Who Wants To Be A Lemming

tbf, Caitlin Clark is the only WNBA player that’s profitable, and she’s kinda limited salary wise by the fact that the women’s league in general is not profitable and heavily subsidised by the NBA.
People will removed about how the men’s league gets paid so much in comparison, then proceed to not watch the women’s league…
If you want it to make money YOU need to support it 🫵
- This has always been my stance, Women make up approximately 50% of the population and the WNBA generates 2% of the revenue that the NBA does...
  My wife and her friends go to some restaraunt once a month and they buy brand name workout clothes. Go to a game, buy a jersey, take your daughter and make it a thing.
- This is a great response. If you want to support them, great! Donate, volunteer, watch their games, whatever. For the rest of us, it's an entertainment product. I don't watch WNBA because I don't watch NBA, or any sports. But if you like basketball, yet draw the line at the players' genitals, that's weird.
  
  I would think that the kind of people who watch NBA, would want to watch the WNBA.
  It's the same concepts, but with women. I would think the mostly straight/male sports audience would want to watch their favorite sport where the players are also the gender they like to stare at.
  Yet, here we are.
- It's totally unfair to use Caitlin Clark as an example of the pay disparity as well. She's a rookie on a pay scale. Her salary is less than half the average wnba salary. What's really crazy to me is that the average salary is about 150k with only one woman making over 250k. For the salaries to be that flat seems odd compared to other pro sports but it's just a part of the W having less revenue. Athletes have very strong unions also.
  
  It's totally unfair to use Caitlin Clark as an example of the pay disparity as well
  Dunno. It was comparing rookie against rookie.
  250k is 4x the rookie salary. Stephen Curry, Kevin Durant and Nikola Jokic are also around 4x the 12m quoted salary.
- Is bill burr on lemmy?
- I'm gonna bet that corporate executives are bigoted assholes and increases in profits won't substantially go to the women players.
  
  The WNBA is currently operating at a loss.
  Players in the WNBA are unionized and if and when the WNBA starts turning a profit they will be compensated.
  To put things in perspective, the WNBA makes less than 1% of the revenue of the NBA. They got a long way to go before they're making anything near to what the NBA players make.
- In Brazil, is even more common now to people gather to watch the women football national team, not at the level of the men one, but there's even companies where they close up when any of the two teams play, to give people opportunity to see the game.
- I don't like watching basketball (love playing it, though), but oddly enough I know of more people that go to WNBA games than NBA games, which comes to think of it seems odd. Maybe the seats are a lot less expensive...
  
  You can sometimes buy season tickets to the WNBA for the price of similar single-game NBA seats.
- Caitlyn Clark should launch her own merch store or something.
- Why does nobody watch the women’s leagues? Is it because nobody else does? can’t have all the social aspects of sports if nobody else is doing it.
  Imo, they need to stop the segregation. Ditch the women’s leagues, but keep the games and teams. Have both teams play in one league, and contribute to the overall score of the team.
  It’ll add new strategy to the seasons. Spend all of your budget on the dudes and hope they keep winning despite the ladies; build a strong women’s team to carry your b-tier men’s team; or something in between.
  
  This results in zero women playing sports.
  I wish so much that the top women athletes were above the replacement level. It would create so much interest, we could all root for these women. It would be a benefit in terms of equal rights arguments when you could point to a woman being better at a sport than the men.
  But unfortunately that's just not reality. Male replacement level players are better than the best of the best female players. Having women on a team means having a player that's below replacement level on the team. Meaning they could find a male player from a minor league team that could play better. This will never be a winning strategy.
  There isn't really a rule that prevents women from competing at the top level in professional sports at the top level. There just isn't any women that can compete at that level. I remember around 20 years ago there was a woman goaltender that was really good and there were hopes she might be good enough to play in the NHL. Ended up not being as good as the male goalies in the minor leagues, so didn't make the cut to get to the NHL.
  It's just one of those things where reality doesn't conform to what we want it to be from a political standpoint. Women's leagues exist (and should continue to exist) because if they didn't women wouldn't get to play sports. There's always thousands of men that are stronger and faster than the strongest and fastest woman. It sucks, but it's how it is.
  People watch the NBA over the WNBA because they want to be the very best at the sport. It's not a segregation rule that prevents women from playing in the NBA, it's just that there aren't any women that make the cut. Same goes for most sports.
  But in the end it isn't really a requirement to be the best at a sport to deserve equal rights. Sports are sports and it's not really that important that there aren't any women that make the cut at the top level of play. There's more important things to worry about.
- There is no rule stopping women from joining the NBA. It's just that no woman currently is able to compete at the highest level when men are included; the whole point of the WNBA is that, without it, there are no professional women in the sport.
  In other words, it's not the same job: one is an NBA player, the other a WNBA player. The WNBA exists precisely because women can't do "the same job" but there is a market for watching women do the job. It's just not as big as the market for people playing at the highest level of competition.
  The reality is that if the market were bigger, they'd make more money. Help make the market bigger. Be the change you want to see in the world.
  
