Even addled Joe Biden gets it right sometimes, if unintentionally.
The Clueless One is in the hot seat for taking to Twitter (or more likely having his handlers do it) to jump on the celebratory bandwagon for the Las Vegas Golden Knights, winners of the NHL’s Stanley Cup.
The tweet referred to the Knights as “the first major professional franchise” in the great city of Las Vegas.
Predictably, an aggrieved member of the WNBA’s Las Vegas team took to social media to gripe. Us, too!
But Biden, or whomever, got it right on Twitter because the WNBA, despite all the feel-good efforts to promote it, is not a “major professional” league with its minuscule number of 12 franchises.
Let’s look at the telling arbiter of TV ratings. WNBA types currently are crowing about higher TV numbers, fueled largely by the drama surrounding the return of anti-American former Russian hostage Brittney Griner.
And what is the ratings track record? Glad you asked. According to Forbes magazine, WNBA TV ratings “pale” in comparison to other sports. The NFL averages 17 million a broadcast. NASCAR is at 2.2 million viewers on average; Major League Baseball, 1.4 million; and the NBA, 1.6 million.
The WNBA has averaged about 321,000 viewers. That’s thousands, not millions.
Average WNBA game attendance in 2022 was 5,679, about what Johnstown High School used to draw for football games at old Point Stadium when I was young.
By way of comparison, the NHL just had its lowest TV ratings for a clinching game in a Stanley Cup final in more than 30 years. But even that was 2.72 million viewers on average. The WNBA would kill for that level of disappointment.
Speaking of small TV footprints, you likely missed the U.S. Men’s National Team in soccer romping past rival Mexico, 3-0, Thursday night in a CONCACAF Nations League semifinal.
I was reduced to watching a Spanish-language broadcast because the soccer hierarchy, in all its infinite wisdom, offered the broadcasts in English only via something called Paramount-plus.
Worse, there were TWO offerings on my Dish Network packaging of the broadcast in Spanish. And just to add insult to injury, the other semifinal game played last night, between Canada and Panama, was offered in English on CBS Sports Network.
Talk about a kick in the teeth. Or, perhaps we should say, una patada en los dientes.
By the way, Las Vegas just missed out on landing the 30th Major League Soccer franchise when that addition went to San Diego.
The U.S. men dominated last night – in a game ironically played in Las Vegas — looking technically superior to Mexico and showing creativity not usually associated with our national men’s team.
Christian Pulisic, already arguably our greatest men’s player ever, scored twice and was brilliant.
Frustrated Mexican players resorted to cheap fouls. The combination of those, and retaliation by American players, led to four red cards, soccer code for players being thrown out and their teams playing shorthanded going forward.
Two key U.S. players will miss the championship game vs. Canada due to those red cards.
The fights were mostly comical. It’s a soccer tradition to embellish contact hoping to draw fouls. Get close enough to an opponent that he can feel your breath and he’s likely as not going to collapse as if shot by a .44-magnum from point-blank range.
The fights last night were mostly slap battles and shoves, with the odd grab of a neck or jersey.
Soccer players ought to sign up for lessons in toughness and fighting from hockey players. Florida forward Matthew Tkachuk played part of Game 3 and all of Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Finals with a fractured sternum!
As is typically the case with soccer, there seemed to be more Mexican fans in the Las Vegas crowd. They continued a tradition of chanting what soccer hierarchy considers a “gay slur,” “puta.”
This got play halted, and eventually ended the game short of playing out the entire allotment of second-half stoppage time.
The U.S. will meet Canada Sunday night in the title game and, you guessed it, if I want English commentary I need to pay to sign up for Paramount-plus streaming.
No, gracias.
Sam Ross Jr's site 