Welcome to Good Game with Sarah Spain, where we're knee deep in Sangria, croquettas and patatas bravs.
That's right, we're topis over here.
It's Monday, November eighteenth, and while Alex and I are getting settled in Spain for the VJK Cup, we're focusing the show on.
An interview with the authors of the books.
Slaying the Trolls, Why the Trolls are very very wrong about women in Sports, the Great Nefert, D Walker, and David Barry. Before the interview, I want to tread you the blurb I wrote for this book, and I think this book might be a very useful tool in the arsenal of all use slices out there fighting the good fight.
So here you go. I wrote.
It can be difficult to move on from said ideas, stereotypes and talking points if we aren't fully educated on how we arrived at them and how things have changed, which is why a book like this is so important. Centuries of societal bias have created heuristics around women's sports that are not only inaccurate and harmful to female athletes, leagues, and fans of women's sport, but They also keep people from making a lot of money off a very viable product.
In no other business do we reject or refuse to capitalize on multimillion dollar profit and rocket ship growth. We do that in women's sports, not just due to ignorance, but because of an unequal and unfair system that was actually built with intention. The authors recognize all the ways women's sports have been held back, and they see the incredible growth and profit that could happen if we actually invested, supported, watched,
and understood the product. This book will not only slay the trolls, but educate the masses, and Nef and David will educate us all. Coming up next, it's time for another group chat where we take the t from the text and put it on the airwaves.
Joining us.
She's the Deputy VP for Academic Affairs Student Affairs at Equity for the University of Massachusetts, a tenured full professor in the Department of Sport Management, and a social scientist who studies organizational culture. She's a Research Fellow with the North American Society for Sport Management, signifying the top ten percent of researchers in her field. A former NCAAD one basketball player, at Georgia Tech and Stetson and was inducted into the Stetson UA Hall of Fame.
It's Nef for TD Walker. What's up, Nef?
How are you? Sarah? Good to be here, Thanks for having.
Me, Thanks for coming on joining her.
He's a professor of economics at Southern Utah University who has spent the last two decades researching sports and economics. He's the lead author of the books The Wages of Wins and Stumbling On Wins, the sole author of Sports Economics, and a co author of the Economics of the Super Bowl.
He's been part of more than eighty.
Academic papers published on the subject of sports economics, and has written for a number of popular outlets, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, Time, dot Com, Forbes, and more.
It's David Barry, what's up, David?
What's up with you? Sarah? Thanks for having me.
You know, living the dream is what I tell myself every day. It's got to be somebody's dream.
Uh.
Thank you both for coming on.
They are the co authors of the books Slaying the Trolls Why the Trolls Are Very Very Wrong About Women and Sports, which provides the arguments and the empirical evidence to demonstrate why responding to women sports news with nobody.
Cares couldn't be further from the truth.
The book gives folks the evidence and in photo back against outdated sexism and help support the current push for equity, investment and respect in women's sports. This book is so needed, Unfortunately, more so every day it feels as women's sports is going in one direction and the trolls continue to push in another. So nef tell me how this book came together.
Oh gosh, So First, Dave is a really fast writer. I am not so much. But the book started because Dave and I colleagues writing together doing research together, essentially got tired of going on what was then Twitter now x and seeing these trolls make really ridiculous comments, not fact based comments, based on their small opinions about women's sports, and you know, we would go back and forth and text about it, we would talk about it when we
saw each other. We're writing papers, we're talking about it, and we just sort of got fed up and was like, Okay, what can we do about this. The timing was such that it was I believe twenty eighteen when we first began discussing the idea of this book, and then we
started writing. We started, you know, meeting basically weekly and just talking about what we saw that week on Twitter, following folks like you and your other colleagues, Jamil Hill and others, and seeing the ways that you were wasting a lot of your very valuable time trying to not only you know, call out the trolls, but also provide some facts so that you're educating people along the way.
And we just thought to ourselves, why are they, like they need to be doing the really good work that they do, Why are they wasting their time with these trolls.
Can we do something to provide some.
Tools for folks to be able to respond to trolls or at least just have more educated conversations about women's sports in general. So that's really that was really the genesis of this book.
