While the WNBA has been airing on ESPN channels since its inaugural season in 1997, several other partners have been involved over the years—from NBC, which aired the league's first game, to Amazon, which streamed the 2024 Commissioner Cup Finals on Tuesday, June 25.
ESPN has been the lone partner airing the league since the beginning, but the network's coverage hasn't been perfect. Over the years, many key WNBA games have been pushed to ESPN2 or have not been aired at all, prompting complaints that the network needs to prioritize the league.
But it's no secret that women's basketball is having a moment, and to its credit, Disney's (DIS) sports media arm has been highlighting the product a lot more even before the arrival of Caitlin Clark this year. One example was that it has aired several games of the WNBA Finals on ABC for the past few years.
The WNBA had struggled to pull in viewers for decades, but just over the past week, the league's two games featuring the Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky breached 2.2 million viewers — the most for the WNBA in 23 years. ESPN aired the most recent of those games (the other was on CBS), and the network is reaping the rewards of its continued investment in the WNBA.
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ESPN is 'bullish' on the WNBA — but doesn't need to keep it exclusive
ESPN wants to continue to air the WNBA. That was made clear by ESPN's President of Content Burke Magnus, as he spoke on the "Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deistch" on Wednesday, June 25.
"Extremely bullish on [the WNBA]," Magnus said. "We've been there since day one of the WNBA. We're really proud of that."
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Magnus said that the network believes the hype around Clark may only last for a while, but the effect of attracting a larger audience for the league will be sustainable.
"Caitlin Clark is a phenomenon, and of course, it's brought sort of meteoric levels really, really quickly, which is a little bit of an issue they've been dealing with relative to the coverage around the game," Magnus said. "But I think even when that sort of normalizes, it finds it level, the audience and the interest in the WNBA is going to be significantly higher than it has been historically."
However, Magnus said that he doesn't think ESPN or ABC needs to have exclusive rights to the WNBA Finals as it has since the early 2000s. It's not because he doesn't want to air the WNBA Finals, but because he thinks that distributing the WNBA Finals on other channels may benefit the league's overall growth.
"Of course we want the WNBA Finals," Magnus said. "I'm sure that, at some level, that's going to be a component of the deal. But if we don't have it every single year, because it means it's on other networks, I think that's actually a good thing I'm imagining for the ultimate development and continued growth of the league."
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He called the NBA Finals a "must have" for the network, but he said it's not the same for the WNBA because the two leagues are in different stages. The former already has an established audience, but the latter is still looking to grow its fan base.
"I think a little bit differently [than with the NBA], and I'll say sort of maybe somewhat unselfishly, we look at the growth of the WNBA is also somewhat going to succeed on the number of various entities that get involved in it," Magnus said.
The WNBA's media rights deal is currently looped in along with the NBA's, and that's expected to continue into the next deal, which will kick in after next season. The NBA is expected to strike a deal with ESPN, and reports have indicated that the league will also partner with Amazon and NBC.
The WNBA's current deal has it airing on ESPN, CBS, ION, and Prime Video. It's unclear how the NBA's new partners will factor into the WNBA's next deal, but with the WNBA's current relationships, it wouldn't be shocking to see one of the WNBA's incumbent partners looking to share or rotate the Finals with ESPN.
That could mean that WNBA Finals in the latter part of this decade could be on ESPN, or it could even end up airing exclusively on Prime Video.
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