Welcome to the Tuesday edition of The Cooler, where you can always go home. Let’s go:
*This is the kind of nightmare travel story a friend or colleague might tell you. But this one happened to a professional team at the highest level of its sport.
The WNBA’s Indiana Fever played a game Sunday in Seattle, and the team was then supposed to return to Indianapolis Sunday night. They arrived at the Seattle airport around 7:45 p.m. for a 10:30 p.m. flight.
But from there, according to Fever forward Natalie Achonwa’s frustrating but often hilarious Twitter account, Indiana had a postponed flight… then a route via Atlanta on a new plane… then an overbooked connecting flight… then an 8 hour bus ride to Indianapolis. this included a stop for mechanical issues… before finally returning home about 24 hours after departure Monday evening.
Indiana has a home game against the Lynx on Tuesday, and that’s not the best way to prepare.
It could have been worse: Las Vegas had to withdraw from last season due to travel issues.
These two examples are reminders of a fundamental difference between the WNBA and the NBA (and other top-tier men’s leagues for that matter): WNBA players take commercial flights while NBA players take private charter flights. The WNBA prohibits teams from using charters to attempt to maintain a level playing field between teams that can afford it and those that cannot (which is ridiculous by the way. A team that wants to spend money should be able to spend it).
It’s an interesting disparity. For one thing, NBA players didn’t start flying charters until more than three decades into that league’s existence. The WNBA is barely twenty years old, so there’s a case to be made that these things take time.
Major League Soccer, which began play just a year before the WNBA, still has teams that operate primarily via commercial flights — but there is an exception that allows four charter flights per season.
The biggest problem, as with most things, is cost. The price of a charter flight varies, but flying commercial is definitely the least expensive option. It can be argued that the economics of the WNBA don’t support charter flights — and in fact, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver provided at least some measure of that in an interview with ESPN last year.
“It would cost more than the value of each ticket sold in the WNBA last season,” Silver said. “But I think the stakeholders are realistic there too. What they are saying is that there may be special cases where we should use charter aircraft. … Even if we operate a modified charter program for on some special occasions it involves huge expenses. it.”
When WNBA players opted out of the collective bargaining agreement last year, meaning it ends after this season instead of 2021, Silver also noted that the league lost, on average, “more than $10 million every year we were operating.”
Lin Dunn, longtime head coach of women’s college basketball and the WNBA, noted on Twitter about the Indiana situation: “In the WNBA…it’s not about ‘what’ they deserve”… but what you can afford! NO Title IX in the corporate world!
Many WNBA players and fans might argue that the corporate mentality is part of the problem and a barrier to a solution.
As WNBAPA President Nneka Ogwumike of the Los Angeles Sparks wrote via The Players Tribune last year: “It’s not just about business. It’s deeply personal. It’s about the kind of world we want to live in.”
Indeed, they are also the best basketball players in the world. Commercial flights have a symbolic element as further disparity between professional female players and their male counterparts — a fight that is only intensifying as the WNBA moves toward a new collective bargaining agreement.
*Derrick Rose’s 50-point game for the Timberwolves on Halloween was named the NBA’s Moment of the Year at the league’s annual awards show Monday.
* Awesome sports photo alert. #fanatic
