(CNN) — The WNBA – an infighting, cultural battlefield that occasionally doubles as a basketball league – has reached its November 19, 2004, inflection point, and desperately needs its David Stern.
On that November night 22 years ago, Detroit Pistons center Ben Wallace went up for a layup, where he was met and clobbered by Indiana Pacers forward Ron Artest. What started as a shoving match between the two players quickly turned into a brawl between the two teams.
Had it ended there, it would have been bad enough. By 2004, Michael, Magic and Bird had officially hung up their sneakers, and the NBA was failing during its critical crossroads. No player walked into the void left by those superstars. Instead, in their wake, the league veered far in the other direction, taking the finesse out of the game and turning on-court play into a street fight, with officials unable or unwilling to get their arms round the physicality.
It led to a gaping disconnect between players and fans. One NBA official told the Washington Post at the time that even an NBA focus group ranked the league’s athletes as the least popular among all professional sports.
All of which served as the backdrop to what happened next in Auburn Hills, Michigan. As the fight between the Pacers and Pistons finally simmered down, a fan threw a drink at Artest as he lay sprawled across the scorer’s table. Artest climbed into the stands, intent on finding the perpetrator. His teammate, Stephen Jackson, followed him, and within minutes players and fans were throwing haymakers at one another, creating terrifying chaos and images that would haunt the league.
The ratings for the NBA Finals that year dropped 29%.
On the heels of the foment of the “Malice at the Palace,” commissioner David Stern acted swiftly by handing down suspensions that would collectively total 141 games between nine players (Artest accounted for 86 of them).
But then he went a step further. During collective bargaining conversations that summer, he convinced the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) to agree to two more mandated community service appearances per season and a directive that required them to sign autographs after exiting the court following warmups. He created the NBA Cares initiative, designed to raise $100 million for charities over five years.
He also instituted a dress code, mandating that players wear business casual attire and outlawing head coverings as well as chains and medals over clothing. Wildly unpopular among players who saw it as an indictment of Black culture – “Just because you put a guy in a tuxedo doesn’t mean he’s a good guy,” Allen Iverson memorably said – Stern found supporters in unsuspecting places.
“Let’s be honest: image is everything,” Spike Lee told the Post. “And they’re trying to change the image of the league. Between the fight in Detroit last year and other perceptions, they’ve realized they have a public relations issue. They’ve set out to change it.”
Fast forward 22 years and the WNBA has a public relations issue, and it needs to find a way to change it.
Blessed with generational talent, mainstream appeal and a good basketball product, the league is instead in danger of becoming a caricature. The casual fan does not know about the greatness of A’ja Wilson, but it can recite chapter and verse on the memes about Sophie Cunningham. Politicians and political pundits couldn’t name two teams in the league, but they have happily glommed onto the transgender athlete debate suddenly raging in a league that does not have a single athlete publicly identifying as transgender.
Did anyone watch Kayla McBride drop 10 threes for the Minnesota Lynx and score 43? But did anyone not see Seattle Storm owner Celeste Keaton cussing at kids?
It is exhausting melodrama, like “Mean Girls” with a jump shot. It’s both a disservice to the women who paved the way for this opportunity and a legit threat to the stability of the league.
The players and the league are not entirely to blame. This is, at least in part, a societal failure as much as it is a WNBA one. There are days that it feels like we have not evolved nearly as much as we like to pretend. Personal rivalries are OK in men’s sports but, somehow, they’re catfights in women’s, where we still want everyone to get along.
Nor is this about sticking to sports. The women in the WNBA should no more be required to hold their tongues than the men who play in the NBA. Because of the racial melting pot and LGBTQIA+ demographics of the league, the WNBA sits directly on this country’s current cultural and political fault lines. Asking players to ignore those topics would be like asking them to ignore their own existence.
However, when DiJonai Carrington posts about “White privilege” after her ejection for a flagrant foul, or Cunningham speaks of threats from transgender athletes in the locker room where they do not actually exist, it only adds to the tremors. It demeans real issues and turns important conversations into tropes – ones capitalized on by opportunists like former NBA players Enes Freedom and Royce White, who say they now identify as transgender and want to enter the 2027 WNBA draft.
The solution for all of this is the same that one that helped the NBA out of its morass two decades ago. It is leadership.
Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has overseen massive upgrades for the league, including a $2 billion media-rights deal, league expansion and salaries commensurate with her athletes’ profession.
Except leadership isn’t just about getting deals done; it’s about confronting crises as they happen and stepping into the mess without worrying about getting mud on your shoes. Engelbert sent a league memo to players and coaches about treading delicately around conversations regarding transgender athletes and noted she will form a task force to discuss it.
The commissioner’s relationship with her players waffles between frosty and nonexistent. While the commissioner neither has to nor should be pals with players, she must command enough support and authority to command respect. Last year, Napheesa Collier called the league’s leadership “the worst leadership in the world.”
“It’s never going to be pretty all the time, but I definitely think building relationships, having better relationships with multiple players who have been part of this league is definitely something that can improve,” Sabrina Ionescu said recently.
That requires dialogue, especially during difficult times, a fearlessness to confront rather than cower, and in-person meetings not memos.
Stern’s decisive response to the Malice at the Palace – the suspensions of the players as well as the punishments meted out to the fans – sent a clear message that such behavior would not be tolerated. It not only quelled future uprisings, but it also set the stage to help the NBA navigate the social media era, where fans feel more compelled than ever to air their grievances at athletes.
And he stood firm, even in the face of unpopularity. Though players balked at the dress code and voiced their grievances, they ultimately followed it. So much so that, 10 years after the Malice at the Palace, LeBron James’ production company introduced a new item to the All Star Game lineup.
He hosted a fashion show.
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