Sad Day in Sacramento

On November 20 this year, the Maloof family, owner of the Sacramento Kings and Monarchs franchises, of the NBA and WNBA respectively, announced that they were no longer going to be operating the Monarchs, essentially folding the team.

A frenzied two weeks passed while the commissioner of the WNBA tried to find a suitable owner and arena in Oakland and the East Bay area, where interest seemed the highest. This ultimately failed, and the team was picked apart by the other remaining WNBA teams in a dispersal draft.

Ugh.

These are obviously tough times for the WNBA. The Houston franchise also folded this year, and the Detroit franchise has moved to Tulsa, but has yet to be given a name, so currently they're just WNBA Tulsa. They have some time before the season starts before they need a name, I suppose...

But between Sac, Houston, and Detroit you had three of the original eight franchises, all of which had been playoff perennials, and all three had won championships. For as fanatic as Kings fans are in Sac, and they are pretty damn fanatic, it was he Monarchs that brought Sacramento their only professional sports championship. The Solons were okay during the PCL heyday, but were never really good enough to beat the Seals of SF, or the Hollywood Stars, or the Los Angeles Angels. The River Cats might have taken the AAA Minor League crown a few years back. But the Monarchs, in 2005, won it all.

It was my understanding that when the WNBA finally formed, and pushed the more exciting women's professional league that had just started, the ABL, out of the picture, that they awarded teams to cities with loyal and idiotically fanatic fan bases. Sacramento definitely fits the profile. The ABL, though, had started two years prior, played more games in a season, and had more teams on occasion. It also had the refreshing business of having an acronym that didn't automatically signify that it was chick-oriented. The ABL. The best the NBA could come up with is the WNBA, or NBA for women. Am I the only person annoyed by that? In golf we have the PGA, and the LPGA, when on a television screen it shows up as a delicately cursive "L", as in Lady...At least in tennis and volleyball, which have been established as a dual gender professional sports for decades, you get the ATP and AVP respectively, without any "W"s or "L"s.

I've read that the NBA has been operating the WNBA every year at a loss, which begs the tragic question that hangs around the pro ladies basketball constantly: when will the boys decide that the girls are no longer financially viable, and scratch the entire thing?