If Silver would've continued with "The name 'Fever' is insensitive to Covid victims, who were disproportionally people of marginalized communities" he would've been applauded.
as a huge fan of the WNBA (hoop head in general) all the woke and woke-adjacent marketing drives me nuts. i get that it's a women's league but sports fans, including the majority of the fans of this league, are MALE and i just wanna watch BASKETBALL! I don't follow the league because i'm looking for brownie points or to champion women's sports, I follow it because it is good basketball on during the summer. They should try marketing THAT aspect of it more. Just show some highlights will ya?!
Nate is correct the WNBA team names are weird. They went all-in on the "can't pluralize" craze and roughly a third of teams are just "cities NBA team but make it for ladies". Mystics, Mercury, Storm, and Lynx are all CLEARLY just plays on their NBA equivalents and Sun is just a singular version of an NBA team. You were criticized for suggesting WNBA teams do what 1/3 of them clearly want to do
The mystics is particularly wild to me. They looked at a bad NBA team name and said "what if we made it bad but for women?"
even funnier, pretty sure the Connecticut Sun are named that because they play at Mohegan Sun Casino and/or are owned by the same people who own Mohegan Sun. So they were named after a casino for brand synergy purposes I guess? which just reinforces Ethan's take
If the NBA awards expansion franchises to Las Vegas and Seattle, should they name them after their incumbent WNBA teams? The M-Aces ("Maces?") and M-Storm ("Maelstrom?"). I suppose Seattle has the Sonics legacy, but could be interesting for the NBA.
--
The thing about Nate Silver is that I think he rose to prominence by telling left leaning people what they wanted to hear in 2012. Not that he was pandering, but that the data he was looking at just so happened to align with the interests of the left -- that Obama was going to beat Romney in the election, and that left leaning people were more data-based and scientific than those on the right who talked about unskewing polls and rally crowd sizes. He was a security blanket.
Then in 2016, he stopped filling that role. Trump won, and people's misreading of Silver's analysis made them sure Clinton would win. Silver could no longer be relied on to tell them good news. And they haven't forgiven him for it.
--
I think one of the reasons that the WNBA is off limits is that people see it as providing cover for misogynists. Maybe Nate Silver and Ethan Strauss aren't misogynists, and have legitimate critiques of the WNBA management, but other people are. And Strauss and Silver just gave them an excuse to tune out of the WNBA (which they are ethically required to support, per the rest of the column). This must be squashed.
I guess if I would "steelman" the case for the WNBA vigilance, it would be that they believe the league can be successful on its own, but is currently in a vulnerable state, and anything said against it puts it at increasing risk of not emerging. Criticizing the league now might make people think it won't be around for long, and this reluctant to commit to it. So, it's important to keep things positive for the league, at least for now.
I might disagree -- 20 years seems like a sufficient incubation period, especially with the NBA's support, but it at least might make some sense.
This is basically the same as mainstream media telling you what to think instead of just reporting facts as objectively as possible and allowing you to draw your own conclusions. Doesn't work, is counterproductive, and you lose credibility in the process.
Non-pluralizable names are one of the last vestiges of bad 90s marketing that we still haven’t been able to shake off. The only league smart enough to avoid them is the NFL. Just take a look at the shortlist of names for the coming Utah NHL franchise, it’s awful.
The bizzare thing is that, as Ethan points out, this is already the done thing in probably the two most succesful women's team sports in the world - US college basketball and European soccer. They don't even put the W ahead of the English soccer teams and just figure people will pretty quickly realise its women and not the men!
Women's sport at international level has always been more popular than a club level because fans have a natural affinity to teams representing the country and playing in same colours as long established men's teams. It's very dumb not to leverage existing fandom and even dumber to think it is somehow unreasonable to suggest otherwise.
Caitlin Clark would be far more iconic in a Pacers jersey, with all the associated history that has, than a Fever(s) one.
It just makes sense - you have this ready-made fan base of Chelsea fans or FC Barcelona fans, and you have an existing team culture, history, and set of traditions that are pre-loaded.
Well said Ethan, and you hit on an interesting point. I don't think people that are trying to champion the league realize what they're unintentionally implying.