Yeah, it does feel like such a waste of time. And then on the other hand, I think what we're seeing more often now is when research, which is what you guys focus in, comes up against ignorance, there isn't a great way for people to fully comprehend or vet which side is being accurate, right, Like you could go to someone's bio and see if maybe it tells you something about their expertise and their background and say, well,
this person probably knows better. But we're also seeing some pretty disingenuous people in high places who are feeding misinformation with intent. And that is true of things all the way up to the presidential race, all the way down to things that are just entertaining for us or sports
right in the middle there. And if I think part of that is why you do find folks in my position or Jamel or many others in the business who say, somebody has to inform, even if a lot of people aren't going to pay attention or going to notice, somebody
has to inform with actual facts. And I imagine as someone whose job is research, it's all the more frustrating when someone who looks to be or for all intensive purposes is on equal footing in a space like X can say something that's absolutely false and there's no repercussions, there's no accountability, it doesn't really matter. So how did you decide which things people were saying or which arguments people most often came with that you wanted to address in the book.
So you're exactly right, it's frustrating when you see people say these things that aren't rooted in parical research are just sometimes common sense. They say it to infuriate folks that are deeply involved in women's sports, and it's you know, it's frustrating. So part of the reason, and I give all credit to Dave. The reason why we wrote this book the way we did is because we wanted it to be interesting to people, but we also wanted it to be able to be read at essentially a fifth
grade level. If you go to Amazon, it says this book is you can it's a fifth grade level. Like, we didn't write it for academics. There's research in there, but we try to put it in playing terms, and we wanted it to be as accessible as possible. So I think that was really sort of our way of making sure that folks who needed to read this book and were interested in it could I think, in addition to your question that you asked to get back to
that it was hard choosing. I mean, you see, the book is twenty chapters, right, like, it was very difficult for us to choose which stories to write on. And I think also because I am a painfully slow writer, we just it took so long that we kept adding stories, right, I mean weekly, Dave and I are meeting and Dave's like, oh, this just happened. We have to put it in the book, and I'm like, we don't have space, but we do. So we didn't really cut out a whole lot. We
tried to add all of the stories in there. We tried to force them in there, but at the end of the day, it was whatever what was most relevant. What we saw on X that people were the stories that people were sharing that were false, that was rooted in data and empirical research that we had access to. We prioritize those so that we could tell really good stories that were interesting, but also stories that were rooted in literature and research.
Yeah, Dave, you've been fighting this fight for quite some time. You've been alongside me and Jamelle and others on the Internet attempting to use facts and research to talk back to people who are trying to spread lies. How difficult was it to take that mindset of combativeness and marry it with your professorial research side that is probably wanting
to get more into sort of empirical data. How do you find that balance, Like NEF just said of like getting the information to people in a way that they'll understand it, but also knowing how much it matters to be able to back that with saying this is facts, this is true, this is not subjective opinion.
Well, I think the advantage I had as an academic is when my first book came out, I was asked to write for places like The New York Times, and I had editors sit me down and I would write something and they would say, okay, that nobody knows what the hell you're talking about. You can't say it that way. I had a New York Times editor tell me once, you can't use the word standard deviation. No one knows what that means.
We all learned it, do we all remember?
Yeah? No, and so, and you know. I had a radio host once get very irate because I dare to use the word econometrics on air. They were very mad about that. They're like, don't say words like that. Rather have you swear and have our license revoked, rather than have you say things and lose all our audience. So I was taught how to write things by by very patient editors, and they said, you know, you got it. You can't write these things like journal articles or not.
People don't read things like that. So you learn to write things in a way that is accessible. And so because the objective is what we're trying to do is we're trying to reach out to the fans of women's sports who who It just feels when you're on social media and they're debating with the trolls, like there's this this level of frustration. It's like, I don't I know you're wrong, but I don't have the data and I don't have the research. It says, hey, you're wrong. I
just know you're wrong. And so what NEPH and I are doing is saying, hey, this is this is how you say that, This is how you respond to that they say this, but this is why they're wrong, and this is how you can respond to them in a way that other people can under because really, you're probably not going to convert the trolls. That is unrealistic. We don't. It's not called the book isn't called converting the trolls.
It's called we don't Convert them. But it's for it's for the fan of women's sports, and then for the people who don't really know who's right, and then you can say, hey, look look at it this way. Now do you understand why that person is wrong? And that's kind of where we're going with this.
That's exactly what I always tell people when they ask me how I decide to engage on social media. I often say, I wait until there's a bunch of people saying the same uninformed thing.
I pick one.
