Cathy Engelbert wants the WNBA's Magic-Bird moment...but still doesn't understand what comes with it.

There is nuance to the WNBA Commissioner's comments about the Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese rivalry but the takeaway is clear: she and the league weren't prepared for what has happened this season.

I’ll try to give Cathy Engelbert a modicum of grace before I spend the next 1,000 or so words pillorying her for an answer she gave on CNBC’s Power Lunch on Monday morning. There is a generational divide at play with an older woman, in a position of executive power, who probably doesn’t use social media the way her WNBA players do. Blocking out noise and negative interference is probably supremely easy for a middle-aged former Deloitte executive turned major league commissioner. So, on the tiniest of levels, it would make sense that her argument for her players facing an onslaught of abuse online is simply to ‘log off’.

Here’s the problem: it’s not just the trolls making the issues here.

For those unaware, Commissioner Engelbert was asked on a CNBC interview about the rivalry developing between fans of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese as well as how caustic the discourse around it has become. I actually came away impressed with the business network, whose anchors typically are such sycophants for the powerful figures they interview that these segments are basically just paid PR. This one…decidedly wasn’t that, if even for a single question.

Tyler Mathisen, CNBC: Let’s go to that question which raises some sensitivities of rivalries between players — in the case of Angel Reese who’s had to shut it down due to a wrist injury, Caitlin Clark who continues to play — rivalries that go back to their college days, presumably, where I guess some trash talking entered in. But now it seems, on some social media channels, to have taken a darker turn and a more menacing turn where race has been introduced to the conversation, where sexuality has sometimes been introduced to the conversation. How do you try and stay ahead of that? Try and tamp it down? Or act as a league when two of your most visible players are involved — not personally, it would seem — but their fanbases are involved in saying some uncharitable things?

Cathy Engelbert, WNBA Commissioner: Well the one thing that’s great about the league is that we sit at the intersection of culture and sport and fashion and music. The WNBA players are now looked at as cultural icons.

Tyler Mathisen, CNBC: True.

Cathy Engelbert, WNBA Commissioner: And when you have that, you have a lot of attention on you. There’s no more apathy. Everybody cares. It is a little of that Bird-Magic moment, if you recall. Where those rookies came in from a big college rivalry, one white, one black and so we have that moment with these two but the one thing about sports that I know is that you need rivalry. That’s what makes people watch. They want to watch games of consequence between rivals. They don’t want everybody being nice to one another. Social media is different today than in 1979 when it didn’t exist but I always tell the players — I was told a long time ago — ‘if someone is typing something in and you wouldn’t ask their advice, ignore it’. So it’s a balance but certainly from marketing dollars, corporate partners are stepping up to endorse these players much more so than they were five years ago because they see the benefit of having women and diverse women representing their brand.

Say it with me, folks: OOF.

The general problem I have with interviews like these is that they generally allow canned statements like that to go unchallenged. It’s important to remember, Engelbert is effectively a corporate CEO answering to a Board of Directors (WNBA owners). That answer was written, re-written, workshopped and rehearsed before she even stepped on the set and, this being CNBC, there wasn’t going to be someone on the other side to tell her ‘that isn’t an answer’.

Let’s start with the nuance here. Everyone owns feeding the discourse monster that has become a type of giga-Frankenstein destroying everything in its’ path. Even the folks on Twitter I’ve seen light up Engelbert this morning have made conscious decisions on their own shows and media platforms to pour fuel on the fire. There can be an argument that its’ a response to the first salvo fired by new fans, brought in by Clark, but at some point there also has to be some introspection and understanding that profit in this goes both ways.

On some level, Engelbert’s answer is unsurprising. The league was very clearly angling to pit Clark and Reese against each other and play up that rivalry before it began. There was an opportunity to do it right, to gear the conversation towards culture and basketball rather than towards race and identity. It’s also important to remember: this is a former executive of one of the ‘Big Four’ accounting companies in the country. I would’ve been more surprised if she wasn’t looking at this from a completely numbers-oriented sense, devoid of cultural context, or human emotion for that matter. That’s what she was brought in to do: handle numbers and help the league enter the black and stand on its own financially.

The problem is, this is not the kind of league where you can be so removed from what’s happening to your players.