It comes across as saying the only reason you should want to watch this is out of civil good. The sport is entertaining enough to stand on its own. Everyone in the world isn't going to like it, and every NBA fan isn't going to like it. That's okay. Attacking people trying to consume the product in good faith is only going to turn people off.
To me this is similar to the social justice messaging in sports during the early 2020s. At that time I disagreed that the demonstrations done by the leagues/athletes turned viewers off. But I can now see that the fan/media reaction to athlete/league demonstrations turned some people off who eventually decided to not tune in. If there are this many rules to watching, a good chunk of people will just not watch.
As probably one of Ethan's "wokest" subscribers, I have to say that this whole controversy is beyond ridiculous. I even asked my wife, who would probably label herself a feminist, about the issue and she was baffled as well.
Whether it's men or women, no sports team name should be an abstract noun or non-plural. Also, I guess we have all collectively decided that women's team names can't be animals either. Although, I guess I do understand why we can't have the Chicago Heifers and/or Cows haha.
I hate treating women's sports like sports broccoli. Eat it because its good for you. Screw that noise. It's condescending, and diminishes women's sports. You should watch women's sports because they are fun and awesome.
One of the great things about the SEC is that the rivalries are so intense that if one school gets good at a sport, everyone else gets good at it too simply out of spite. SEC women's gymnastics is a meat grinder full of bitter rivalries, and it's great. Women's college hoops is better than men's college hoops because players stay long enough to develop genuine rivalries built on legit hatred. The South Carolina-LSU brawl doesn't happen in the men's game because no one gives enough of a shit. Hatred is great drama and makes for great sport.
Which leads us to nicknames. The WNBA has horrible nicknames, but anything is better than the "Lady Whatevers" or the "W Your Mascot Here." Going back to the SEC, they have largely dropped the modifiers. Florida is the Gators. Bama is the Crimson Tide. Kentucky is the Wildcats. If you're getting mauled by a wild animal, you tend not to care about its gender. A tiger is a tiger.
Substack doesn’t let you post images in comments but a screenshot of tweets in reply to Ethan’s Twitter post of this article (and subsequent ratio due to in group memesis) is downright depressing. Going through those comments made me a bit down myself that I’m spending mental energy internally combating them (I’m a lurker will never post) and I didn’t even write the damn piece.
All these people who didn’t read the article but *Know It’s Bad* because Holly Anderson or whoever posted about it and insulted Ethan’s character while giving no substantive criticism of the actual content feels like a real epistemic break in discourse. It’s just insult after insult. At least Fire Joe Morgan or old Deadspin or whatever spilled tons of ink on why their subjects were worthy of ridicule.
I don’t know what motivates that but I would really like to find out if someone would extend an olive branch to someone who says they have “bees for brains.” Maybe they have a principled clear point but their contribution to the debate is just “can’t believe this guy is bad now he used to be good” with no real evidence to back up the thesis. I still want to know what is objectionable about this!
I guess these may be their takes now? Like we don’t have takes on the issue, instead we identify the wrong and the bad and bathe in the ratio? Digressing but it is very “Libsoftiktok” to just screenshot an article and let the cascade of followers shit on the target. I hate it all.
Also I appreciate how charitable Ethan and others like BaR pod are in their content. They always give the people they are covering the benefit of the doubt and ascribe the most generous motives, while people dunking on Twitter are just like “this dude is a retard” and somehow they’re the righteous ones?
sometimes i wonder if sports commentators huff so much because their core topic really more about entertainment than social seriousness for most people
The hottest take I have is, almost every new professional sports team has a terrible nickname, the thunder, raptors, magic, almost all the wnba team, the predators, the gd Commanders (I’d argue is the worst of all the names) we just have a lack of creative in sports. That’s my biggest issue. Columbus got a soccer team and named it the crew; no idea what it means and the hockey team which is the blue jackets is for the most soldiers in the civil war for the Union army but no one gets it. Fever terrible name, Liberty is the probably the best of all the wnba teams
To me the Commanders has an interesting throwback vibe to it. It sounds like a name you would never come up with nowadays, sort of like the Browns or Steelers.
