• agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      The fact that the NBA doesn’t admit women should be grounds for dissolving the NBA as an illegal organization

      The NBA, like most pro sports leagues, has no rule preventing women from trying out. They’re already co-ed. The NBA doesn’t admit women because they don’t beat men in try-outs.

      • MonkRome@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        That last sentence is a bit misleading, women aren’t trying out for the NBA left and right. There also is a massive cultural barrier there, some of the best wnba players could likely play in the NBA and yet it hasn’t happened. I think someone would have to be willing to sacrifice their wnba career to try it out. If the person that does this isn’t built physically for it, it could paint a negative perception for years to come. Thus far it’s just been easier to keep separate. I do think we will see women start to enter sports dominated by men in the coming years though.

        • Tom_Hanx_the_Actor@lemmy.world
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          4 months ago

          “Some of the best players in the wnba could likely play in the NBA…”

          As an avid NBA fan (occasionally watch wnba) this is absolutely not true. Golf, Nascar, Tennis, yeah. It’s more likely to happen in the NFL than it is in the NBA though, because specialists positions like kicker. The NBA, players are required to play both offense and defense. For a woman to have both the pure athleticism to be competitive with the best 500 male basketball players in the world? Not an impossibility but she’d still likely be bench depth and seen as a pr motivated move. That level of nba player gets paid, maybe, 3x the top paid WNBA player but it’s give and take with potential endorsements etc.

        • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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          4 months ago

          Are you an athletic person? Do you enjoy playing team sports and exercising?

          Something makes me think you aren’t.

              • MonkRome@lemmy.world
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                4 months ago

                I know 2 people that have played/do play in the wnba. I did play with one of them, when I was a kid.

                • Wanderer@lemm.ee
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                  4 months ago

                  How would you say women compare to men? Are there any areas where they are noticeably worse than men?

                  • MonkRome@lemmy.world
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                    4 months ago

                    Height and muscle mass obviously make a difference. But it’s important to note that uncoordinated, weaker, or shorter men all find roles in the NBA. So the argument people make that women can’t match up seems suspect. No one is saying Caitlyn Clark will be able to play like LeBron in a decade, but when she hits her prime she could absolutely fit a role on an NBA team, not as a starter at her size unless she bulks up. I think especially with the newer batch of wnba players coming in it will be hard to argue that at least the top 20 wnba players couldn’t fit roles in the NBA. (But most won’t because they’ll make more money on endorsements as stars in the wnba)

    • li10@feddit.uk
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      4 months ago

      If people don’t watch, then there’s fundamentally no money to be given to the players. If you want money to be given to the player, you need to watch.

      That’s how it works for women’s sports, and that’s how it works for men’s sports as well.

      Pay for all athletes is dictated by the viewership they bring in, not their performance. WNBA players actually make disproportionately more relative to viewership.

      You honestly talk like someone who’s never watched a sport in their life.

      • lemming741@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        Men’s minor leagues all pay shit salary too and for the same reasons. Teams and leagues fold all the time.

        Hockey, football, baseball, soccer- unless you’re at the top you make about as much as you would at Costco.

    • Schadrach@lemmy.sdf.org
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      4 months ago

      So basically, “gender pay-gaps are fine, because the value of a woman is decided by the free market.”? Fuck that capitalist drivel…

      Pay differences between different groups of performers are fine, because you can’t pay more than you bring in in revenue and be sustainable. The WNBA makes 2% as much as the NBA and also gets subsidized by the NBA (as in the NBA pays the WNBA to be a thing).

      Tear down the entire sexist gender-segregated professional sports industry for illegal/unconstitutional gender discrimination and require professional for-profit sports be co-ed like every other industry in this country is mandated to be.

      Every “men’s” sports league in the US allows women to compete, presuming they can compete at the same level. This is rare because of the general differences in height, weight and upper body strength between men and women, which are exacerbated when you start talking about professional athletes as they tend to be on the tail of the curve for those things.

      Only women’s sports leagues discriminate with respect to sex. Same as competitive chess, amusingly. This extends down to the school levels too, where a girl that wants to play a sport with only a boys team must be allowed to try out and make the team if she can perform at the requisite level but a boy wanting to play a sport with only a girls team is simply SOL as according to Title IX policy the former is sex discrimination but the latter is not.

      The existence of women’s sports is a form of protectionism.

      Fuck the centuries of sexist tradition around sports. Just because it’s the way things have been, doesn’t mean it’s the way it ought to be. I’m sick and tired of the sexism and sexist apologia. If you think women deserve less, I don’t care what your excuse is, especially if your excuse is “the free market”. smh…

      Professional sports is only sustainable if the athletes are paid less than the total amount of revenue less the costs of equipment, facilities, etc. In the case of the WNBA, their regular revenue is something like 1/50th of the NBA, and the NBA additionally pays about $15 million per year as a subsidy to help keep them afloat.

    • SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca
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      4 months ago

      So what is your plan to close that wage gap? You recognize that money exists and is important (otherwise you wouldn’t be angry over disparity in money) so how do we get the appropriate amount of money to these women.

      The WNBA makes less than $100 million in revenue. The NBA makes over $10 billion. It’s bringing in less than 1% of the revenue of the NBA. Do we take money from the players in the NBA to subsidize players in the WNBA?

      Would it be fair to the players in the NBA that people are paying a lot of money to go see? Like if I spend $500 to see LeBron James play, then $250 of it goes to pay someone I didn’t even see play… is that fair?

      If another league starts up that doesn’t take away players salaries, don’t you think all the best players would go to that league? Then both the NBA and WNBA don’t exist anymore.

      You’re throwing out a lot of rage but no real solutions. There probably isn’t one. People pay more money to see the top players. The top players are men. It’s unfair, but at the end of the day, it’s just sports. It’s nothing to get upset over.