I use them as an example to be able to shout down whatever they're saying that's wrong headed, with no intention usually of expecting them to change their opinion. But for everybody in the middle, who's maybe not even posting anything, but they're all reading it to see, oh, that's a
great point, that's actually right, that's wrong. And I've had a lot of people over the years say, I have to tell you, when you first started at ESPN one thousand, ten years ago, I thought X and Y. But I started following you and I read this, and I see this, and I hear this, and now I get it, and that's the intent here.
So you're right, it's not really about converting the trolls so much.
As it is about informing the people who know they're wrong and want to have the facts to back it up. And also everybody in the middle that maybe doesn't know and hasn't looked into it, who now gets this information that helps them potentially be more interested in women's sports at the very least, not believe the BS stuff that's coming out of the other side. Now, if I heard you describe in an interview this book as sas you said of the trolls, they don't deserve our calm and welcoming demeanor.
They deserve a bit of sassiness. I couldn't agree more.
Was it clear from the beginning for both of you that that's the tone you wanted?
And how does Nef's.
SaaS and Dave's sas meet in the middle so that there's a through line in the actual composing of the book.
Yeah, that's where the fun happened, right, trying to combine our sassiness. But really, honestly, the book, if you read it, and if you know Dave, the book is really right, and in Dave's voice, right, I mean, we got together and we began writing together, and you know, sometimes we would actually literally write as we're meeting. Oftentimes we would write pieces of the book and then come together put
it together and then sort of talk through it. But at the end of the day, what we notice is that my writing was very much so academic focused, and I had a very difficult time transitioning from the academic style of writing to writing for a trade book, writing for a general audience, and writing, you know, essentially at a fifth grade level. Eventually I got it. But what we decided is that we needed to write it in one voice. If we wrote it in both of our voices,
it would be confusing. It was disjointed. So the sassiness. Dave is sassy if you've met Dave in person, if you talk to Dave, if you see him on X, he.
Is sassy in general.
So the sassiness came from that, and then I'm far less sassy. But these people are so irritating that I found my inner sassiness and brought it out. So yeah, at the end of the day, you know, again watching folks like you and Jamil respond to these people and
many others. Right, I use you into as an example, but there are many others that are out there just trying to do their job in the media and waste in almost all women, wasting their time that could be spent doing other important things responding to these people and.
Doing it nicely, right, And I'm like, no, we don't have to be nice. This is in our field. We're not in the media. It doesn't matter what we say.
We're academics, you know, we go back to our caves and right, like, we can be sassy in the public eye and continue on with our lives.
So why not.
And again, I don't think these folks deserve our calm or a welcomness because they're not being genuine in their responses when they're being trolls.
I think sassy's the perfect word, though, because if you start to become cruel or dismissive, your message is lost because it's easier than to fight the attitude you're bringing instead of the information you're bringing. So the sassiness says, listen, we're tired of your bullshit and here's the real facts versus cruelty, which this just then adds to this sort of schism when nobody seeks to find common ground and to meet over the information, it's just about pushing the
other side away. So I think SAS's like the perfect word,
and that's what I aim for. I've had plenty of people reach out to me who are up and coming in the business and say, should I worry about getting hired if I clap back occasionally to trolls, And I always say, as long as you are not cruel and you are civil and the information that you're providing or the way you're clapping back is either just funny about grammar or spelling, because that is always a go to for me if somebody's coming after me or if it's informed,
you're fine, just don't sync down to their level. We got to take a quick break more with Neph and Dave coming up. You know, Dave, you came on my old podcast. I've been following you for years. I learned a ton about how to see the women's pro sports space through an academic lens, in part because of the research that you would share and the important historical context
that you would bring in. Some of your most compelling and important work I think is helping folks learn the realities of men's leagues at their inception, years before many of us were ever alive. Can you share what might be some surprising realities around, for instance, the NBA's lean early years, and how you can use information like that to help people understand why their opinions on women's sports are not correct.
Yeah.
