BREAKING: Cathy Engelbert Announces Retirement - Fever Focus Podcast

0:00Hello fever nation and welcome to a special edition of the fever focus podcast. My name is Casey Johnson. No Alex today. I'm flying solo as we discuss the biggest news in women's basketball right now. And that is this incredibly important hinge point that just came up within the history of women's basketball as Kathy Engelbert has announced her resignation announced that she is stepping down effective right toward the end of the year. And this is something that you know, I think a lot of people really saw coming and a lot of people really hoped were coming myself included. But over the course of the last day after this has been announced, I've really started thinking about Kathy's tenure in a completely different way than than I ever have because you know, whenever you're looking at things like the elicitama situation and you know,

1:05the Dijonet Karington incident with Sophie Cunningham really the Sophie Cunningham outspoken ness in general. And you look at the way that you know, Caitlin is treated and all of these topics to sure that we've covered on this show. It's very easy to distill it down to what I think was still a really hefty truth, which is Kathy Engelbert needs to be done here. Kathy Engelbert needs to be gone. Kathy Engelbert is not doing a good job in her role as commissioner, but it's funny. Over the course of the last, like I said, 24 hours or so as of recording since we since we learned that she is officially going to be stepping down, I've started thinking about things in a completely different way because now it's a post-mortem right now. It is something where you can look at and figure out what you think about the totality of things and just place it in a completely different lens than we did previously.

2:08So first things first, before we get into too much of that, I'm going to read the statement verbatim for those of you who have not heard this press release that was released yesterday by the NBA and WNBA. It says following seven successful years as the first commissioner of the WNBA, Kathy Engelbert has informed the league of her decision to retire effective at the end of this year. It was announced today by NBA Commissioner Adam Silver. Quote, Kathy has presided over the WNBA through the most significant period of growth in the league's 30-year history, said Silver. We are grateful for Kathy's leadership and unwavering commitment to the advancement of women's basketball. Engelbert's tenure as WNBA commissioner has been marked by unprecedented growth. Under her leadership, the league has seen exponential increases in viewership and historic highs have been reached in digital engagement. Game attendance, league pass subscribers, merchandise sales, corporate partnership revenues

3:08and franchise valuations. Silver directed the WNBA's most substantial franchise expansion to date from 12 to 18 teams by 2030 and helped negotiate the most transformative media rights and collective bargaining agreements in league history, leading to historic salary increases and benefits for WNBA players. Quote, after more than seven years of the WNBA and more than 40 total years in business, I've made the decision to retire as WNBA commissioner, said to Engelbert. In 2019, I had the privilege of being appointed the league's first commissioner and to lead a league with enormous potential yet untapped awareness and significant undervaluation. Over the years, it's been amazing to watch WNBA players thrive and lead the massive cultural surge around women's sports. End quote. 2020, her first full season as commissioner Engelbert oversaw the creation of the WNBA Wubble and Bradenton, Florida, which allowed the league to play a season amid the COVID pandemic.

4:12In 2021, she announced the in-season WNBA commissioners cut presented by Coinbase and in 2025, expanded the regular season schedule to a then record 44 games and to a record 50 game schedule beginning with the 2027 season. In 2022, Engelbert led a $75 million capital raise, the largest ever investment round in women's sports to fund long-term growth initiatives, including marketing and fan engagement, upgrading the WNBA's digital products and distribution and growing the league's footprint internationally. She also introduced an airline charter program for teams and players to travel privately to all games, a first for women's professional team sports in the US. Engelbert continued quote, I retire knowing we've built something bigger, stronger and more enduring than we could have imagined. I'm grateful to the WNBA and NBA team owners and staff, players, investors, fans, and the powerhouse league office staff who believed

5:14in what this league could become. I retire with immense gratitude and tremendous optimism for the future of the WNBA with the best yet to come. So, as we would expect, there's a lot of fluff in that piece there. And the story of Kathy Engelbert is definitely a lot more complicated because almost every bullet point that they attributed specifically to her is something that has a lot more interesting of a take somewhere in the middle, right? One of the biggest ones being this interesting microcosm of her tenure there in the capital race because yes, she raised a lot of capital for the league, but also sold another 16% of the league in order to make that happen, which just muddled all of the ownership even more, right? And she ended up selling those stakes of the league. A lot of the investors then were team owners. And so part of it is like, did you need to do this capital

