WNBA REPORT: The Washington Post's Sally Jenkins reports on the WNBA All-Star Game, which I--like a cretin--forgot to watch last night. She flat-out admits that in a lot of ways play still stinks in the WNBA, which is only true. (I am not enough of a soccer fan to know if the same is true of the WUSA, but I know I am entertained by it, and much more often than I am by a tedious Starzz-Fire 37-47 classic. "I may not know soccer. But I know what I like.") I would like to comment on this nugget:

For the moment the WNBA is still struggling to define its own alchemy. Why is Washington the model franchise of the league, regularly drawing more than 15,000 from the start of its existence? Why is New York, where the local audience would seem to be saturated with sports teams, such a solid a franchise, regularly the runner-up only to Washington in attendance? If the league could figure that out, it would have the answer to its future.

The two possible answers are to move franchises to places where people actually like women's basketball at the college level (Storrs, Knoxville, Lubbock, Albuquerque, Notre Dame, Ames) and see if success in drawing college ball crowds combined with being a completely untapped sports market translates into big crowds. The other answer is to move into the traditional fine sports towns that do not have a team yet--Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis. Just don't put another freakin' franchise in the Meadowlands. Or in Atlanta, for that matter. No one will go and we'll all look bad. But there's no reason for the Starzz or Monarchs to exist in their current form or for the only-NBA-cities-get-teams policy to continue. Ship them to Connecticut and Tennessee, it's a long summer and people need their sports.