Sure, yeah, let's let's start with the NBA. I think the NBA. Most people don't know the story of the NBA. It starts in the in the forties. It is college men's basketball had been around for decades, had been was very, very popular. It had a huge audience, and naturally people thought, hey, let's take those same exact athletes, put them on professional teams, and we'll sell tickets. And they did that, and they did not there were no tickets to be sold, and
they tried lots of things early in NBA history. They would they would schedule NBA games after high school games. You came to watch your kid watch a professional. Bob Goosey tells the story that when he was originally drafted, not by the Celtics, he was drafted by the Tri City Hawks. He's like, I did major geography at holy Cross, but I knew there was no such thing as a tri City Well, they couldn't get an audience in one city, so they put in three cities, and so they all,
maybe if we run around, we'll find some audience. They had an early memo from the Commission. In the first you know, five or six years of the NBA, it says, hey, some of you are telling the media how many people are actually showing up to these games. Well, don't do that. You are free to pad the numbers, you know, you don't have to tell the truth. And so that's where
the NBA starts. And we know from Congressional testimony because Congress investigated professional sports in the fifties men's professional sports. The NBA at that point in today's dollars was worth about fifteen million. So the WNBA is worth hundreds of millions. They were worth fifteen million. They were incredibly tighty. If you get up to nineteen seventy seventy two, that's when the NBA is the same age as the WNBA, same age. Their revenue in the late sixties early seventies jumps from
one hundred million to two hundred million. The WNBA's revenue from twenty nineteen to twenty twenty three jump from one hundred million to two hundred million, exactly the same thing. There was. There is a really big difference. The NBA at that point was paying Kareem Abdul Jabbar four hundred
thousand dollars a year in nineteen seventy three. Nobody that of NBA is making four hundred thousand dollars a year now, So there is a huge difference in wages, but in terms of revenue, terms of attendance, in terms of how much people are paying attention to this, the NBA and the WNBA are following essentially the same path. They are adding fans just like you'd expect it. It just takes decades to build a fan base. Most people are born into their fandom. You don't. You don't become a rabbit
fan of a lot of things as an adult. It's basically it's an addiction. So the way to think about it is, imagine all the people you know who at the age of forty took up smoking cigarettes. That's a bizarre thing to do, right, That would be bizarre. That's what a fandom is, right. You know, if you're forty years old, you're not going to suddenly say, hey, I'm going to be a fan of this sport I've never
watched before. That's not realistic. You do it as a child, do you pick it up from your parents and your friends and your relatives, and it grows gradually as that network gets bigger and bigger, and so everyone investing in a women's sports league, whether it's National Women's Soccer League or the WNBA, should expect this will take decades, but eventually fans will get addicted and then you'll have the greatest business ever imaginable, because there is no business like sports.
Sports is a business that you can disappoint your fans every single year and they never go away. Right, Chicago Bears fan, you know this, Yeah, we.
Talked about this before. You use the restaurant example. Being a Chicago Bears fan is like going to the same restaurant over and over and they serve you like a plate of shit, and you're like, thank you, I'll be back next week.
Yes, yes, And and then you get convinced of this. You go to the owner and the owner says, I understand that this food has been crap for so long. But here's what I did. I got a new bus boy, and it's going to change everything. And you would be like, oh my god, a new bus boy.
Oh I believe I'm it's going to be different now, Oh it's gonna be I didn't know you got a new busboy.
Well, I'll be back for sure. And that's exactly how sports fans are. You know they you know, they draft, they draft a brand new offensive guard, and every fan is like, oh, well, that is all the difference that's gonna change every reason.
And it's so true though, and it's something I've talked about so much with women's sports, is how do you recreate things that can't be done organically, like nostalgia and tradition. So much of what brings us together around sport is when you go to a game, you know what the chants are, and you know what everybody always does when this thing happens. And if that existence hasn't been there for longer than a couple of years, that's not going
to exist yet. So how do you either be intentional about creating it or how do you offset that with other things that make it exciting. One thing I'll point out about the NBAWNBA comparison is, of course, the WNBA benefits from an NBA that is financially helping them, that has existed and created a sort of path and model that is part of a larger cable and streaming and massive sports entertainment industrial complex that didn't exist for early NBA,
but it also suffers from that because of comparison. It also suffers from centuries of patriarchy. It also suffers from expectations about women and what lane in which they belong.
So it's not in apples to apples comparison, but it is so useful to look back at some of the moments that we herald in NBA history and be remind I did that eight thousand people were there for them, right, these great players, these moments of scoring, and in our minds the stadium is full and everyone's watching on TV, when in fact it was on tape delay and almost.
No one showed up to watch it. Those are important things to remember.
Nef I mentioned in your intro you were a Division one basketball player yourself. You're a talented female athlete who has lived the life of trying to be given respect, afforded resources and facilities. How did the negative noise around athletes when you were hooping inform your perspective now? And how much have you seen it change?
Oh?