6:19race campaign or could you have done it through other means? And granted, you know, it was an unprecedented time and the league needed capital. And I think that that is we have to be careful about underscoring Kathy's entire time of leadership by so many of her failures of the past few years because Kathy was not hired. And this is something that I'm thinking about in terms of probably going to do a wide angle that takes a little bit more of Kathy's leadership into account because it's so fascinating. I think it's one of the most fascinating 10 years in the history of sports is that, you know, with Kathy, she was hired essentially to run a small business. I mean, it's hard to think of a sports league as a small business, but that's what she was hired to do, right? She said something to the effect of the league had seven, I think, full-time employees

7:25when she when she started. And that is staggering. You know, you've got a professional sports league. There only has seven full-time employees. And now, you know, the it's nearly a hundred or just over a hundred in terms of full-time employees. That is something that is if you think about it in those terms, it's a staggering amount of growth, right? And then she was hired to run a league that had never turned a single penny of profit. As a matter of fact, almost all of the teams themselves, as businesses, were losing money. And she ended up, you know, through a lot of her own action and through a lot of the actions of others, making the league profitable. Now, obviously, people are going to turn back around and they are going to say, yeah, but it was Caitlin and it was, I mean, to an extent page and angel and I mean Cameron Brink and all of these big stars that were coming in

8:32from the Juggernaut of Women's College basketball that really spurred this growth. But I think it's important to note, and a lot of people have noted this, but like the league was on its way to becoming profitable. The league was on its way to becoming all of these things that it has become. The thing that Caitlin and Angel and all of these players that came in with this massive amount of fanfare, again, primarily Caitlin, is that they accelerated the timeline. It's almost like, you know, you go back and if, you know, the classic question of like, if you went back to the 1940s and you gave their scientists a cell phone, along with the blueprints for the cell phone, and they were able to reverse engineer from there how much farther would we be today if they just had access to the next big thing right away? And the next big thing was Caitlin Clark and she

9:38took the WNBA by storm and all of the sudden the WNBA became a different league in terms of scale. The WNBA became a different league in terms of attention. And I've been thinking a lot the last couple of days about a conversation that I had with my father-in-law last year where he was talking about the place that he was working for at the time. And he was talking about the fact that a lot of times in business partnerships, everybody's goal is to eventually become useless to one another. He was talking about the fact that, you know, this company is at this point and if I do my job right within a couple of years, this company will have grown farther than what my usage is to them. It will have grown farther than what I am able to provide for them. And that's, you know, that's the goal of any executive. You can also think about it in terms of like parenting, right?

10:42Where like your goal is for some day you to be asking your child of the questions rather than your child asking you the questions because if you do your job correctly, you are going to have that child grow up and be something that's better than what you were. We're trying to progress here. And in the case of Kathy Engelbert, I think it's really interesting because over the course of the last couple of years, which is only the very minute picture that a lot of fans have had of her because it's just been in the last three or so years that the WNBA has truly taken off, right? With that draft that included Caitlin and then suddenly it's like a light switch went off. But the last couple of years, she's been a legitimately very bad commissioner. A lot of really bad things have happened under her watch and it's been incredibly clear that she shouldn't be the one leading this. But I

11:45think it's important to note that this is not the league that she was hired to to run. At the time, what they needed was somebody who was a shrewd businesswoman, somebody who could take a brand that was struggling, right? Like how much longer could the WNBA have gone not turning any kind of a profit? How much longer could the WNBA have survived not turning a profit? You can only go so far into a failed venture and she was brought in to make it not a failed venture. Somebody needs to have their button on this. Somebody needs to be working at this 100% of the time, seven days a week. And Kathy was very quickly able to make moves and put initiatives in place that really benefited

12:46the league and put it on this upward trajectory. The issue with her tenure and there were always issues with her. I don't think she was ever the perfect leader. But the biggest issue with her tenure is that as you're going on this upward trajectory, inter-Kateland Clark, inter-angelries, and inter-this new crop of stars, and suddenly that nice gradual climb that every single business person looks forward to and once explodes. And it goes straight up into the stratosphere. And now suddenly the league is turning a profit based on revenue from Kateland Clark jerseys alone. That's a new thing for the WNBA. And then this thing happened where suddenly the inmates became running the asylum. And not in a bad way, right? But previously, you're talking about players who aren't making a living wage and they need to play basketball pretty much 100% of the year if they're going to even be able to live. And so the WNBA was really, really needed. But now you have unrivaled, now you have