Before we go any further, the WNBA is not an activist league. It’s a league where some of its athletes are activists. That’s an important distinction because we can’t affix that moniker to the W as a means of making every conversation an inherently political one. In this case, it’s actually not political at all. Engelberts’ viewpoints are an ethical and moral shortcoming, not a political one. And, lost within the canned answer she gave, is a sad truth: the league was unprepared for what happened at the start of this season and this statement is proof of that disconnect from reality.

The WNBA wanted this rivalry, to be clear. They’d been tinkering and trying for years to get something to stick. Whether it was Aces - Liberty, A’ja vs. Stewie, or any other attempt at pushing two opposing forces, nothing seemed to capture the imagination of the American zeitgeist. Enter Reese and Clark, who are less Magic and Bird and more the personification of Duke - UNLV or Duke - Fab Five. Shoot, it might even be more Isiah Thomas - Bird if we’re talking cultural complications. In her answer, Engelbert gives away the game by referencing that Magic - Bird was a rivalry primarily built around race. ‘One white, one black,” she says.

She is right in that rivalries drive sports traffic. Personalities amplify it and, even removing race, the personality dichotomy between Reese and Clark is so different that it lends itself to a compelling story. But that’s not what the W saw here. It’s a cultural competency issue and a lack of imagination on the part of Engelbert and its’ owners. In 2024, the expectation should be that you can create a Magic - Bird moment while still understanding everything that went into that rivalry. The problem is that lost in the nostalgia and the dollar signs that came with that rivalry is the amount of racism that went into crafting it. We are able to write hagiographies of the era now but conveniently ignore the role mass media played in juxtaposing Bird and Magic from a lens of race. What Engelbert completely misses is that, even in 2024, it’s not just nameless internet trolls. To be clear, I think there’s been entirely too much amplification of obvious engagement bait accounts in the WNBA this year and treating those bad-faith actors as indicative of a larger issue.

But when the Chicago Tribune’s Editorial Board comes out with an op-ed that Chennedy Carter assaulted Caitlin Clark, that’s not something an athlete can just turn off. Engelbert, who grew up in a different era, should know better than her athletes the role that television, talk radio and newspapers still play in agenda setting. When major media outlets are going on the offensive against your players, the league does have a degree of responsibility to insulate them from criticism. It doesn’t make anyone any money if your golden geese are mentally drained from what they face not just online but from media outlets as well. To distill all this to dollars and cents is to look at your athletes not as people, but numbers. That kind of thinking is incongruent with the league’s priorities as well as the general public’s view on how athletes should be treated in today’s world.

There could’ve been answers about resources that were made available to players, if any? There could’ve been a call that rivalry is good but racism is not. That seems like an easy layup, no? Racism is bad! Duh! Engelbert had a million different ways she could’ve hedged that conversation and said ‘we want to build a rivalry, within reason, and the league is flourishing as a result.’ Instead, she went right by the initial question and said, ‘we’re making money so be happy it’s coming, no matter how’.

To take it a step further, there was evidence of the coming tidal wave. Where were the resources from the Fever and Sky? Where was the league and the Player’s Association to adequately prepared for how to handle the onslaught? They clearly knew fans were coming. But it’s clear they didn’t realize how bad it would get and have been playing catch-up since the first Sky-Fever game of the year.

Does this mean Engelbert needs to be relieved of duty? No. From a business perspective, the W has expanded to two teams with a third reportedly on the way. Charter flights are here. Team valuations are way up. But there has to be a post-mortem between Engelbert, the owners and the Players Association (who have been the masters of saying a lot of nothing this entire year) about how to adjust next year. Everyone can see that what is happening here isn’t working. Fans, new and old, have become disillusioned and tired of the discourse. Cari Champion’s podcast announcement hopping on the clout train of the Clark - Reese dialogue was met with eye-rolls online. In short, everyone is getting burnt out on this discourse except for the rage bait and politically motivated actors continuing to game algorithms to enrich themselves.

Instead of catering to those people, Engelbert and the league have to understand that new fans can be turned off by something as easily as they can be turned in. What’s sad is that they all seemed to be so blinded by incoming dollar signs, they completely missed everything else that would come with it. But, in this league, we’re used to reactionary behavior by now. Hopefully that changes in the offseason but, for now, the league’s discourse issue comes from the top. Unfortunately, they don’t seem in any rush to fix it.