Cathy Engelbert’s Capitalist Sprint Left the WNBA Fractured, Silver Must Resist the Urge to Install Another Permanent Short-Sighted Executive [Op-Ed]

News that embattled WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert is retiring at the end of 2026 has been met with a collective sigh of relief across the basketball community. 

For many, it signals the end of an era in the WNBA marred by controversy, unwelcome political tampering from conservatives, and a spiraling manufactured narrative centering on an overrated player, Caitlin Clark, that Engelbert naively fashioned the league around.  

Engelbert’s retirement compels NBA Commissioner Adam Silver to choose between continuing a broken corporate strategy or fundamentally restructuring the league’s priorities.

To understand where his vision truly lies, one must look at how Silver navigates this impending appointment, as his choice will reveal whether he remains fixated on short-term media metrics or genuinely wants to protect the player base from being treated like a political football at the behest of conservatives.

If Silver is intent on neutralizing the criticism about the league’s increasingly incendiary racial politics, his most cunning, if not calculated, move would be to appoint a Black woman as the next commissioner to serve as the ultimate public face and enforcer of a corporate strategy that has clearly outlived its usefulness. 

Fans and pundits have floated Swin Cash, Nneka Ogwumike, and Candace Parker as possible replacements for Engelbert, recognizing that all three are Black women who have played in the WNBA and understand its internal dynamics. 

A deeper look at these options reveals that appointing any one of them would place them as Black women in the middle of a political firestorm the league has so far mishandled by acquiescing to political pressure from Republicans intent on using the league to achieve its larger goals of dismantling DEI and Title IX. 

Appointing Parker would most closely align with the corporate politics of Silver, given her constant on-air loyalty to centering and complimenting Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark, while allowing the league office to point to Parker’s identity as a Black queer woman to deflect blame whenever fans or players call out racism. 

Those who advocate for Ogwumike point to her successful tenure as president of the players’ association, missing that the commissioner job requires an allegiance to the league over players, a shift that might force Ogwumike to operate more like Parker likely would. Ogwumike’s loyalties would be to Silver, whose vision may not leave her room to lead and flex her skills as a savvy negotiator and diligent advocate for the interests and protection of the predominantly Black player base. 

While Cash has the front-office experience and accolades to thrive in the role, her success would depend on being given the freedom to lead and course-correct, rather than being used as Silver’s lackey and compliance officer who’d inherit Engelbert’s boo’s. 

The public backlash awaiting any successor stems from the strategy Engelbert set in 2019 as the league’s first commissioner. Women’s basketball was sitting at a volatile crossroads, chronically underfunded and facing numerous headwinds. 

Chief among those headwinds was the difficulty of getting W games on TV schedules. For years, the WNBA was sports media’s best-kept secret and was deliberately shut out of prime time television schedules. Sports networks like ESPN heavily favored men’s sports programming, and buried women’s basketball in erratic, hard-to-find time slots or locked games behind digital paywalls that required multiple subscriptions and the right geography to access.  

Financial strains hit teams hard, too. The New York Liberty were forced to downsize from Madison Square Garden to the much smaller Westchester County Center. 

A larger shift in appetite for women’s basketball was already under way, driven by changes at the collegiate level. After public backlash over unequal facilities at the 2021 tournament, an external gender equity review forced the NCAA to expand the women’s bracket and finally grant the “March Madness” branding to the women’s 2022 tournament. 

The 2022 National Championship game featuring Dawn Staley’s dominant South Carolina squad up against UConn’s famed Huskies drew a massive 4.85 million viewers, marking the most-watched women’s college basketball game on ESPN in nearly two decades. This provided undeniable proof that a rabid appetite for women’s basketball had existed long before Engelbert’s regime and Clark’s rabid fanbase attempted to take credit for it. 

