Stephen A. Smith has had it up to here with the WNBA.
There’s no one that talks more about sports than Stephen A. Smith. He does get paid a lot of money to do so, but one might think that Smith could get a little burnt out blabbering about sports around the clock like he does. The man is on ESPN around the clock talking about every sport under the sun.
Football game on? He’s there to talk about it. Basketball game that just wrapped up? He’s there breaking down the game (and yelling about something). Add on the fact that he’s a certified hot take machine and you’ve got yourself one of the busiest personalities in all of sports. And recently, he’s been very busy keeping up with the mess that has been the WNBA in the past couple of months.
Just to catch you up, here are some of the biggest storylines out of the league… and none of them really have to do with basketball:
-Fever guard Caitlin Clark voted 11th best guard in the WNBA by her peers
–WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert dodged an interview
–Seattle Storm co-owner was suspended and fined for screaming at fans
-The W outed themselves in a gambling scandal
-Fever forward Sophie Cunningham ignited a firestorm by saying she was against biological men playing women’s sports
–Former NBA players have declared for the 2027 WNBA Draft
And that’s really just scratching the surface.
It’s become very apparent that the WNBA can’t get out of its own way, and can’t seem to handle issues in an optimal and efficient manor. That was on full display earlier this week, when the league reportedly met to determine what would make an athlete eligible or ineligible to play in the league, and couldn’t reach an agreement.
That sent Stephen A. Smith – on his non-ESPN Stephen A. Smith Show – into a fiery, 26-minute rant:
“It’s important that the WNBA wakes up and acknowledges something. There’s a lot of people that don’t like you. I’m talking about the league. We gotta stop playing games, and we gotta get down to the nitty-gritty of this all
I see my girl Chiney Ogwumike, who is a sensational basketball analyst, and yesterday, Andraya Carter, another basketball analyst. I think they’re two of the best basketball analysts in America. They are doing everything they can, trying to get everybody and their mother, ‘Let’s talk about basketball!’ Well, guess what? What she’s not realizing is, people don’t want to. It’s not that they don’t know any better. It’s calculating. It’s just that simple.”
Translation: the conversation about basketball in the WNBA would be more accessible if the league would stop figuratively stepping in it off the court any change that they get.
Smith went on to say that it seems ridiculous for the Women’s National Basketball Association to not have clear-cut language in their league agreement that bars biological men from participating in the league, and blamed the league for not tackling the issue more head on:
“Why do you have language in your CBA agreement talking about how the league is designated for women, but you don’t have a clear definition of what a women is? So you’ve got to have meetings with presidents and GMs so you can clarify that situation.
You are the league, you put yourself in that situation. Rather than facing it head on, and tackling it with the fervor that it deserves, everybody wants to be passive. And it’s caught up to you.”
Ain’t that the truth.
Smith also said that the WNBA has landed itself in the middle of a political crossfire because the league has failed to come out one way or the other on the issue of who is “eligible” to participate in the league. The W did come out and denounce “bad faith efforts” by the former NBA players to declare for the draft, but that’s as far as they’ve gone to try and bring all of the chaos to a halt.
That’s why Stephen A. Smith had plenty to say about the league when the Stephen A. Smith Show broke into it’s WNBA coverage:
