WPS owners decide to cancel 2012 season

When I first saw the story I thought it was World Poker Series. You wonder if the MLS might do something - partner some women's teams with the men's teams, keep operating costs low by sharing expenses and facilities. Stage double-headers.

 

It is always funny to see Starmans doomsday predictions. He has been ever so accurate in the past. How's that 37% the players were going to have to settle for? Or how about the NFL players?

 

Interesting. Any guesses as to why?

 

Sometimes I like to pretend Starman is a parody account. It reads funny that way.

 

Why would MLS take its tenuous but improving financial footing and destroy it with something that is now and forevermore nothing but a money-suck?

 

There's a women's soccer league?

 

Not that it would ever be done, but the NBA seems more compelling with 15 fewer games

 

I think part of it is that by happy accident, they had a great opening to the season. I'm not a huge NBA guy, and I think I watched 4 of the 5 Christmas day games. Ordinarily that's when a lot of people start paying attention to the NBA. This year you had that, combined with the novelty of it being a delayed opening day, along with some great matchups. I suspect a lot of people got sucked back in on Christmas and have followed the season more than they have recently.

If I'm David Stern, I'm thinking very hard about pushing the schedule back a few months from now on, and making Christmas the annual opening day.

On top of that, there are a lot of compelling players and stories in the league right now. The teams that have been up the last few years are still interesting, and some teams that have sucked are becoming interesting for one reason or another. The Clippers are suddenly fun to watch. The Thunder continues to improve. Hell, I just watched half of a Wizards game to see John Wall. (They're unspeakably awful, by the way, and will probably poison his career. They need to dynamite that roster.) The quality of play is pretty bad right now, thanks to the lost camp and the crowded schedule, but the quality of player is higher than it has been in years.

I was one of those who thought (a) they were probably going to miss the year, and (b) the league would take a huge hit as a result. I was wrong about (a), obviously, and in retrospect I probably would have been wrong about (b) even if they lost the full season.

 

Holy smokes, I never dreamed SportsJournalists.com had turned into one of the world's biggest pom-pom shaking societies for the WNBA.

 

Kumbaya, motherf***er!

 

This.

As for women's soccer, it had become a shell of what it was, and no West Coast presence to speak of. And didn't magicjack have the best-known players off the World Cup team?

There is a market for soccer in the US and Canada, as MLS keeps proving. It's not translating to the women's game.

 

Every time the USWNT has a big tournament, they get greedy and overreach. You can't support a whole league, but I bet a touring all-star team would do well.