The Anonymous Super Team: Minnesota’s Lack of Attention Despite Their Dominance

This post is a part of WNBA Week+.  During this stretch, I will release several blog posts related to the WNBA, including news stories, player discussions, and teams’ seasons.

 

This year, the NBA had a strange situation where a team who had minimal media attention (the Oklahoma City Thunder) won the championship.  There was little coverage of the team from the national standpoint, which led many to believe this team was not good despite winning 68 games and having an MVP who was a superstar, two All-NBA players, two All-Defensive team players (including the runner-up for Defensive Player of the Year), and four other elite defenders who could have been named (it is worth noting that 3 of them were ineligible due to games played).  All the focus on OKC was that they were not a great team, they were boring, and that MVP Shai Gilgeous-Alexander was a free throw merchant who only scored so many points due to forcing his way to the line, even though they were such a fun team to watch due to their depth, versatility, and chemistry on both ends of the court, not to mention their dominance.  My biggest issue with all of this is that this wasn’t a major surprise; after finishing atop the West the previous year, I thought it was obvious that they were going to be an amazing team, but the media struggled to keep up.  Now, the WNBA could also deal with a similar situation with the Minnesota Lynx, who I believe is the clear championship favorite.

In general, the WNBA does not get a lot of attention from major networks, as they tend to focus on New York (as they should since they’re great), Indiana Fever (due to Caitlin Clark), Las Vegas Aces (due to A’ja Wilson), and Chicago Sky (due to Angel Reese); while they also give attention to individual players (like Kelsey Plum and Paige Bueckers), it doesn’t usually carry over to the teams.  It wasn’t like nobody expected Minnesota would be great; most experts predicted that they would be a top-2 team, while I for one thought they would be competing for the most record for most wins in a season (I was being a little coy with this because this is the first WNBA season with 44 games, but my point was that I thought they’d be dominant).  On top of that, they have a superstar (Napheesa Collier), multiple All-Stars (Collier, Kayla McBride, and Courtney Williams), multiple All-Defensive players (Collier and Alanna Smith, as well as the newly acquired DiJonai Carrington), and a legendary coach (Cheryl Reeve).  On top of that, the team is so much fun to watch; they’re competitive and feisty, play a beautiful game, and do dances when they win.  While their games against New York are nationally televised, this was a rematch of a Finals series that went 5 games, so I’d expect it to be a marquee event; the other games don’t garner the attention that some other games do.

While the obvious explanation is that Minnesota is a smaller market, the organization was a marquee franchise in the 2010’s, as they won 4 championships in 7 seasons.  During a run that included superstars such as Maya Moore (my favorite WNBA player of all time), Sylva Fowles, Seimone Augustus, Lindsay Whalen, and Rebekkah Brunson, they were among the teams that got the most attentions in the game, albeit in an era with less attention to the league.  While this team doesn’t have quite the star power that those legendary teams had, there is a precedent for a small market team to be popular and cool in the league.  This team should be what the WNBA would want to popularize, but it even took a while before Collier got more publicity from the league (I didn’t feel like they did that until she was runner-up for MVP last season, despite having long been one of the stars of the league).  While I have complained about how the league does not do a good job of marketing black players (I do believe that they would have realized they had something in Collier earlier if she was white, kind of like how the Plum discussed in the past how there was a push to make her a massive face despite her struggles due to her race), I also think the WNBA and league partners have failed at promoting greatness, which will come back to bite them if they don’t have New York or Indiana in the Finals.

While the WNBA has struggled to promote the league, so have league partners.  They continue to only discuss what they feel like, often while blatantly having not watched the sport all season.  They prefer to talk about a fictional rivalry between Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese than how dominant and fun Minnesota is.  The league partners have proven to care more about a few topics than the actual games themselves, which is extremely disappointing for fans.  In this year’s NBA Finals, the talk from league partners was about how bad the ratings of the Finals was, but they could have helped if they had talked about the best team in the NBA (Oklahoma City) and a 4-seed that played like a top-3 team in the East after a slow start (Indiana).  We could end up with a similar thing the WNBA Finals this year; Minnesota is the frontrunner to win the championship, and I wouldn’t be shocked if either Atlanta or Phoenix end up making the championship as well.  Even still, while they will inevitably end up not promoting the Finals teams, but at least WNBA fans can get a fun series if Minnesota is there.

What do you think of the Minnesota Lynx?  Let me know in the comments!