Stephen A. Smith is warning the WNBA.
One of ESPN's highest-paid employees is scolding the WNBA, amid the ongoing controversies with the league. Smith says that he's a fan of women's basketball, but he's worried about the future of the game.
Smith believes that the WNBA needs to own up and realize that "a lot" of people don't like the league at the moment.
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“It’s important that the WNBA wakes up and acknowledges something. There’s a lot of people that don’t like you,” Smith said on his Wednesday afternoon SiriusXM Radio show, per Awful Announcing. “We gotta stop playing games, and we gotta get down to the nitty-gritty of this all. I see my girl Chiney Ogwumike, who is a sensational basketball analyst, and yesterday, Andraya Carter, another basketball analyst. I think they’re two of the best basketball analysts in America. They are doing everything they can, trying to get everybody and their mother, ‘let’s talk about basketball!’ Well, guess what? What she’s not realizing is, people don’t want to. It’s not that they don’t know any better. It’s calculating. They don’t want to! It’s just that simple.
Smith claims that people are 'walking up to him' in the streets and saying they don't like the league
“People do not like the WNBA. I’ve got people walking up to me in the streets saying stuff like, ‘It’s a lesbian league.’ I said, ‘What the hell that got to do with anything?’ Most people in America are supporters of the LGBTQ+ community,” Smith claimed. “And what do you got folks on the right doing? Yeah, I’m calling them out. What do you got folks on the right doing? They’re politicizing it. What’s the Lt. Gov of Indiana getting his ass involved in this incident for? He’s trying to politicize it. Why? Because it’s been politically expedient. Why? Because when you create that kind of divide in a binary political system, it forces one side against the other.”
Smith isn't wrong in saying that a lot of people don't like the WNBA right now.
The question, of course, is would those people like the WNBA if all of this off-the-court drama wasn't happening?
That's the argument the WNBA is making.
