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WNBA faces new crossroads of opportunity in 2027. It all starts with hiring the right commissioner
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- WNBA faces new crossroads of opportunity in 2027. It all starts with hiring the right commissioner
The first big surprise of Saturday came around lunch. News began to trickle out that viewership for the WNBA Finals Game 6 played two days earlier — which had been moved up to a 12:30 p.m. start — had more than outperformed expectations.
Even though more than 17,099 people had seemingly called in sick to work in Atlanta that day, some assumed the television ratings would be dismal. Many guessed the numbers would be buried amid offseason news days after the championship trophy had been hoisted and the confetti had been swept into the trash.
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But there it was: 1.5 million people had tuned in during a midweek, daytime game (9:30 a.m. on the West Coast ). The fifth-most watched WNBA Finals game on cable.
WNBA faces new crossroads of opportunity in 2027. It all starts with hiring the right commissioner
The number was specifically impressive because it came with a caveat: Atlanta hadn't reserved the 17,000-plus seat State Farm Arena in advance, and last-minute changes had forced the game into a "Brunch Basketball" window . In a game when the Atlanta Dream was staving off elimination and the Golden State Valkyries were fighting for the title, it prompts the question: Can you imagine what this game could've gotten in primetime?
The next big surprise came as Halloween revelers inside the Chase Center downed their second or third drinks of the night. Nearly 18,000 fans had traded trick-or-treating for Game 7 of a series that hadn't always impressed but had entertained. In front of sold-out crowds, A-list celebrity sightings and top-tier musical acts, the WNBA Finals delivered on the biggest stage as the Valkyries, in their second season of existence, captured their first WNBA title with a 68-63 win over the Dream .
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The game produced the highest get-in price ticket sales for a WNBA game ever, peaking at $433 the morning of the game (per TicketData), which followed the trend of this series producing some of the highest get-in prices for WNBA Finals matchups of all time — five of the top seven most expensive games coming in the Dream-Valkyries series (with three of those games coming at Chase Center and two at State Farm).
Similarly, television numbers — as they have for the past few seasons of the WNBA — impressed. The first game between Golden State and Atlanta set a television record for Game 1 viewership (2.1 million, peaking at 3 million), and the next five games all hit at least 1.33 million.
Just a few years ago, a single WNBA game crossing the 1 million mark for viewership was news. Between 2009 and 2023, not a single WNBA game hit 1 million viewers. In 2024, led largely by Caitlin Clark, 22 regular-season games crossed that mark, but even after Clark and the Indiana Fever were eliminated from the postseason, viewers remained. Ten 2024 postseason games hit 1 million viewers. Last season, 19 regular-season games crossed a million viewers, and in 2026, that figure ballooned to 51 regular-season telecasts.
Though the numbers aren't in for Game 7, it feels like a given that the number will cross 1 million viewers, and potentially — given the excitement of the second half — exceed viewership from the rest of the series.
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Golden State's Game 7 win — and this WNBA Finals matchup — marks a harbinger for the league and its stakeholders: After a postseason that averaged massive viewership, and a finals series that saw 17,000-plus show up for every game in the longest series in league history, the WNBA now faces its most consequential offseason yet. Fans are paying attention. The league is at a crossroads. And the WNBA has decisions to make that will alter its course.
The WNBA's most pressing matter is hiring a commissioner. Cathy Engelbert, who will retire at the end of 2026 and has served as commissioner since 2019, has a legacy that's defined by both unprecedented financial and league growth and extremely strained (and publicly so) player relations. As she presented the trophy to the Valkyries on Saturday evening, boos rained down from Ballhalla.
The Indiana Fever, the league's most popular team, needs to hire a president and a general manager after both exited the franchise after their first-round playoff exit. How the new commissioner revamps (or doesn't revamp) the relationship between him or herself with Adam Silver and the NBA, which owns 42 percent of the WNBA, will be scrutinized immensely. Decisions around how to build out or change the league's front office will likely follow as the WNBA moves into the post-Engelbert era.
Now, after the fastest expansion team to win a title, the WNBA re-welcomes the Houston Comets to the league. The team — which lost its franchise after the 2008 season after winning the first four WNBA titles — will be eager to re-enter the league's ecosystem.
Alongside the league's and teams' front-office moves, WNBA free agency will finally have a chance to own the stage. Last offseason's free agency was squashed into a tiny window because of prolonged collective bargaining negotiations, but the league can now center offseason conversations on the million-dollar decisions multiple players (and teams) have to make. One of the pieces that long hampered the WNBA was the fact, with players overseas through much of the offseason, the WNBA and its players vanished from public sight for a good chunk of the year. That's no longer the case.
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Looking to the future, with key learnings from the entrance of the league's first era of name, image and likeness superstars such as Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, the WNBA now prepares to welcome the next wave. Players such as USC's JuJu Watkins, Notre Dame's Hannah Hidalgo and UConn's Sarah Strong will enter the league as soon as next season, bringing an additional spotlight to the pros that, with good planning, can be harnessed to continue the league's growth behind star power.
With all of these incredibly consequential moves ahead, the league stage has brighter lights than ever.
In a sense, it seems as though the WNBA has been here before. After the 1996 Olympics, the WNBA burst onto the national scene in 1997, regularly drawing millions in television audiences and posting in-person attendance records in the early seasons that weren't broken again until 2024 when Clark and Reese entered the league.
In fact, of the top six seasons of attendance, three are the league's first three seasons and the other three (including the top two) are the three most recent seasons.
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But there was a different feeling back then. The hype and attention were largely built around the newness of the product, and some felt once that novelty wore off, the league would recede into a more niche sport, and others worked to make that true.
In the early 2000s, and when ESPN gained control of the media rights, ESPN executive Mark Shapiro — who famously said in "Those Guys Have All the Fun," an oral history of ESPN, "I told (NBA commissioner David Stern) the WNBA stinks, it doesn't rate, and I didn't want it. No one watches it. Men don't watch it. Women don't watch it! My goal was to get it off the air" — buried league games on ESPN2.
As an expected result, lower viewership and less marketing investment ultimately spelled lost revenue and divestment across the league.
But after a season that ended with a few surprises, the WNBA now needs to operate this offseason by harnessing the attention it has and making the right moves to push itself forward. Given the missteps of the past, it would be another welcome (and necessary) surprise for the continued growth of the league.
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This article originally appeared in The Athletic .
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