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NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

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  • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

    Questions on the NWHL? Rachel Blount has the answers

    http://www.startribune.com/questions...ers/509690012/
    Minnesota Golden Gopher Hockey

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    • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

      The Devils have ended their partnership with the NWHL's Metropolitan Riveters. This comes after the Pegulas severed ties with the Buffalo Beauts. The Riveters will need a third different home rink if there is going to be a 19-20 NWHL season.


      This seems like a concerted effort by the NHL to force the league to fold.


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      • Originally posted by Scott_TG View Post
        The Devils have ended their partnership with the NWHL's Metropolitan Riveters. This comes after the Pegulas severed ties with the Buffalo Beauts. The Riveters will need a third different home rink if there is going to be a 19-20 NWHL season.


        This seems like a concerted effort by the NHL to force the league to fold.


        I assure you that either your brains or your signature will be on this paper in the next 5 minutes.
        CCT '77 & '78
        4 kids
        5 grandsons (BCA 7/09, CJA 5/14, JDL 8/14, JFL 6/16, PJL 7/18)
        1 granddaughter (EML 4/18)

        ”Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
        - Benjamin Franklin

        Banned from the St. Lawrence University Facebook page - March 2016 (But I got better).

        I want to live forever. So far, so good.

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        • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

          . . . Bettman answered, “We’d have a conversation and see what she has in mind.”

          https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/s...ns-hockey.html

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          • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

            This bit:

            Last year, while the television audience was up, the W.N.B.A. teams’ attendance fell 12 percent to 6,769 fans per game, on average.
            is disingenuous. The reason that the WNBA's average attendance took a big hit last year is because the New York Liberty were pushed out of Madison Square Garden, where they had been drawing about 10,000 fans a game, to a 5,000 seat arena in White Plains, 20 miles outside the city and away from their fan base. Like many other things that New York Knicks fans would be happy to tell you about, James Dolan ****s up everything he touches, and the Liberty is no exception. The team has since been sold to the principle owner of the Brooklyn Nets principle owner. They're still in White Plains this year, but hopefully that will change going forward.

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            • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

              Originally posted by Still Eeyore View Post
              The reason that the WNBA's average attendance took a big hit last year is because the New York Liberty were pushed out of Madison Square Garden, where they had been drawing about 10,000 fans a game, to a 5,000 seat arena in White Plains, 20 miles outside the city and away from their fan base. Like many other things that New York Knicks fans would be happy to tell you about, James Dolan ****s up everything he touches, and the Liberty is no exception. The team has since been sold to the principle owner of the Brooklyn Nets principle owner. They're still in White Plains this year, but hopefully that will change going forward.
              This article does a better job of addressing what you mentioned...

              https://www.usatoday.com/story/sport...2019/38809289/

              Hard to get too positive when the league is still losing money after 23 years...Seems like more of a "cause" sport than one that can become sustainable. And that reality is probably true with a pro women's hockey league as well.
              Last edited by FiveHoleFrenzy; 05-24-2019, 02:18 PM.
              At the outset, we could hang with the dude...

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              • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

                Originally posted by FiveHoleFrenzy View Post
                Hard to get too positive when the league is still losing money after 23 years...Seems like more of a "cause" sport that one that can become sustainable. And that reality is probably true with a pro women's hockey league as well.
                There are three things to keep in mind when you look at the claimed $12 million loss last year:

                1) The Liberty's move also dramatically affected revenue. They went from about 10,000 tickets sold per game on average in 2017 to about 2,500. You can't find figures for average paid ticket price, but from the list of the price of different tickets, $25-$30 seems like a reasonable guess. In which case, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the league's losses are the result of this move. And it wasn't just the Liberty; the Washington Mystics also moved to an arena that has a smaller capacity than their 2017 average attendance.

                2) The NBA's original rationale for creating the WNBA wasn't to make money directly. It was to use the league as marketing for the NBA itself. The thought was that having a women's league would increase interest in the sport of basketball and thus create NBA fans, especially among women and girls. We have no idea how successful the WNBA has been at doing this. I'm pretty certain that the number is greater than $0, but you could cite a very wide range of numbers that I would find plausible. So, the real net loss for the league is almost certainly lower than $12 million.

                Note that this does not constitute a subsidy to the WNBA or some sort of cause. Whatever the marketing value of the WNBA to the NBA is, that's money that the WNBA is generating for its parent league. It's just money that does not show up in the WNBA's P/L statements.

