Monday, July 1, 2013

June awards

Angel McCoughtry and Diana Taurasi are the Eastern and Western conference players for the month of June.

Elena Delle Donne is rookie of the month for June.

Taurasi and Delle Donne are the West and East players of this past week.

Team news:

Shock....the dynamic Glory Johnson blogs for Slamonline.

Mystics....a minute with Crystal Langhorne.

Lynx....Maya Moore can throw down in the kitchen.

Moore discusses her path to the pros.

General news:

Fan interest in the rookies has lead to unprecedented WNBA viewership, Forbes says.

Tomorrow's game previews:

Storm at Sky

Shock at Sun

Liberty at Mercury

Lynx at Sparks
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3 comments:

Anonymous said...

By way of full disclosure I subscribe to Forbes. They looked at opening weekend attendance and claim that interest is up. Those of us that follow know better.

It's nice to see EDD getting some exposure and understanding the marketing strategy that her agent / brother is working. Couldn't be much more opposite from Richie's view of the future of WBB and the league.

If nothing else this year will be a watershed for the league. Hopefully in a positive way.

July 1, 2013 at 7:59 PM
rfurman77 said...

I have to disagree.

Last year's attendance was dismal at best. This year at least you don't see entire sections empty behind teams playing their hearts out...it was embarrassing.

At least the 5 games that I've attended and the ones that I've watched on LiveAccess appear to have much fuller stands than previous years.

The League still has tons of work to do, but things are definately on the rise...

July 2, 2013 at 5:05 AM
Anonymous said...

It is possible that TV audiences and LiveAccess subscriptions are higher but reported gate attendance is down from last year, which was the lowest in the history of the league. I've been tracking and putting the detail up here in comments a couple times a week for the past month or so.

I'm not trying to be negative but it's important that facts are on the table instead of wishful thinking. As of Sunday 6/30 there have been 61 games played this year or around 30% of the total schedule. Average attendance per game is 7341 fans or 116 fans fewer (-1.6%) than the 2012 season year-end average of 7457. It isn't down so much that it's a total disaster but it isn't up. Hopefully things will turn around and we can get some attendance traction in through the end of the season.

I'm sure attendance is up for some franchises and down for others. I'm only commenting on the league roll up average. There continues to be little correlation between the performance of teams and their respective gates. A good example of that is Atlanta's last home game a few days ago, which only pulled 5359 fans. Not good for a 10 - 1 basketball club.

By way of reference some significant historical W attendance data follows. Everything is stated in average game attendees at the end of the respective season:

1997 - First Year - 9,662 seats
1998 - Record High Attendance - 10,864 seats
2009 - Last Year > 8000 - 8,039 seats

There is some good news in the recent data:

2011 - 7,955 seats
2012 - 7,457 seats
2013 - 7,341 seats (tracking @ 61 games)

As you can see the drop off from '11 to '12 was significant at 498 seats or -6.3%. As I noted earlier we are down 1.6% this season so far. So even though it is down year over year the rate of decline is much lower than the prior year. That is positive. The other positive is that there is still plenty of season left to make the attendance claims of the Forbes columnist come true. We all hope that happens.

If Richie and her people are smart they aren't reading the misleading press releases / columns and are working hard with the franchises to make certain that by the end of the season attendance has increased versus last year. It is critically important in my opinion to turn around the multiple year slide.

If anyone is interested attendance detail it is posted in the ESPN box score immediately after each game.

July 2, 2013 at 7:58 AM

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