It makes perfect reasonable sense to name WNBA teams as the women’s New York Knicks, women’s San Antonio Spurs etc. In Australia, they started a women’s AFL league (Aussie rules football) where each new club is attached to existing AFL (men’s league) clubs that have been around forever. Idea is fans will naturally start going for their women’s equivalent team as the team colours and brand holds a lot of cultural weight. I suspect there’s plenty of women who love the NBA and don’t really know much about WNBA but would if their favourite NBA team also has a women’s team.
As far as Biden's comment, he should have said, "Women's sports are competitive and entertaining, everyone should try attending or watching a live event."
"Women's sports are competitive and entertaining, everyone should try attending or watching a live event."
But are they though? I mean you can say the same thing about your local 12 year old soccer game, no one is lining up to pay big bucks to watch that. The bar is pretty high, and I am not sure it really gets there in most women's sports. I kind of think without the political element they would not succeed even to the miniscule extent they do now.
I know my wife and her friends go a few times a year just purely as a political statement. They don't have any real interest in it as sport per se.
Sure is. On SeatGeek, looking at Saturday's game against Connecticut: Lower bowl baseline tickets are $250-$500. Lower bowl corners are $140. Upper deck is $90-$130.
If Silver would've continued with "The name 'Fever' is insensitive to Covid victims, who were disproportionally people of marginalized communities" he would've been applauded.
Someone should put Bill Burr's routine about the WNBA on a loop for everyone
as a huge fan of the WNBA (hoop head in general) all the woke and woke-adjacent marketing drives me nuts. i get that it's a women's league but sports fans, including the majority of the fans of this league, are MALE and i just wanna watch BASKETBALL! I don't follow the league because i'm looking for brownie points or to champion women's sports, I follow it because it is good basketball on during the summer. They should try marketing THAT aspect of it more. Just show some highlights will ya?!
Nate is correct the WNBA team names are weird. They went all-in on the "can't pluralize" craze and roughly a third of teams are just "cities NBA team but make it for ladies". Mystics, Mercury, Storm, and Lynx are all CLEARLY just plays on their NBA equivalents and Sun is just a singular version of an NBA team. You were criticized for suggesting WNBA teams do what 1/3 of them clearly want to do
The mystics is particularly wild to me. They looked at a bad NBA team name and said "what if we made it bad but for women?"
even funnier, pretty sure the Connecticut Sun are named that because they play at Mohegan Sun Casino and/or are owned by the same people who own Mohegan Sun. So they were named after a casino for brand synergy purposes I guess? which just reinforces Ethan's take
"This is the cultural space the WNBA operates within in sports media though, above reproach but beneath judgment."
This is excellent writing. And I'm still stealing that last phrase - perfectly put.
If the NBA awards expansion franchises to Las Vegas and Seattle, should they name them after their incumbent WNBA teams? The M-Aces ("Maces?") and M-Storm ("Maelstrom?"). I suppose Seattle has the Sonics legacy, but could be interesting for the NBA.
--
The thing about Nate Silver is that I think he rose to prominence by telling left leaning people what they wanted to hear in 2012. Not that he was pandering, but that the data he was looking at just so happened to align with the interests of the left -- that Obama was going to beat Romney in the election, and that left leaning people were more data-based and scientific than those on the right who talked about unskewing polls and rally crowd sizes. He was a security blanket.
Then in 2016, he stopped filling that role. Trump won, and people's misreading of Silver's analysis made them sure Clinton would win. Silver could no longer be relied on to tell them good news. And they haven't forgiven him for it.
--
I think one of the reasons that the WNBA is off limits is that people see it as providing cover for misogynists. Maybe Nate Silver and Ethan Strauss aren't misogynists, and have legitimate critiques of the WNBA management, but other people are. And Strauss and Silver just gave them an excuse to tune out of the WNBA (which they are ethically required to support, per the rest of the column). This must be squashed.
"Then in 2016, he stopped filling that role. Trump won, and people's misreading of Silver's analysis made them sure Clinton would win. "
It's so wild that they got angry at his 1/3 chance to win probability for Trump, but not the NYT or numerous other outlets with Clinton at ~99% etc.
