Men’s basketball and the NBA has been on the decline for years and everybody knows it. The rise of analytics and the out-of-control nature of three-pointers, as well as the NIL rules in college, has ratings falling. To make things worse for the league, there seems to be nothing Commissioner Adam Silver or the NCAA want to do to rectify the situation.
But with the fall of one league comes the rise of another. The WNBA has seen exponential growth over the last decade, as well as women’s college basketball. In fact, the ratings for the men’s final four in 2024 were lower than the women’s final four. And if the NBA continues its fall, the WNBA finals may get higher ratings than the NBA finals in the near future.
With this meteoric rise, women’s basketball is in good hands.
What started as a league that had very few fans compared to the NBA has become a signal that the landscape of sports is changing, and that many female athletes should be considered elite in a sport that has been stereotypically dominated by men.
It started with Sue Bird, Diana Taurasi and Candace Parker, and hasn’t stopped. Those three are considered among the greatest women’s basketball players of all time, but the current crop of young talent has the chance to exceed their legacies.
Sabrina Ionescu, Caitlin Clark, JuJu Watkins and Paige Bueckers are the future of women’s basketball, and the future is now.
Ionescu is one of the many players in women’s basketball that are pushing against the stereotype that female players can’t shoot from behind the arc. A career 36% shooter from deep, Ionescu and her New York Liberty are fresh off a WNBA championship that was the most watched in history.
Clark’s superstardom is obvious to anyone that has read a sports article in the last 5 years. If you’ve opened the ESPN app during that time period, odds are you’ve come across her name.
From her storied career at Iowa, to her record-breaking rookie of the year season with the Indiana Fever, Clark has become a name synonymous with women’s basketball. Clark succeeds at all aspects of the game and has every opportunity to be the best women’s basketball player in the world for a long time.
As for Watkins, she could very well surpass Clark as we potentially haven’t even seen her at her best yet. The USC Trojan sophomore will be coming off a devastating ACL tear in the women’s NCAA tournament but has destroyed her competition thus far.
Watkins has averaged an astounding 25.5 points per game and is destined to be the number one pick in the WNBA draft once she decides to end her storied college career.
Bueckers will more than likely be the number one pick in this year’s WNBA draft. The University of Connecticut phenom has led her team deep into the NCAA tournament every season she has played under legendary coach Geno Auriemma and is designed for stardom at the next level.
Because of these stars, the WNBA and women’s basketball as a whole is destined to continue to exponentially grow and draw in more fans and revenue than ever before.
