Entry 13:

G'morning Chas,

Show me your goose bumps: The Sparks and Libs open another WNBA season this weekend, the sixth for an outfit I didn't think had a chance to survive beyond a year or two. As the Hornets light out for New Orleans, their sisters, the Sting, will actually stay behind in Charlotte to make it on their own, Mary Richards-like. The WNBA hasn't exactly prospered, but it's certainly survived, attracting an entirely new pro-hoops following: parents with grade-school kids, gay women, and seniors who actually like their basketball below the rim. From the adenoidal noise at a WNBA game you know that men aged 18 to 35 are off reading Maxim somewhere. I thought playing in the dead of summer would be the league's undoing, but the season is short enough, and baseball has become desultory enough, and NBA arenas are air-conditioned enough, that there's an audience to be carved out.

This is far from the first time I've been colossally wrong when the game's tectonic plates have shifted. I disliked the chip-shot three-pointer when the colleges introduced it in 1986, and now I love how the trey opens the floor and has mercy on no lead—though I do get the occasional pang when, stumbling upon a whiskered NCAA tournament game on ESPN Classic, someone is sinking the snail darter that is the medium-range jump shot.

David Stern is trying to become the CEO of Boutique Basketball Inc.—a league for every niche. The NBA's minor-league NBDL has been less successful, even though the marketeers on Fifth Avenue, trying to confer cult status (and get Slam to assign a beat reporter?), quickly dubbed it "the Down Low." The glitch, of course, is that the Down Low, thinking "captive audience," stuck its teams in military towns in the Southeast, only to watch half the populations of places like Fayetteville, N.C., and Columbus, Ga., get shipped to Kunduz. At the All-Star Game in Philly in February, Stern tipped his hand on the league's global plans for five years hence, when the current TV deal expires. He was cagey about whether that move would involve a European division within the existing NBA; a separate entity called NBA Europe or some such; or invitations to extant European clubs to join up. Every option has its logistical challenges, especially the last. I don't think the haute bourgeois gentlemen who have run Real Madrid and Panathinaikos Athens since when the Fort Wayne Pistons were still a gleam in Fred Zollner's eye are going to much like paying the Mark Cubans and Donald Sterlings of the world millions in expansion fees just to sit at the same table. But one way or another, keep your xenophobia handy. It should get a good workout.

Globally yours,

Sasha Lupo