I guess if I would "steelman" the case for the WNBA vigilance, it would be that they believe the league can be successful on its own, but is currently in a vulnerable state, and anything said against it puts it at increasing risk of not emerging. Criticizing the league now might make people think it won't be around for long, and this reluctant to commit to it. So, it's important to keep things positive for the league, at least for now.
I might disagree -- 20 years seems like a sufficient incubation period, especially with the NBA's support, but it at least might make some sense.
This is basically the same as mainstream media telling you what to think instead of just reporting facts as objectively as possible and allowing you to draw your own conclusions. Doesn't work, is counterproductive, and you lose credibility in the process.
Non-pluralizable names are one of the last vestiges of bad 90s marketing that we still haven’t been able to shake off. The only league smart enough to avoid them is the NFL. Just take a look at the shortlist of names for the coming Utah NHL franchise, it’s awful.
MLB too. Every team name is pluralized, and all end in "s" except for the more playful SOX teams
Actually Yeti is amazing (it would be better as Yetis but I'll take what I can get)
The bizzare thing is that, as Ethan points out, this is already the done thing in probably the two most succesful women's team sports in the world - US college basketball and European soccer. They don't even put the W ahead of the English soccer teams and just figure people will pretty quickly realise its women and not the men!
Women's sport at international level has always been more popular than a club level because fans have a natural affinity to teams representing the country and playing in same colours as long established men's teams. It's very dumb not to leverage existing fandom and even dumber to think it is somehow unreasonable to suggest otherwise.
Caitlin Clark would be far more iconic in a Pacers jersey, with all the associated history that has, than a Fever(s) one.
It just makes sense - you have this ready-made fan base of Chelsea fans or FC Barcelona fans, and you have an existing team culture, history, and set of traditions that are pre-loaded.
Well said Ethan, and you hit on an interesting point. I don't think people that are trying to champion the league realize what they're unintentionally implying.
It comes across as saying the only reason you should want to watch this is out of civil good. The sport is entertaining enough to stand on its own. Everyone in the world isn't going to like it, and every NBA fan isn't going to like it. That's okay. Attacking people trying to consume the product in good faith is only going to turn people off.
To me this is similar to the social justice messaging in sports during the early 2020s. At that time I disagreed that the demonstrations done by the leagues/athletes turned viewers off. But I can now see that the fan/media reaction to athlete/league demonstrations turned some people off who eventually decided to not tune in. If there are this many rules to watching, a good chunk of people will just not watch.
Yeah, I can say the same thing. I was moved by Jamal Murray talking about the names on his shoes after making a game-winning shot in the bubble.
I was annoyed by play-by-play announcers fawning over the players' social justice involvement.
As probably one of Ethan's "wokest" subscribers, I have to say that this whole controversy is beyond ridiculous. I even asked my wife, who would probably label herself a feminist, about the issue and she was baffled as well.
Whether it's men or women, no sports team name should be an abstract noun or non-plural. Also, I guess we have all collectively decided that women's team names can't be animals either. Although, I guess I do understand why we can't have the Chicago Heifers and/or Cows haha.
I hate treating women's sports like sports broccoli. Eat it because its good for you. Screw that noise. It's condescending, and diminishes women's sports. You should watch women's sports because they are fun and awesome.
One of the great things about the SEC is that the rivalries are so intense that if one school gets good at a sport, everyone else gets good at it too simply out of spite. SEC women's gymnastics is a meat grinder full of bitter rivalries, and it's great. Women's college hoops is better than men's college hoops because players stay long enough to develop genuine rivalries built on legit hatred. The South Carolina-LSU brawl doesn't happen in the men's game because no one gives enough of a shit. Hatred is great drama and makes for great sport.
Which leads us to nicknames. The WNBA has horrible nicknames, but anything is better than the "Lady Whatevers" or the "W Your Mascot Here." Going back to the SEC, they have largely dropped the modifiers. Florida is the Gators. Bama is the Crimson Tide. Kentucky is the Wildcats. If you're getting mauled by a wild animal, you tend not to care about its gender. A tiger is a tiger.