Man, it absolutely informed who I am, right, I mean, I think and I say that, But also I kind of lived in a bubble where I played in a part of Atlanta where women's basketball was very popular, girls basketball was very popular. Growing up, I was coached by a black guy who played college football at a high level, played some basketball, and he just he had a lot of daughters. He just did not see the gender barriers to success in the ways that a lot of other
girls may have experienced it at a young age. I've told the story before that we played against boys at a very young age and routinely beat them. So as a you know, thirteen year old ne f thought she could beat anybody that was thirteen, right, it wouldn't matter if you.
Were a girl or a boy.
And that just, you know, that followed me throughout my career, both athletically and academically. I do I will say that when I got to college, you could see the differences, right. I mean I also went to a high school where the girls and boys team was treated similarly, but also the girls team was much more successful winning state championships than the boys team. So again, it just it was it didn't occur to me until college that you are
treated the genders are treated differently based on just gender. Right, Women's and men's basketball are not treated the same. I got to Georgia, Tech and it was night and day. The experiences that the men team got versus the women's team wasn't even comparable. And you know, I say this often, is it's not just isolated in sports, and I think
we have to acknowledge that. I think this moment right now, we've seen, you know, two of the most qualified political candidates in the history run for being women, run for presidencies and lose. I think we have to acknowledged the fact that there's always this undercurrent of sexism and hegemonic masculinity.
Not to get too nerdy and theoretical, but these ideas that there are negative stereotypes about women that are at play, and it's very easy for leagues and organizations to fall back into those when they don't want to actually just share the fact, like the NBA or WNBA that they're not necessarily valuing women's sports or women's teams or a whole league, and the way that they have valued and
treated the men's league over time. So that's a very long way, long winded way of saying I didn't acknowledge that these gender inequities exist until I was in college, and then very quickly I began to acknowledge it and sort of dig into why this is happening.
I was coaching and training.
Boys, you know, in college. I played with boys my whole life. So just being a basketball player and playing in a city where the girls and boys are playing together pickup games are But you know, all folks, if you show up and you can play, then you can play. You're not getting kicked off the court because you're a girl. In Atlanta and similar in a lot of big cities right especially for at least my experience is being in black neighborhoods as well.
It's just not happening.
If you can play, you can play, and then going to organize basketball at the collegiate level and saying no, if you're good and if you're better, and if your team's better than the men's team, it doesn't matter. You're still not going to get the same resources that they're getting even though they haven't won a game all year.
Yeah, it's something I've talked to mothers and especially women who coach younger girls, is what is the balance between telling young girls you can do any thing, believe in yourself, you're just as great, versus saying just so you know you're not going to get the same resources, You're not going to get the same facilities. You're going to have
to demand equality because otherwise you won't get it. Thereby sort of bursting their bubble too early, but also maybe creating activists out of younger women before they get to the collegiate level and start to look around and realize.
Well, this is messed up.
Because I feel the same way, like so many of us also become so conditioned to that that it isn't until later in life that we realize that technically, per Title nine, we could have suit our schools, or we could have complained about getting less than. But because society seemed to so endorse the idea that we deserved less than, it didn't occur to us that we should ask for anything otherwise until you get to later in life.
And then it's sort of beyond your control.
So yet, that's a conversation I guess for people with kids and coaches. You know, there's so many passionate, informed fans of women's sports, there's so many smart people investing in women's pro leagues. But there are folks at the highest levels of brands and networks and media outlets that are essentially more akin to the trolls that you're speaking to. They're stuck in the past when it comes to the economic opportunity offered and the realities of the interest in
women's sports. How do we get the trolls in high places to be more educated and up to date?
Dave, Yeah, let me. I'll get that fixed for you by lunch.
Thank you, thank you, link with lunch, probably martini lunch a couple hours.
We're dealing with the trolls of our places.
When Enough was talking, she said hegemonic masculinity, and I would point out that book that works do not appear in our book. The way we say that is the way we put it is in sports men really love men. That's that's effectively the same sentiment, but it's said it a more accessible way because and that's actually true. The problem is in sports and when you look at these companies when it comes to sports, men are really in love with men, and they treat women. And we say
this in the book. Women are treated as if women's sports are a cardboard factory and all that matters is the latest financial statement, and men's sports are treated as if this is my passion, I am living my life through these men. I don't give a damn how much my money they spend. I just want to win because this is everything to me. And the problem is getting the investors to be as emotionally connected to what they're
investing in. And there are WNBA owners and I think Mark Davis with the ACE is a good example of this, who goes to the games. He clearly is emotionally involved. He wants his team to win. He will break rules to make his team win. And we don't like that, but that's a good sign. You want to see people doing that, that they're so involved that they're willing to
do stuff like that. And that's the problem is. I think one of the ex that holds back women's sports is so many people trying to treat this as a financial statement for this month. And it's not if you're going to be an investor. It's it's long term. But also you got to get investors who are passionate about the actual sport and and you know, but if you can't get that, I do. I will point this out.