                3) The WNBA players are clearly at least somewhat skeptical about that $12 million figure. One of the primary reasons that they voted to reopen the CBA after this season is that they want to examine the league's books rather than just relying upon what the NBA tells them. It's possible that this is related to point #1, and they want to see how much of the damage to the league's finances was self-inflicted (or Dolan-inflicted, if you choose to view him as separate from the league). It's possible that it's related to point #2, and they want to see the NBA's estimates for how valuable the WNBA is as a marketing tool.

                But there are dozens of ways to cook the books of sports teams and leagues. There are even more ways to cook the books of a league that is effectively the subsidiary of another league. Do WNBA teams pay market rents to use NBA facilities? Is the WNBA's revenue from TV deals entirely independent from the NBA's own deals? We don't know the answers to these and many other questions, and neither does the WNBPA. Regardless, until the NBA allows independent examination of the accounting, we don't have any reason to accept their claims as necessarily accurate.

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                • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

                  Originally posted by Still Eeyore View Post
                  There are three things to keep in mind when you look at the claimed $12 million loss last year:

                  1) The Liberty's move also dramatically affected revenue. They went from about 10,000 tickets sold per game on average in 2017 to about 2,500. You can't find figures for average paid ticket price, but from the list of the price of different tickets, $25-$30 seems like a reasonable guess. In which case, somewhere between a quarter and a third of the league's losses are the result of this move. And it wasn't just the Liberty; the Washington Mystics also moved to an arena that has a smaller capacity than their 2017 average attendance.

                  2) The NBA's original rationale for creating the WNBA wasn't to make money directly. It was to use the league as marketing for the NBA itself. The thought was that having a women's league would increase interest in the sport of basketball and thus create NBA fans, especially among women and girls. We have no idea how successful the WNBA has been at doing this. I'm pretty certain that the number is greater than $0, but you could cite a very wide range of numbers that I would find plausible. So, the real net loss for the league is almost certainly lower than $12 million.

                  Note that this does not constitute a subsidy to the WNBA or some sort of cause. Whatever the marketing value of the WNBA to the NBA is, that's money that the WNBA is generating for its parent league. It's just money that does not show up in the WNBA's P/L statements.

                  3) The WNBA players are clearly at least somewhat skeptical about that $12 million figure. One of the primary reasons that they voted to reopen the CBA after this season is that they want to examine the league's books rather than just relying upon what the NBA tells them. It's possible that this is related to point #1, and they want to see how much of the damage to the league's finances was self-inflicted (or Dolan-inflicted, if you choose to view him as separate from the league). It's possible that it's related to point #2, and they want to see the NBA's estimates for how valuable the WNBA is as a marketing tool.

                  But there are dozens of ways to cook the books of sports teams and leagues. There are even more ways to cook the books of a league that is effectively the subsidiary of another league. Do WNBA teams pay market rents to use NBA facilities? Is the WNBA's revenue from TV deals entirely independent from the NBA's own deals? We don't know the answers to these and many other questions, and neither does the WNBPA. Regardless, until the NBA allows independent examination of the accounting, we don't have any reason to accept their claims as necessarily accurate.
                  Meh...I'll keep in mind that I'm a hockey guy so I have pretty much zero interest in basketball other than what lessons can be learned for a women's pro hockey league from the WBNA experiment.
                  At the outset, we could hang with the dude...

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                  • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

                    The other thing the WNBA players undoubtedly want to look at is the expenses. The league claims that it lost $12 million last year despite the fact that the players only get 12% of the declared revenues in salary. All of the major men's leagues pay about 50% of revenues in player salaries. There are undoubtedly some fixed costs that don't scale down, but it's kind of strange to be losing money when you've scaled down the largest expense in most sports leagues that far.

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                    • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