13:52project be on the horizon, now you have the WNBA being a little bit of a liability in some cases for some of these players are at the very least the players do have other options and they have other options that pay good money. And now you also get into the point where now the players they actually are celebrities. Now the players do have their own brands. And because of that, the labor force, right, if we're just going to look at this as a typical corporation because ultimately that's what it is, right? The labor force now holds all of the power. Now, Kathy Engelbert is good at running a large corporation. She came from Deloitte and they had like 100,000 employees that she was over or something like that. But it's also like taxes and accounting and audits like notoriously the driest people known to humankind. This is not going to be a situation where you have like labor disputes and all of that like things were kind of just running there and she

14:57didn't have to worry a ton about, oh, I don't know, 144 of her employees having, you know, microphones shoved in their face after they get off work every day. And furthermore, if Caitlin was like screw the WNBA, at this point the WNBA very well may be screwed that we were actually at the point with the CBA where the players would have locked out and they would have been fine doing it. And that's not something that the WNBA has ever really felt before. The last CBA negotiation was kind of along those lines. I mean, we were getting to the point where people were realizing stuff like this could happen. But again, boom, and this is why the the fever portion of this is really important as we take a fever focused. Look at it right is that man, it is Caitlin Clark, right? It is the fact that she walked in and the moment, the moment she walked

16:01into the league, the league became something that Kathy Engelbert was completely out of her depth on. It became something that she couldn't manage anymore in a lot of ways in my estimation. And it's not the fact that the size itself grew beyond what she was capable of managing. She's fine with large corporations. It's the fact that like it's the classic thing of like your office worker versus your artist, right? A type A personality and a type B personality. And all of these type A personalities are all in the same place. All of these alphas and now she answers to the players as much as the players answer to her. And she also answers to Adam Silver, which is an interesting piece of this because reportedly, Adam Silver doesn't really want to be part of the day to day business of the WNBA, which I mean shoot. He has enough on his plate doing doing terribly at

17:03running the NBA. But the the whole thing is I and this is my this is my opinion. But I think Kathy knew that she was out of her depth for a while. And she needed somebody to step in and make certain calls because I think. And this is again, this is just my opinion, but it seems like from the outside looking in, Kathy knew that this had become a different job than the one that she started. And she even said this was something that she thought she was going to do for a few years. And then say goodbye to and this was her moment where she's like, I absolutely have to say goodbye to this. I have to I have to get out of here because she had to call in the big guns in my opinion, right? Like Adam Silver has to step in because he is used to dealing with LeBron and he's used to dealing with Steph Curry and he's used to dealing with players that are dang near bigger than than the brand. Like I

18:08mean, the the brand of LeBron James is bigger than the brand of the 76ers. And nobody really knows how to handle that except for people who have been in big sports business, right? For a while. And so now Kathy's inability to build good relationships with the players, which in the beginning, right? Again, when she was hired, that wasn't necessarily the skill set that was needed at the time or at the very least it took a backseat to the fact that, hey, we need to start making money or there isn't going to be a league anymore, right? But now the fact that she doesn't, you know, handle player relationships very well, that's a big problem. That's like a big, big problem now. And the fact that she doesn't know how to deal with media scrutiny, the fact that she doesn't know how to deal with fan scrutiny, the fact that she doesn't know how to navigate the waters of unfortunately, suddenly the players are receiving death threats. Suddenly the players are having

19:13stalkers show up to their house. And it's it's nothing against the W NBA, but the W NBA on a larger sports scale didn't really matter before the players that were in the W NBA unfortunately didn't matter before even though that they always should have. And so now she's dealing with all of this stuff that she's just not equipped to handle. And it's only going to get worse over the course of the next couple of years, which is why so many people have been calling for her to step down because it goes all the way back to that conversation that I had with my father-in-law, right? She was in my estimation, because I want to give her fairness here because it wasn't all bad. It was pretty bad the last couple of years, especially. But in the case of Kathy Engelbert, she did do some really good things and she did ultimately set the league on the path to success that it's now on. The timeline was accelerated in a way that really jostled her seat, even sitting in that plushy

20:15cushy captain's chair, right? But she was the one who prepared this league for where it's at right now. But where it's at right now is not something that she's prepared to lead. And that's why I think it's a really good opportunity for her to step away right now because when she was hired, what the WNBA commissioner needed to be, what the first WNBA commissioner needed to be was wildly different than what the second WNBA commissioner needs to be in 2026. And so it's almost, you know, with these commissionerships sometimes and really with any transfers of power and ten years on a large business scale, it's kind of like a relay race, right? You have that runner who starts out at a sprint, right? And you have that runner that is perfect to get you to that first pass off

