back in the summer when the Cunningham controversy was dominating the discourse, the WNBA has shown little ability (or even interest) in calming things down and putting the focus back on hoops.
Then again, they say we're in an attention economy. And the WNBA has shown once again that it is very good at attracting attention.
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