CHICAGO — About halfway through her annual state of the league address ahead of the All-Star Game, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert was asked whether she expected to be in her job at the start of next season. “Obviously, I’m so blessed to be at the helm of this league during this incredible hypergrowth period,” she began. The commissioner went on to compliment the players, note all the new hires at league headquarters and describe how nice it was to see passion for the game in so many young girls. She notably did not say either “yes” or “no.” Engelbert spent two minutes answering the question without giving very much of an answer at all.
It came at the end of a week that neatly demonstrated the core tension here. The WNBA has indeed achieved the hypergrowth referenced by Engelbert. This season has already broken viewership records with months left to play. Yet much of the conversation leading up to All-Star Weekend has focused on a set of controversies ranging in scale and severity—some very much legitimate, others twisted beyond the point of any honest accounting, nearly all of them used as convenient fodder in various online culture wars. (Included in this were questions of player safety, refereeing quality, bizarre media narratives, and what should constitute an official invitation to the league three-point contest.) The collective impression was a familiar one for the WNBA. Here is a league that cannot quite get out of its own way, and here is a commissioner who cannot quite frame the narrative surrounding it, either.
This is not the first time Engelbert has been questioned about her job security. It’s begun to feel like a guaranteed piece of any press conference: Before receiving the question at the All-Star Game on Saturday, she got it at the draft in April, and she did the same at the WNBA Finals in October. She has never quite had a convincing answer. (In April, Engelbert replied by asking whether the same question would be posed to a male commissioner—yes, it would, the reporter assured her—while in October, she chose to answer by forcefully declaring that was “not a quitter.”) As long as she is fielding questions about the WNBA, it seems, Engelbert will keep getting this one.
It can be tricky to deliver a definitive verdict on commissioner success. A successful run for ownership does not have to mean a successful run for the players or for the fans. What’s good for the bottom line is not always good PR. A strategy that pays off in the long term can seem disastrous in the short term. Those conflicting interests can be messy in any professional league but are especially so with the WNBA: The fate, fortunes and finances of the W are inseparable from those of the NBA, which has exercised varying amounts of control here over the years. For the first two decades of the league, it did not have its own commissioner, with its top executive instead called its president. Engelbert became the first to hold the title when she was hired in 2019. But there are still areas where she exists in the shadow of NBA commissioner Adam Silver. And some of that is self-inflicted.
A few hours after Engelbert’s press conference, Caitlin Clark was asked to describe her personal relationship with league leadership, and she mentioned Silver before Engelbert.
“I think communication can improve overall,” Clark said. “Me and Adam have a great relationship… Cathy has also brought a lot to this league and helped us reach new milestones. But, you know, there’s always room for improvement in every area of the business, and I think we can go back and reflect and find ways to get better.”
Engelbert has presided over growth that would have been unthinkable when she assumed the position. Yet she has never quite been able to come across as anything other than beleaguered.
That was the case in her latest press conference. In her opening statement, Engelbert praised the growth of All-Star weekend and its many corporate sponsors before condemning “the racism, the misogyny, the homophobia, harassment and threats directed to our players” and then announcing the establishment of a replay review center. The combined effect was somewhat dizzying. It was the one section of the press conference wholly in the hands of Engelbert: her chance to be proactive in the message she wanted to share about the league and how she wanted to frame it. But there was little connective tissue here. The floor then opened to questions.
Which meant, of course, another question about whether she would keep her job, and another response ensuring the question would have to be asked yet again.