21:17of the baton. But right now the WNBA needs the perfect commissioner to take that baton and gain a sizable lead over the other people in this hypothetical relay race. They need somebody who can take that baton and make a good time headed into whomever is going to take it over next. You know, Kathy Engelbert did do a lot of really good things, whether or not she was being orchestrated, you know, by Adam Silver for large portions of it, which I believe that she was. But she did a solid enough job of getting us from point A to point B. But the difference between point B where we're at right now and point C point C is an almost unrecognizable lead. The WNBA needs massive amounts of capital dedicated to things like deputy commissioners and just a more fleshed out

22:22infrastructure. They need that. They need marketing overhalls and they need to hire the best marketers. If they want to take advantage of all of this stuff that they've got going on, you've got pagebeckers, you've got Caitlin Clark, you've got the stars. People are now coming into the league and realizing, oh my god, who's this Asia Wilson person? She's been here the entire time, but they haven't been in a position to take advantage of her. They are in a position to take advantage of all of that and that's going to come down to marketing. That's going to come down to more than just the welcome to the W campaign right from a couple of years ago where it was just a bunch of you know clips of WNBA players mauling one another like, we do things different here in the W. It's going to require better officiating. It's going to require differences in officiating. It's going to require differences in culture and that's why I think whomever takes over this next we've heard Swin Cash, we've heard a number of different names that have come up whomever takes

23:29it over is going to need to be somebody who can handle player relationships because I've talked about this before. There's this interesting cross section happening right now where the old guard is handing it off to the new guard and this needs to be somebody who can get the old guard to stand down a little bit probably because the new guard is going to be the one that takes it into the future right and that is player safety right that is hey maybe Kaitlyn Clark shouldn't leave every single game with scratches and bruises all over her arms and we've seen that in the international play so far I saw somebody pointing this out yesterday on X where it was like hey this is what physical basketball actually looks like because in international play hand fighting and all of the stuff that's allowed in the WNBA is not allowed there's a difference between like good physical basketball and whatever in the world is happening in in the WNBA and this is going to need to be

24:31somebody who can navigate that who can navigate relationships but also is ready not only to lead the WNBA that exists right now but is ready to grow it into something in a completely different stratosphere in terms of infrastructure in terms of resources in terms of commitment to really actually providing the best and this is going to have to be somebody who can manage player relationships. This is I think that this higher whomever is chosen is going to be the hinge point the most important teetering moment in the history of women's sports and I don't I don't say that lightly but now you have the WNBA this league that is ready to go this is right now for all of its faults

25:31there is a dream here to take over right like if you were getting to go into the commissionership and you said I get to figure out how to make money off of Caitlin Clark that should be pretty easy I get to figure out how to make money off of page beckers that should be pretty easy and all of these stars all of this marketing all of the attention that you're now getting you just have to pick up the baton and run with it but it's also unfortunately very easy to mess up we've seen Kathy Engelbert do everything that she possibly could to mess it up the last couple of years not because she's totally incompetent not because she's a terrible person because she's out of her depth I think that that really is what it comes down to I think that Kathy Engelbert is ignorant and not in the way of calling somebody ignorant as in stupid in the literal dictionary definition of the word ignorant where you say lacking knowledge or understanding she just does not know

26:34how to run the 2024 through 2026 version of the WNBA and now it's time to get somebody who does because for all of the good moments that Kathy had as commissioner there were a whole bunch of bad ones and that is going to create what I think is a very complicated legacy for her because there is an asterisk next to every check mark next to every thumbs up there's a thumbs down so I'm really curious as to what everybody thinks about that you know Kathy and her leadership especially you know those of you have been following the W for a long time I'm curious to see what you think about it because the Kathy that we've gotten the last couple of years is a eerily reminiscent of the Kathy that we kind of always knew was hiding under the surface before but also it's just there's a different level of not being able to handle what's in front of her the last couple of years so I'm really curious what you guys think about the evolution of Kathy's leadership and I'm curious

27:38what you think of what we need headed into the future I'll leave that up to you guys in the comments section or wherever you'd like to have that discussion but that's going to be all for me here on this somewhat shorter very equally rambly edition of the fever focus podcast we will be back here soon to talk a little bit more fever we've got some cool ideas for how to fill this nearly three weeks that we have without a fever game so with that being said until next time first of all like I mean nothing else Kathy did get us to the point where we are at right now and we have to thank her for stepping up thanking her for being dedicated thanking her for trying her best and moving into a position that a lot of people would not have wanted to touch at the time with a 100-foot pole so in that respect Kathy thank you for your service and she'll always be the first but thank God that there's a second one on the way and we will see you guys next time let's go fever