                      Originally posted by Still Eeyore View Post
                      The NBA's original rationale for creating the WNBA wasn't to make money directly. It was to use the league as marketing for the NBA itself.
                      As a kid once delighting in the Harlem Globetrotters’ undercard to a pre-Dolan Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, I would have found it hard to believe that professional basketball would ever not fill the stands . . . So the NBA once needed a boost? Amazing. And the suits considered a WNBA as a way to provide that boost? Astonishing. Magic v Bird and Michael Jordan proved to be worth a zillion Libertys. So Eeyore’s post led me on to a search of zany marketing ideas, starting with the Globetrotters themselves, who, as the Savoy Big Five, were enlisted to boost flagging dance attendance at the Savoy Ballroom in Chicago. Abe Saperstein, a true marketing genius, gave these native sons of the south side the double cachet of “Harlem” (a most happening place at the time) and “Globetrotters,” which speaks for itself. They were so talented that commerce itself broke the color line when Sweetwater Clifton was hired as the first black player to wear an NBA uniform. Those were its fledgling days when professional basketball really needed a boost. Why? Because the NBA (first known as the BAA before a merger) was more or less created out of thin air by one Walter Brown of the Boston Bruins and his fellow hockey honchos. They needed a way to fill their empty dance cards (arenas) and decided that a fully supported league to monetize the popularity of (mostly college) roundball was the way to do this. Voilà! ---- The sports juggernaut that we all know and love today. (You can look it up.) If you think of these hockey barons as looking for a little economic something on the side, you could almost get away with saying the NBA was the love child of the NHL. Now that’s astonishing! So if Hilary Knight & Co, in dealing with Bettman, were to take anything at all from the WNBA model to help establish a viable women’s professional hockey league they would be completing a very strange circle indeed.
                      Last edited by thirdtime's . . .; 05-25-2019, 11:43 AM.

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                      • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

                        The BAA merged with the National League to create the NBA around 1948.

                        I'm old enough to remember NBA doubleheaders (4 teams / 2 games) at arenas (50th st MSG was mine). Also, as late as 1980, the NBA final (Magic's rookie year vs the 76ers) was shown on delay tape (1130 pm) in most US markets. DC got it live.
                        Last edited by joecct; 05-25-2019, 04:00 PM.
                        CCT '77 & '78
                        4 kids
                        5 grandsons (BCA 7/09, CJA 5/14, JDL 8/14, JFL 6/16, PJL 7/18)
                        1 granddaughter (EML 4/18)

                        ”Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.”
                        - Benjamin Franklin

                        Banned from the St. Lawrence University Facebook page - March 2016 (But I got better).

                        I want to live forever. So far, so good.

                        Comment


                        • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

                          Originally posted by thirdtime's . . . View Post
                          As a kid once delighting in the Harlem Globetrotters’ undercard to a pre-Dolan Knicks game at Madison Square Garden, I would have found it hard to believe that professional basketball would ever not fill the stands . . . So the NBA once needed a boost?.
                          Even if you're filling the arena, you market. At that point, increasing demand allows you to raise ticket prices.

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                          • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

                            And martketing goes beyond selling tickets to merchandising and increasing demand for the broadcast product to up advertising revenue. For a league like the NFL, ticket sales has to be a relatively small percentage of the total revenue generated.
                            "... And lose, and start again at your beginnings
                            And never breathe a word about your loss;" -- Rudyard Kipling

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                            • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

                              My question about marketing, prompted by the supposed logic of the founding of the WNBA, is whether any fan of any women’s sport has ever been turned on to the same sport, previously ignored but now enthusiastically enjoyed, as played by men?! I doubt it.
                              (And I need to get this posted before T3 brings in Homer Simpson.)

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                              • Re: NWHL Announcement Event On Tuesday In Saint Paul

                                Originally posted by thirdtime's . . . View Post
                                My question about marketing, prompted by the supposed logic of the founding of the WNBA, is whether any fan of any women’s sport has ever been turned on to the same sport, previously ignored but now enthusiastically enjoyed, as played by men?! I doubt it.
                                I suspect that you're wrong, but neither of us has any data on that, and the NBA does. But you also don't have the mechanism they're pursuing correct. The goal was not to take existing fans of women's basketball and, by starting the WNBA, convert them into fans of the NBA.

                                The concept was to appeal to women, and especially girls, who didn't have any attachment to basketball at all. By starting a women's league, they would spread the idea that basketball is something that women care about. That basketball is something that women play. And that it's something that they will pay to follow. It also goes the other way, showing women that the NBA is interested in them, in ways that paying a bunch of men millions of dollars to play basketball doesn't. If this works, you will create a new group of fans that follow both the WNBA and the NBA, and even lots of them who never follow the WNBA at all, but would never have become fans of the NBA without feeling included.

                                I have no idea how well this works, and how much revenue this generates for the NBA annually. I'm certain that the value is greater than zero, and almost equally certain that it's less than $100 million. (For reference, the NBA generated about $7.4 billion in revenue last season, so my guess is that the WNBA is responsible for something between 0% and 1.35% of the NBA's revenue.) The NBA, though, does have estimates of how well this works. Having taken business school classes in which the statistical methodology of marketing was discussed, I'm skeptical that their estimates are all that solid, but I'd still be interested to see them.

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