With demand for women’s basketball at record highs and the next WNBA season just a month away, the league will start its 27th season with a new television deal in place that will create a dedicated night for the W all unto itself.
The WNBA will air on the Ion Television network Friday nights this season as part of a new multiyear contract signed this month. This provides the WNBA with another national TV deal and allows it to build a consistent national window for its games. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though the contract will not run past the 2025 season, when the league’s current TV rights deal with ESPN/ABC expires.
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The agreement with the E.W. Scripps Company will air games after the opening weekend, starting May 26. The network will air at least one, and sometimes multiple, games each Friday. WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert hopes this will create appointment viewing for the league, akin to how the NBA has become synonymous with Thursday nights on TNT.
“It just shows the demand is high for W games, and Scripps really recognized that,” Engelbert said in an interview with The Athletic. “I think it’s just another sign and signal that we’ve been looking for about our growth, and it’s great to see a top organization like Scripps step up here.”
This is a first step into national sports rights for Scripps. It launched its sports division in December and sought a way to add sports rights to its broadcast network. Scripps CEO Adam Symson said in a phone call that Ion is the fifth-largest network in the country, ahead of The CW. He said Ion has 79 million paid subscribers and reaches 103 million homes through a connected TV.
Scripps is attempting to take advantage of the growing interest in women’s sports and has made the WNBA a central broadcast partner. Asked why he wanted to sign the WNBA, Symson was not short on reasons.
“Because I think it’s time for women’s sports to be showcased in a way that its fans deserve,” he told The Athletic. “It’s time for the league, the owners and the players to have a platform where they can showcase the athleticism and the drama that is the WNBA. Because more than half of the American audience is female, and it’s time for them to be able to see on television themselves competing at the highest level.
“Economically, we’ve got, obviously, that nice intersection with the demos that we serve on all of the platforms that we serve, but we’re at a moment now where we can get into a partnership with a sport and a league that’s looking to us like it’s in a hockey stick growth mode versus the opposite.”
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Ion will build a whole night around the league, which the network will call “WNBA Friday Night Spotlight on ION.” It will air a pre-game show and have a halftime show, Symson said, though the WNBA will be responsible for its production and hiring the talent.
The format, Symson said, was based on how the NFL orchestrates its national windows on Sunday afternoons. There will be a national game of the week distributed across the country. However, there will be exceptions. If a city also has a team from that market playing the same night, that local game will be available instead. Ion also will use data to target the right game to the right market, broadcasting contests in which it believes appeal most. For instance, no matter the national game that Friday night, if the Minnesota Lynx are playing that night, the Lynx game will be broadcast in the Minnesota market.
That will give the WNBA a regular broadcast window for its fans to find. While 25 WNBA games will air across ESPN, ESPN2 and ABC this upcoming season, mostly on weekends, they will not air consistently on the same day, time and channel. Symson hopes the WNBA’s consistent broadcast schedule on Ion will make viewing games there a habit.
“The WNBA deserves a national platform so that it can be broadcast beyond home markets,” Symson said. “And today, it’s on other platforms for sure. And I’m not knocking the commitment those other platforms have to the WNBA. They’re good partners. But this partnership allows us to showcase the WNBA on a marquee night when families are gathered around the television looking for the athleticism and the competition of the WNBA. And with consistency. When I think about it, it’s pretty hard for me — I mean I’m not a die-hard fan, I don’t live in a WNBA market, and yet, I’m a fan. If I were to ask somebody like me like, ‘When’s the WNBA on ESPN next?’ (there would be silence).”
“But I can absolutely tell you because it’s been proven from the rise and power of what the NFL has done with broadcast that creating a franchise night dedicated to that game through the season creates a lot of momentum. So the WNBA spotlight on Ion will be that focus.”
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The deal came together in just a matter of months. Engelbert met with Scripps representatives in February during the NBA All-Star weekend in Salt Lake City and hosted them earlier this month at the WNBA Draft.
The WNBA was able to strike a deal with Ion because it enlarged its schedule to a record-high 40 games, offering it a new package of games it could sell off. There is more inventory remaining, Engelbert said, but that will be dispersed between its WNBA League Pass, NBA TV and teams’ regional sports networks.
Ratings for the league were up last season. Its regular-season ratings across the Disney-owned networks were up 19 percent in 2021. Postseason ratings were up 22 percent the year before. Viewership for last week’s WNBA Draft was up 42 percent on last season, just over a week after the Iowa-LSU NCAA Tournament championship averaged 9.9 million viewers as the most-watched women’s college basketball game ever.
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This deal allowed the WNBA to not only take advantage of those trends but also to test the market for its rights ahead of hitting the market following the 2025 season. Engelbert said she took this result as an “absolutely positive sign.” Engelbert declined to say what the value of the deal with Scripps is worth but said it is “a significant rights fee.”
Engelbert said the league will start working on its next media deal in roughly 12 to 18 months. By the time it kicks in, the league could be in a different place. Expansion remains at the forefront. Engelbert hopes to add four teams over the long term but wants to start with two new franchises before a pause to ensure their viability. It will have a slew of new young talent — including a potentially star-studded 2024 draft class — and maybe more markets within its reach.
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The Ion deal, set to tipoff in just over a month, is a testament to the upward trajectory Engelbert believes the league is on. As league icons like Sue Bird and Sylvia Fowles ease into retirement and Diana Taurasi and Candace Parker are in the twilight of their careers, new stars in the league are emerging, which can create a new generation of fans.
“(They’re) handing it off to A’ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, and now (to) Rhyne Howard and (rookie) Aliyah Boston and the next generation of players coming in that got drafted last week,” Engelbert said. “So, I mean really good timing for us to have all that happening at the same time we’ll be negotiating. Media rights expansion too. When you’re in more cities, I think it’s more valued. … That is important, I think, as media companies look at us as a property and that true legitimate sports media and entertainment property.”
(Photo of Cathy Engelbert (left) and Adam Symson (right): NBA Photos)