Caitlin Clark WNBA Draft Shows ‘Stars Aligning,’ League Commish Says

WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert was in a meeting in Nashville on Thursday afternoon when Christmas arrived 10 months early.

Engelbert’s phone buzzed with a text from WNBA exec Colie Edison. Inside was a link to a social media post from Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark announcing her plans to enter the upcoming WNBA draft. There had been open questions about whether Clark, already the highest scoring women’s college basketball player ever, would return to Iowa for a fifth and final year of eligibility.

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Engelbert’s first reaction when she saw the text was to ask Clark’s agent at Excel if the news was real. When that confirmation came back, Engelbert stepped out of her meeting into a new reality.

“This couldn’t have come at a better time,” Engelbert told Sportico on Friday in some of her first public comments since Clark’s announcement. “I keep calling it the confluence of huge momentum around the WNBA as it is today, generational players like Caitlin coming in from the NCAA, expansion, and media disruption. It’s all feeding our growth.”

Clark’s announcement will have a dramatic impact on the league, which is entering its 28^th season and in the middle of what Engelbert calls “hyper growth phase.” The 2023 campaign was the WNBA’s most-watched regular season in over 20 years, and its highest attendance in 13 years. Digital and social media metrics hit all-time highs. In the last few years, commercial opportunities for the league’s stars have also expanded dramatically.

Now the WNBA gets to fold in the most famous college basketball player in the country. Clark’s shooting range and vision have made her appointment viewing for many basketball fans. She has more than 1 million Instagram followers, and has been selling out arenas at home and on the road.

“A generational player like Caitlin will help all of our players get more recognition, help our league get more value, and that goes from the patch on the uniform, to placement on the court, to a media ad buy,” Engelbert said. “We need to have all those values go up, and that’s what’s going to happen here as people recognize the quality of this league, the quality of these players, and Caitlin being this national phenom leading that, it’s going to raise valuations across the board.”

One big question: How much of Clark’s college stardom will transfer to the WNBA?

Last year’s NCAA final, played between Clark’s Iowa and LSU, drew an average of 9.9 million viewers on ESPN. The WNBA Finals—a dream matchup between star-studded Las Vegas and New York teams—averaged 728,000 per game, itself a 20-year high. The deciding game averaged 889,000, about 9% of the audience for the NCAA championship.

Engelbert, who has never met Clark in person, said she “absolutely” believes the guard’s appeal and popularity will endure through the transition.

“People like her game,” Engelbert said. “They like her 3-pointer, they like her passing, they like how she sees the court, and that’s all going to translate really well into the WNBA.”

Clark’s decision comes as women’s professional sports experiences rapid growth in viewership, attention, and investment. Women’s college basketball, in part riding Clark’s stardom, has become a much bigger commercial property in the last few years. A new, unified women’s hockey league launched late last year with the backing of Los Angeles Dodger owners. NWSL teams were selling for low millions just a few years ago; now the average team is worth $66 million. When private equity giant Sixth Street bought into the league last year, CEO Alan Waxman told Sportico that “everything that indicates something is structurally undervalued was flashing green, on every vector.”

The WNBA, which launched in 1997 via backing from the NBA, has also seen momentum, though maybe not as linear as that of the NWSL. In 2022, the WNBA closed a league-wide $75 million funding round that included capital from Laurene Powell Jobs, Condoleezza Rice, Dee Haslam, Linda Henry, Ted Leonsis, Joe and Clara Tsai, and Nike. That deal valued the league and its teams at $1 billion, Sportico reported at the time.

More recently,  the Seattle Storm raised money at a league record $130 million valuation, and the Chicago Sky raised at an $85 million valuation, the second highest in league history. In October, the NBA’s Golden State Warriors agreed to pay a record $50 million expansion fee to bring a WNBA team to the Bay Area. NBA owners still hold about half of the league equity.

Clark’s decision was particularly notable because new NIL rules allow college stars to sign marketing deal while competing as NCAA athletes. Clark has a significant NIL stable that includes Nike, State Farm, Gatorade, Buick, Topps and H&R Block—a portfolio that some have estimated at roughly $1 million per year.

In the WNBA, her salary will be $76,535, but the full financial picture is much more complex. For starters, she’ll be able to layer brand deals on top of that. There’s also a plethora of other possible income streams from the league itself. She could be eligible for an additional $250,000 next year under the league’s player marketing agreements (PMAs), a new program in the league’s 2020 labor accord. She also eligible for up to $100,00 under the team marketing agreements (TMAs), another program designed to support players doing the most to boost the league’s profile. There are more than a dozen possible performance incentives as well.

Pay-wise, there’s never been a better time for Clark to enter the league. There’s also never been better time for the league to welcome a player of her talent and celebrity. Another positive offshoot of NIL is that former college stars now enter the league with larger followings and existing brand relationships. Combine that with the league’s recent investment (both incoming and outgoing) and as Engelbert says, the “all the stars are aligning.”

Take, for example, the league’s annual draft. The WNBA announced this week that it would hold the event in April at Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City, a bigger venue than the last few years. This will be the first WNBA draft since 2016 that has seated fans in attendance, a convenient fact for what will almost certainly be its most anticipate draft in recent memory.

Engelbert said the WNBA likely wasn’t ready to capitalize on a Caitlin Clark when she first joined the league in 2019. Now it’s primed to make the most of it.

“I never thought we’d be where we are this quickly, but now that we are, I want more,” she said. “There’s so much more we can do with this strategy of household name, rivalries and games of consequence. Now these generational players like Caitlin coming into the league, that’s a great recipe to continue our hyper growth phase.”

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