The Caitlin Clark pay situation is interesting.
What I find interesting is not the pay issue, which is easily explained, it is the massive number of people with absolutely no dog in the hunt or money in the pot, who coalesced at once to argue in favor of paying Caitlin more – much, much, more.
You wonder how many of the screaming meanies yelling that Clark is not getting paid enough (and that it is clearly due to misogyny and sex discrimination), know anything about the WBNA or have ever been to a WNBA game.
I am guessing the number may not be zero, but it approaches zero.
The long and short of it is the WNBA is fifty percent owned by the NBA (the other fifty percent is owned by the twelve WNBA teams), the NBA provides fifteen million dollars in annual funding and the league reported sixty million in revenue last year – and zero profits. The WNBA currently loses between ten to twelve million dollars a year - and has since it began.
The WNBA, no matter how good its fans think it is, is a product without a market – at least not one big enough to make a profit.
Stupid people do not understand economics, because if they understood economics, they would not be stupid.
It is hard to pay out a big contract when you do not make any money,
The interesting thing is that how people who have little to no knowledge of economics OR the WNBA, immediately jumped on the Clark train. It really is an interesting example of human swarming – like sharks are drawn to blood in the water, bees to an intruder or migrating birds, they do what they do because that is what nature tells them to do.
Over at Instapundit, Mark Tapscott links to the story of a fish named “Indomitable,” a “Pacific Salmon found one day in 1964 swimming in the same pond in the Prairie Creek Fish Hatchery near Orick, California, where he had been born two years prior. He made it back despite facing multiple Frostian splits in the ‘road,’ an abundance of natural and man-made obstacles, plus hordes of extremely hungry brown bears.”
I think that humans, particularly the ones who seem to lean left, have a natural predilection to attack perceived weakness, which they define as anything they do not like. Like our buddy, old Indomitable of the Pacific Salmon Tribe, the lefties do not really care about rhyme or reason, they just swarm to the attack because there is something in their subconscious telling them to do it. Their first instinct is to shoot first and ask questions later – if they ever ask questions (which they seldom do).
Most of what the swarms are feeling looks to be compelled by some seemingly biological imperative largely stemming from the “wrong people” being for or against something the left thinks are right or important (drawing the left’s ire are mostly conservative Christians, but any traditional American will do, it is not necessary to be conservative OR Christian).
And most, if not all, of the issues they are mad about are like their relationship to paying Caitlin Clark millions more than the WNBA can afford – which is no relationship at all.
No dog in the hunt.
At all.
Is anyone asking how big Caitlin's Nike contract is compared to LeBron's?