WNBA, does anyone really watch this?

[SBR Lou]

These women are paid millions?

Game on ESPN 2 now and it looks so amateurish, womens tennis > womens hoops.

[WonTooManyBets]

Is that really what they are paid? I didn't think they made that much.

[fearless]

There's a cap on salaries around $90,000 I think. They only play a 34 game regular season and there's not tons of revenue.

[SBR Lou]

Yeah you're right, it appears they actually don't make in that ballpark, I assumed the top draftee ones did but guess not.

[WonTooManyBets]

Yeah I didn't think they got paid anywhere close to the million dollar figure. I don't see how anyone can sit through a full game, it is painful to watch.

[SBR Lou]

The top ones do get endorsement deals though which makes up for it.

[rm18]

they actually get paid a lot more overseas

[fearless]

Vegas probably pays them much more than their teams.

[JBC77]

Have never watched a single second and never plan to. Not a fiber in my body is willing to endure watching grown women play basketball.

Hard to believe WNBA teams aren't bankrupt yet.

[VideoReview]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WNBA

"WNBA rookies earned $30,000 per year. The maximum salary for a WNBA player in 2007 was $100,000."

[Illusion]

they actually get paid a lot more overseas

MOSCOW — Diana Taurasi's cell phone rang and she
put down a bite of her classic modern Moscow meal — sushi — to
glance at the number. "That's your boy," she told her teammate across
the table, before answering the call and speaking to Shabtai von Kalmanovic, owner
of their Spartak basketball team.

"Papa! What are you doing? … Dinner last night was awesome … We got home fine … We got in the gym
today; practice was good … Massages? I think massages would be good. Some people would want massages … Mmm hmmm. I think that would be good. Tomorrow? … Good."

Across the table, Sue Bird laughed when asked whether former Seattle Storm owner Howard Schultz ever called her up to ask whether she needed a massage.

Is this the "new world order" the first President Bush described after the fall of communism? Bird, born and raised on Long Island, played under an Israeli passport this winter for a team in suburban Moscow where she earned almost four times her $93,000 annual salary with the WNBA. Taurasi, who grew up in California, played under an Italian passport and earned roughly 10 times as much as the $49,000 her WNBA Phoenix Mercury will pay her this season. From December to mid-May, the two former UConn teammates were back together, living in a rent-free, six-bedroom villa only slightly smaller than the Kremlin, so lavish it included an indoor swimming pool and a sauna. They had a part-time cook. They had an interpreter. They had personal drivers. They received three round-trip, business-class flights between the United States and Moscow during the season. They regularly flew business class or charter for road games. They played in a new arena with a photo mural of the team stretching across the entire back wall. von Kalmanovic phoned them several times a day, took them to dinner and shows, and flew them abroad on break.

This might be as close to the NBA lifestyle as they will ever get.

True, there was a slight problem with the plumbing in their house. Toilet paper couldn't be flushed, so it had to be placed in a wastebasket and taken away in the garbage. But what the hell. The woman who owns the house took care of that. And it still beats an August road trip to Houston with the WNBA.

Strangers in a strange land
On a snowy late-winter evening in Vidnoe, a suburb just south of Moscow, Bird and Taurasi stood with their hair pulled back and their faces pointed up toward a Russian flag hanging from the rafters. Feeling the usual pregame jitters, they shifted their weight from one foot to the other while a Russian army chorus two rows deep, 60 men strong and resplendent in olive uniforms belted out a goosebump-forming rendition of the national anthem.

Bird, 26, and Taurasi, 24, are too young to appreciate the incongruity that the man responsible for the public funding of their team's sparkling new arena is Moscow region governor B.V. Gromov, a former general and the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan in 1989. For that matter, they are too young to fully appreciate the irony of American basketball players traveling to Russia to earn a far better living than possible in the United States. They learned about the Soviet Union in history class, certainly, but they do not personally remember when Reagan first called the U.S.S.R. the "Evil Empire", nor the decades when the threat of nuclear war between the two countries was a constant source of tension and worry. Though they somewhat understand the complexities of those times because they saw "Rocky IV."

Here's the rest of the article:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket/story?page=rollinginrubles

[VideoReview]

There are other ways besides playing overseas that they can supplement their income.

Here is why I like betting on the WNBA.

At the press of a button I can make one single bet ATS at Pinnacle for an amount equal to 7% of the yearly salary of their top player ($7000 bet, $100,000 salary). Contrast this with a maximum NBA ATS bet of only 0.13% ($29,000 bet, Kevin Garnett's $22,000,000 salary).

These women are shaving more than their legs IMHO.