Substack doesn’t let you post images in comments but a screenshot of tweets in reply to Ethan’s Twitter post of this article (and subsequent ratio due to in group memesis) is downright depressing. Going through those comments made me a bit down myself that I’m spending mental energy internally combating them (I’m a lurker will never post) and I didn’t even write the damn piece.
All these people who didn’t read the article but *Know It’s Bad* because Holly Anderson or whoever posted about it and insulted Ethan’s character while giving no substantive criticism of the actual content feels like a real epistemic break in discourse. It’s just insult after insult. At least Fire Joe Morgan or old Deadspin or whatever spilled tons of ink on why their subjects were worthy of ridicule.
I don’t know what motivates that but I would really like to find out if someone would extend an olive branch to someone who says they have “bees for brains.” Maybe they have a principled clear point but their contribution to the debate is just “can’t believe this guy is bad now he used to be good” with no real evidence to back up the thesis. I still want to know what is objectionable about this!
I guess these may be their takes now? Like we don’t have takes on the issue, instead we identify the wrong and the bad and bathe in the ratio? Digressing but it is very “Libsoftiktok” to just screenshot an article and let the cascade of followers shit on the target. I hate it all.
Also I appreciate how charitable Ethan and others like BaR pod are in their content. They always give the people they are covering the benefit of the doubt and ascribe the most generous motives, while people dunking on Twitter are just like “this dude is a retard” and somehow they’re the righteous ones?
sometimes i wonder if sports commentators huff so much because their core topic really more about entertainment than social seriousness for most people
The hottest take I have is, almost every new professional sports team has a terrible nickname, the thunder, raptors, magic, almost all the wnba team, the predators, the gd Commanders (I’d argue is the worst of all the names) we just have a lack of creative in sports. That’s my biggest issue. Columbus got a soccer team and named it the crew; no idea what it means and the hockey team which is the blue jackets is for the most soldiers in the civil war for the Union army but no one gets it. Fever terrible name, Liberty is the probably the best of all the wnba teams
I don’t think it’s a lack of creativity; it may be a surplus of creativity.
Bears: great team name
Kraken: bad team name, but creative!
You’re 1000% correct, it’s overly creative.
You mean the Commies isn’t a good name.
Commanders is so generic. They should have gone with a cooler, more specific rank. I think the Washington Admirals would have been a GREAT name
To me the Commanders has an interesting throwback vibe to it. It sounds like a name you would never come up with nowadays, sort of like the Browns or Steelers.
It makes perfect reasonable sense to name WNBA teams as the women’s New York Knicks, women’s San Antonio Spurs etc. In Australia, they started a women’s AFL league (Aussie rules football) where each new club is attached to existing AFL (men’s league) clubs that have been around forever. Idea is fans will naturally start going for their women’s equivalent team as the team colours and brand holds a lot of cultural weight. I suspect there’s plenty of women who love the NBA and don’t really know much about WNBA but would if their favourite NBA team also has a women’s team.
As far as Biden's comment, he should have said, "Women's sports are competitive and entertaining, everyone should try attending or watching a live event."
"Women's sports are competitive and entertaining, everyone should try attending or watching a live event."
But are they though? I mean you can say the same thing about your local 12 year old soccer game, no one is lining up to pay big bucks to watch that. The bar is pretty high, and I am not sure it really gets there in most women's sports. I kind of think without the political element they would not succeed even to the miniscule extent they do now.
I know my wife and her friends go a few times a year just purely as a political statement. They don't have any real interest in it as sport per se.
Women's NCAA tourney is always fun.
Yeah that seems mostly a thing on its own.
I’m in Chicago - It doesn’t help that Sky tickets are just as expensive as Bulls tickets. I know they have charter planes to pay for now, but come on.
No way this is true.
Sure is. On SeatGeek, looking at Saturday's game against Connecticut: Lower bowl baseline tickets are $250-$500. Lower bowl corners are $140. Upper deck is $90-$130.
You assume he could actually utter a sentence that long.
Just a non-biased comment from me. I am a "you do you" and "whatever floats your boat" kinda guy.