Gerth: Don't just invite WNBA bigwigs to Derby, Mayor Greenberg. Bring a team to Louisville

For the second straight year, Mayor Craig Greenberg has gone courting the WNBA and invited its bigwigs to what has come to be Louisville’s biggest and most famous prom — the Kentucky Derby.

And for the second straight year, the WNBA has treated Greenberg like the dweeb in high school who didn’t know better than to ask the homecoming queen to be his date.

“Uhm, I’ve got to wash my hair that night,” or something like that has been the women’s professional league’s answer each of the years.

Just a couple of decades ago, Louisville darn near had the NBA signing to come here and now can’t get its sister to pick up the phone.

“Tell him I’m not here.”

That’s too bad because Louisville actually seems like the perfect match for the WNBA, which in nearly 30 years in existence has failed to turn a profit and is struggling to draw crowds larger than the University of Louisville has for its women’s college games.

Since its founding in 1996, the WNBA has focused on putting its teams in NBA cities.

They’re in New York and Chicago. Los Angeles has a team, as does Dallas and Washington, D.C. Then there’s Indianapolis and Atlanta.

None of them are doing great, attendance-wise. That may change for the Indiana Fever, which looks to have hit the jackpot when it picked the University of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark in the WNBA draft.

But if you look down the list of attendance figures, those teams finished last season in fifth, sixth, seventh, ninth, 10th, 11th and 12th in 2023 — in a 12-team league.

Two of the three teams at the top of the WNBA attendance list are in two cities that don’t have NBA basketball — Las Vegas and Seattle.

And the first team to ever turn a profit in the WNBA was the only other team that is not in an NBA city, the Connecticut Sun, which is owned by the Mohegan Native American tribe and plays its games in an arena at a casino-resort in rural Uncasville, Connecticut.

The tribe bought the team and moved it to Connecticut from Orlando after the Orlando franchise — based in the same city as the NBA Orlando Magic — went broke.

You see where I’m going here.

I’ve written before that Louisville can’t support an NBA team.

Ticket prices are too high and there’s just not enough money in Louisville to put butts in seats 41 nights a year, which you have to do if you want to pay for and keep an NBA team.

This isn’t the pre-Magic Johnson/Larry Bird 1970s when the NBA was playing to half-empty arenas around the country.

The NBA says its arenas were 98% full this past season.

But the WNBA is a completely different story.

Ticket prices average $47, about half what the NBA charges, and there are only 20 home games a year for which people would have to shell out the cash.

The Atlanta Dream, which boasts the WNBA’s worst attendance with just 3,006 fans per game in 2023, sells its worst seats for just $25 a pop.

The team with the best attendance is the Las Vegas Aces, which last year averaged 9,551 fans.

U of L’s women’s team has averaged 9,320 for the last 10 seasons that weren’t impacted by COVID and two years finished second in NCAA attendance with more than 10,000 fans at each game.

It’s a mystery as to why the WNBA is loathe to look to cities that have supported women’s basketball at the collegiate level and keeps going back to NBA towns that haven’t embraced the sport.

The league announced last year that it’s awarding a franchise to the owners of the Golden State Warriors, and league Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said last week that it was looking to add three more teams by 2028 and was in discussions with several NBA cities including Philadelphia, Toronto, Portland, Denver and south Florida.

Engelbert said the league is also in talks with Nashville, the new it-girl of the southeastern United States.

While Greenberg has made overtures to the WNBA with his Derby invites, it’s unclear if he’s done any of the hard work needed to lure a professional team to Louisville — like find people who are willing to invest.

All he’s done that we know of is invited league officials to the Kentucky Derby each of the past two years — and he got turned down by league officials each of the last two years.

I asked his spokeswoman what else, if anything, he has done and I didn’t hear back.

So I called Steve Higdon, the chairman of NBA2Lou, the group that is trying to bring an NBA franchise to Louisville, and he said he’s heard absolutely nothing about an effort to bring a WNBA team to Louisville.

Higdon said the NBA group had discussed trying to bring a WNBA team to town but opted not to do it because members didn’t see a WNBA team as “transformational” for Louisville.

He’s right, but on the plus side, bringing a WNBA team would do wonders for the city’s self-esteem after years of being shunned by the NBA. Especially since Higdon said efforts to bring a team to Louisville are “dormant” because the NBA isn’t talking about expansion any time soon and no teams want to leave their current homes.

Bringing a WNBA team would also raise Louisville’s stature around the country and potentially put it in position to draw more interest from other major league sports. “It puts you in the newspaper across the country and it puts you on ESPN,” Higdon said.

Racing Louisville is the city’s only major league franchise and the first in nearly 50 years.

I also emailed J. Bruce Miller, who has been trying to lure an NBA team to Louisville since the Kentucky Colonels of the old American Basketball Association folded back in 1976.

“I'm unaware of any effort by anyone to bring a WNBA team to Louisville,” he said.

So, the questions is, why isn’t Louisville at or near the top of the list for a WNBA franchise and why haven’t we done more to make that happen.

Joseph Gerth can be reached at 502-582-4702 or by email at jgerth@courierjournal.com.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Why Louisville needs to focus on the WNBA if it wants pro basketball