Using that surging collegiate viewership data as leverage, Engelbert executed a $75 million capital raise by selling a 16% equity stake in the league to fund global marketing and digital expansion. By 2023, regular-season viewership across ESPN networks and CBS jumped twenty-one percent over 2022. Total viewership across all national networks surged 27%, drawing more than 36 million unique viewers. The 2023 WNBA Draft saw a 42% jump in viewership from the previous year. 

Engelbert shifted her focus from raising emergency capital to aggressively pulling in a new wave of women’s basketball enthusiasts. She orchestrated a series of television distribution agreements guaranteeing broadcast availability, ensuring that the moment Caitlin Clark entered the league in 2024, fans had national access to games that had previously been buried behind paywalls and wonky scheduling. 

Audiences rewarded that access with a surge in viewership, as Clark’s arrival pulled a fresh, energized audience into the arena. Despite these strides, it became clear Engelbert lacked the vision or leadership skills to manage the exponential growth she’d spurred. 

Instead of capitalizing on this momentum to build a diversified property highlighting the league’s biggest stars, Engelbert mismanaged the windfall by tethering the league’s success and pouring most of its marketing resources into one player, Caitlin Clark. The commitment was apparent even during stretches where Clark’s play failed to meet the astronomical expectations the league and the media manufactured. 

Engelbert’s short-sightedness became undeniable when Clark was sidelined with an injury for the majority of her second season. Rather than experiencing a catastrophic hemorrhage of audience interest, the 2025 season without Clark demonstrated remarkable resilience in viewership and became the most-watched WNBA regular season and postseason on record.

The retention signaled that fans were invested in the WNBA as a whole, a sign that should have prompted Engelbert to distribute attention and promotional capital more liberally across the league’s deep pool of players. 

Engelbert’s refusal to pivot merely continued a disastrous precedent set during Clark’s rookie season, when she fumbled the wave of mainstream attention by framing racial hostility and threats targeting a Black player as a healthy, profitable sports rivalry. 

By not taking the vicious online racial harassment and threats against Black women players seriously, Engelbert fed the growth of a politically conservative faction of spectators who had attached themselves to Clark. This fanbase largely proved uninterested in basketball, using Clark as a political football to play out their own white grievance politics and resentment toward Black excellence. This lucrative but transient constituency will likely exit the sport the moment Clark retires, or whenever the front office finally decides to stop enabling their destructive and dangerous behavior. 

We are already seeing the cracks in Engelbert’s strategy as Clark’s fair-weather fanbase has started to dissipate. After selling out 80 percent of regular-season home games during Clark’s 2024 rookie season, the Indiana Fever’s home sellout rate collapsed to just 40 percent, then hit a low of 15.4% earlier this season. 

Rather than viewing these declining metrics as a disaster, the league office should welcome the departure of this toxic fanbase. Shedding a disloyal, volatile demographic is necessary to build an authentic foundation of fans who stay loyal even after their favorite players retire. 

Given the immense political baggage, player alienation, and volatile vanity metrics that defined the twilight of Engelbert’s regime, the smartest move for Adam Silver would be to appoint an interim commissioner. 

An interim leader has no legacy to protect or multi-year contract to secure, freeing them from pressure to chase the volatile vanity metrics that defined Engelbert’s final years. Managed properly, an interim commissioner could shield the league from conservative lawmakers threatening bad-faith investigations and let the league stall their political grandstanding. A temporary boss would have room to stabilize the friction with players and fix the toxic fan environment. 

This pause would create space to experiment with decentralized marketing that highlights the WNBA’s incredibly deep talent pool. It would let the trend-watching, fair-weather fans who squeezed through the door with Clark have their final spiral before filtering out naturally, leaving a stable foundation of basketball fans for the permanent commissioner to inherit and the league to invest in long term. 

For now, Silver has a clear choice to make. Will he appoint a new commissioner tasked with continuing to chase the fleeting attention of a fair-weather audience that’s turned the league into a racist cesspool and its players into political pawns, or will he choose a leader who understands that the league’s long-term growth and survival depends entirely on protecting Black women and investing in all of the players who are the heart, soul, and future of the league? 

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