The WNBA had to walk something back on Thursday, and it should not have posted it in the first place.
On Wednesday, the league’s official social media account posted a video featuring Paige Bueckers being asked about a wager she and Angel Reese made at All-Star Weekend over the upcoming Atlanta Dream versus Dallas Wings game. The clip was intercut with Reese holding up $400 and talking trash about how her Dream were going to win.
Predictably, this blew up in the WNBA’s face. The clip clearly showed two of the league’s biggest stars betting on their own game, and every professional sports league bans that behavior. The WNBA quickly deleted the post.
The league then had to issue a formal statement on Thursday, saying the post was “intended to be lighthearted” and that the wager was “intended as a joke.”
Come on. That is a bad look no matter how you slice it. It does not matter if the bet was real or not. It does not matter if the players were joking. The optics of the league itself amplifying a video of players betting on their own game is a nightmare.
The bigger problem is that the league social account was the one that posted it. If Reese or Bueckers had made the video themselves and put it on their personal accounts, there would still be conversations about it, but at least the WNBA would not have been the one giving it a stage. Instead, the league’s own social team lit the fuse and now has to explain it away.
The most likely outcome is that nothing happens to Reese or Bueckers. The league cannot credibly punish players for a bet its own social account showcased. That would be an admission of a much bigger problem, and the WNBA is not going there.
Reese, for her part, is not helping the “it was a joke” defense. The Dream won 82-81 on Wednesday, with Reese posting a double-double of 22 points and 12 rebounds. After the game she posted “cuatrocientos” (Spanish for “four hundred”) on social media. If she is joking, she is committing to the bit really hard.
This is the tricky part of the modern WNBA. The league desperately needs the marketing lift that Reese, Bueckers, and Caitlin Clark provide. They drive ratings and ticket sales in ways that never happened before. But that same attention comes with a level of scrutiny the league has not fully figured out how to manage.
Betting is a sensitive topic in every league right now. Ippei Mizuhara, the Jontay Porter case in the NBA, and multiple gambling investigations across sports have made everyone extra jumpy about anything that even smells like players betting on games. The WNBA should have been aware of that before hitting post.
Expect the league’s social team to get some tighter guardrails going forward. Expect Reese and Bueckers to keep talking trash publicly because that is what fans want. And expect this to be an issue the WNBA has to keep navigating as its stars become bigger celebrities.
The good news for the league is that people are talking about the games. The bad news is that they are talking about the games for the wrong reason today.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
