Two days after WNBA president Lisa Borders announced the league was rescinding the controversial fines for teams who repeatedly wore warm-up shirts supporting Black Lives Matter, she spoke to For the Win about the fines, Adam Silver and how the league will move forward.
Were you surprised by the backlash to the fines?
I don’t know that I was surprised. You know anytime things happen in life that people don’t expect there’s often an immediate and sometimes rational, sometimes irrational response. So having lived as long as I have and worked in three sectors, I’m hard to surprise. So what I will tell you is the players wore a non-regulation piece of attire and we fined them, that’s how every league works in professional sports.
What we’ve come to realize as we thought about this but it really came to head in the past week, is that this is really a non-traditional challenge. This is the first time that we are aware of that any professional league has dealt with [a player-led social movement over this long of a period of time], let alone of this magnitude. So there’s no playbook for this. There’s no history or marker that you can look to and say ‘well handle it this way’. So we decided to rethink how we were handling it.
We realized we were not making progress the way we needed to. So like in anything that you’re doing, whether it’s a discussion in your family household or a discussion with a colleague at work, you need to stop, take a breath, step back, rethink your position and how you might be able to more constructively move forward and then re-engage. So this opportunity for us came with rescinding the fines, recognizing that the Olympic break is here and everybody would have more time to talk about this in a more focused way.
Take me through that timeline. On Thursday, the Fever and Liberty refused to speak about basketball. On Friday, the Mystics refused to talk about basketball and the Lynx and Storm tweeted out photos protesting the fines. What was the tipping point for you to sit down and go back on the fines?
There was no tipping point. I will tell you conversations have been going on for two weeks and so there’s a lot of back and forth every time you’re having conversations and there are three entities, you’ve got the players, the union and the league. So it takes a lot of time to set up conference calls, get everybody there and have a conversation and have next steps. So I would say it was more thought inside the league.
Sure we knew the players were passionate about this. They became more passionate which each day that passed. We were trying to take a very thoughtful approach to what can we do to make sure we’re supporting our players, to make sure we steward this game. The players are stewards, we are stewards, we have fans that we are accountable to. We want to make sure we do the best that we possibly can, in the absence of a road map. There’s no road map. So there was no inflection point, it was just us talking and thinking about it over the past two weeks, just as the players have talked and thought about things over the past two weeks.
Have you spoken to Adam Silver about this over the past two weeks and was he concerned about any sort of precedent this might set for the NBA as well?
Adam is always engaged in anything that we’re doing. I report to Adam so he was aware to what was going on on a regular basis — you know you need to keep your boss informed. He was aware of what was going on and he was aware of my thinking.
So when I came to the conclusion or the decision I would say that we wanted to reverse the fines, we had a big conversation about that. Not just Adam, but our colleagues in general. It’s always better to have more eyes, more ears on a problem. I wouldn’t take this on by myself, there’s no need to do that. We have support of the NBA for this league and certainly as we make decisions we want to have all that equal mental power on what you’re trying to do.
Cloe Poisson/Hartford Courant via AP
Whose decision was it to fine the players in the first place?
We made that decision together. This is standard protocol in every league. If a player wears non-regulation gear, it’s the same across all sports, there’s a fine. So it’s pretty set in stone. It’s a protocol.
One point that was brought up was it’s a slippery slope. You support this cause, what happens next time when there’s a cause the league really can’t support. Where do you draw that line?
We will entertain those questions as they come up. One thing we realized is this gave us an opportunity to move even closer to our players. We’re very close to them now but certainly now as they become more civically engaged — even more than they have been in the past and they’ve been doing a great job — but this is a hot button issue for the country. And so it’s one thing to say you want to be a person that’s working on climate change, which is a long term problem as opposed to a situation where people are literally dying every day. It’s much more time sensitive I would say. I think we’re writing new processes for engaging, for communicating, for collaborating with our players and their union.
Going back to Minnesota, one thing that was brought up to me was the Minneapolis Police Union president’s comments when he made a jab at the league’s attendance after police officers walked out there. Did that concern you at all about the officers protecting the team?
You know I try not to judge people. That police [union official] judged our league and judged our attendance and I don’t know how many games he’s been to but I tend to think people are just misinformed and ill-advised. I understand that he was upset perhaps when he said that which is why – as a former elected official [I learned] you never do that – until you know all the facts and until you understand the implications, you don’t make comments because they might come out just wrong.
So we don’t judge him. He has not said anything else and we appreciate that very much. But frankly, attendance for the league is up. Video views on our digital platform are up … sponsorship is up … so if you look at the business, the business is trending in the right direction and it’s unfortunate that that (union official) was so upset that his emotions got the best of him at that particular moment. So we don’t judge him, we appreciate him and the work that all of our first responders do.
As a former elected official, those are my colleagues in Atlanta. I rode in their police cars and rode on fire trucks daily. So I understand the dangers that they face everyday. And the Minnesota team captain said so [too].
That being said are you concerned about what kind of police protection is going to be offered to the Lynx following the walk-out and those comments?
I think there are police officers who are equally enlightened and who will be willing to work with us, not only the Lynx but our teams across the country. You know police are not monolithic either in how they perceive people’s reactions. They understand sometimes people say things they do not mean. So I am confident we will be able to find police officers to secure our arenas, protect our players, our fans, our owners and the media.