  Are you suggesting they make a coed league where only the best get to play. How many female players will make the league.
  
  The WNBA is a marketing line item for the NBA. If the NBA didnt give the WNBA their hand out, the WNBA wouldn't exist.
  
  You do know that professional sports is considered part of the entertainment industry, right? This is like you insisting that Margot Robbie and Christian Slater should be paid the same because they do the same job.
  
  Nope.
  There is no rule preventing a woman from playing in the NBA. The NBA created the WNBA and has marketed it heavily in an attempt to get more women interested in the sport. Sure there's a long term profit motive (more women watching basketball could make them some money) but the WNBA has operated at a loss for decades. But maybe next year will be the year it turns a profit!
  Boycotting the WNBA doesn't get women into the NBA, more the opposite. It's just screwing over women basketball players because of false assumptions.

Part of me says the real solution is to stop paying people $12m a year to throw balls around, but then again compared to the amount the people who own the teams and league get, shits chump change.
- It's not that they throw a ball around really well, it's that the NBA brings in over 10 billion in annual revenue because of these players. How much are you willing to pay someone to bring in that amount of money?
  
  This is kind of what people are missing. These people really do produce millions of dollars worth of labour. That's how entertainers are paid; the more people want to see their performance, the more that performance is worth.
- If anything, more athletes need big paychecks to more evenly distribute wealth from the top. Anything to drive that money into the hands of others.
  
  The first change needs to be teams pay for their own stadiums instead of them being taxpayer funded from cites and states. I don't care if it will drive tourism, use that money to take care of the purple in the city and make the city a nice place, even make it a nice place for a stadium, but make the team owners/pro leagues pay for their own damn stadium.
  
  Those paychecks for athletes don't go up unless the owners' paychecks go up even more, unfortunately.
- Sure but if someone paid you $12m a year to throw a ball around, would you take it?
  If another team offered you $13m would you change teams?
  If everyone else is getting paid $12m, can I just pay you $50k?
  Also if the entire NBA colluded to reduce everyones pay by $1m per year, every year, would that be fair and reasonable?
- Well that's the thing. The team is going to make $X in revenue, so who should get that money? The owners or the players? People are paying to see the players not the owners.
  Besides that, achieving equity by pushing people down rather than raising people up seems like the wrong way to go about it.
- Capitalism leads to dumb outcomes
  
  Yet you wouldn't say the same thing if one of your kids gets into sports and gets paid the big bucks🤑. Marxists drive me nuts sometimes
- That's nice but unfortunately the real solution is A.

A
- Is that your final answer?
  
  Considering 1 percent of 12 million is 120k I guess that's about right.

This reminds me of how well I can do algebra and calculus but need to whip out the calculator for the tip.
- Tips are easy. You move the decimal point (10%) and double (20%). Or find 10%, half of 10% is 5% and add that 5% to whatever 10% was for a 15% tip. And fudge the numbers to make the math easier when it makes sense to, it's a tip not a math test.
  
  You're going to far. 0% of any sum is 0
  
  This is the way I do it. Often I just divide by ten and multiply by two, but I'm a generous tipper, and it's one less head math step.
  The funny thing is that this basically how common core math works: get to the answer by doing as much easy math as possible.
  
  Easy for you to say! You don't have scrambled eggs for brains. 😜
  
  What are you guys talking about? Tip is just rounding up to banknotes-only. €37.25? You pay 2x€20.

why doesn't she just play in the NBA?
- If you want a serious answer: athletic ability
  She isn’t strong or fast enough
- In NBA history, only 1 female player has ever been drafted- Luisa Harris. She did not actually make the team though, or anyways she never played in a game. I don't quite remember. The door is open for women to play-the NBA does not prohibit it, nor do any of the "men's leagues"-it just never happens because women are not good enough.

The WNBA's revenue of $70 million is what percent of the NBA's revenue of $10 billion?
- And how much of The profitability of that industry is owed to state sponsorship, tax breaks, and Monopoly exceptions?
  Professional sports needs to learn how to pay its own bills before it can be used as an example of why women's sports aren't profitable.
  
  Do you know the difference between revenue and profit?
- A whopping 0.7%!!

Is that... Nick Kroll and John Mulaney?
- Oh, hello

Nick Kroll does not look impressed. Then again, he never does.
- Nick Kroll and John Mulaney for those who don't know.
  
  Wow I could have sworn that was Jason Bateman
  
  Wow. I thought the guy on the left was from arrested development
- I had to do a double take scrolling because I was like "Wait, what that Nick Kroll?"

either way, that would buy a lotta tuna.

This is the real reason why I think trans women should be able to play women's sports: Nobody really gives a fuck about women's sports.
- Except maybe women, but they don't really count as people, right?
- Let's drop the state sponsorship of professional men's sports and sporting arenas down to the level that we give to the women's teams and see how those salaries look in a couple of years...
  
  The wnba Is literally supported by the NBA, if you want to talk about subsidies

Victor Wembanyama lol, sounds like the PES version of Victor Wanayama