As Neph and I were working on this book, go back to twenty eighteen where we started, where women's sports was in twenty eighteen where it is today. You know, one of the things I said, I think and I were saying when we were writing this book is is this book allows us a lot of I told you those and so as we go through time, neph and I just go, I told you so. And here's a
fun little stat. W NBA ratings this last year average a million fans across all platforms on ESPN one point two million, NBA ratings right now on ESPN one point six million. The difference is getting smaller and smaller and smaller. And yet the NBA totally ripped off the WNBA in terms of the media deal. It's a seventy five billion dollar deal. The NBA gave them ninety seven percent of it. They're not getting ninety seven percent of the ratings. That's ridiculous.
And so you know the NBA talks about how they gave so much money to the WNBA. Well you look at that media deal. They are taking more. They're going to be taking if you do the math, they're going to be taking back every loss that they made up, and the losses I believe are made up. They're going
to take back all the losses they made up. And more every single year of that deal, every single year they're going to be getting all that money back, and so it's a huge The NBA is going to make billions off the WNBA, billions of dollars off of them.
Yeah, let's talk us through this, and we don't have too much time, but I do. This is something that always comes up. People will talk about how the WNBA doesn't make any money, how the WNBA is just relying and sucking off the teed of the NBA. Meanwhile, we will have NBA teams that openly claim losses for the year that will never be you to point to the
product being a problem on the NBA side. So, as an economist, quickly, if you can walk us through how that's just a matter of presentation, particularly when it comes to things like tax write offs and where the money goes and how it's spent and how it's delivered.
Because to your point, yeah, we do hold up.
Women as this black and white, and then on the men's side, it's this mirage of how are we reporting things versus what's actually happening.
Yeah, So quickly, the NBA, which is the one calling the shots in the WNBA, has claimed the NBA is losing money since at least the late nineteen sixties early seventies. There was senate testimony in the early seventies where they said we're losing money, and economist Roger and Nole looked at their financial statements and said, well, depends on how you look at it. I can look at it this way, and you're making a ton of money. So it's just
the way you're presenting it. And the NBA has been doing this, and they do it because every time they claim they're losing money, players give them concessions and take less money. So it's a very good labor negotiation strategy. So WNBA has suffered the same kind of fate. NBA owners keep claiming it loses money. The amount of money they claim it's losing is ridiculous compared to the NBA. It's a very very tiny amount of money that they even claim. There's no reason to think that what they
claim is true. We don't see the financial statements. We have too many reporters, especially at the New York Times New York Post, who report an assertion of losses as a fact. If somebody tells a reporter, I am doing something and there's no evidence for that. You don't report it as a fact. That's not how reporting works. But the NBA gets that, they get that treatment. They say, WAA is losing forty million. New York Post writes, WNBA is losing forty million. You don't know that. You didn't
see any financial statements. How do you know that? So there's reason to think that they're not telling the truth because they didn't tell the truth about the NBA for all those years. The amount of losses we're talking about are incredibly tiny. They're not significant even if they do exist. Yeah, going back that media deal, they're going to be taking billions of dollars from the WNBA. So if you're losing
forty million, well you're going to be getting billions. That WNBA media deal is it worth probably eight to ten billion dollars and they're getting two that's eight billion dollars. So it's tough money they're taking.
And it's really hard because without the transparency of the financials, you can run with whatever argument you want to make. And what we end up doing is saying NBA teams are losing money, but their valuations are billions of dollars, Like, how does that work every year that you say you've been losing money for the last fifty plus years, and yet with each passing year, the investment in owning a team becomes more and more lucrative, regardless of how you
run it poorly, well, whatever. But we don't afford that same principle or that same idea to the WNBA side. I could keep talking to Chill forever. We're out of time, Nef. Last question, what do you hope folks take away from this book?
I hope folks take away and understanding that the way that the stories have been framed to them about women's sports is incorrect. I hope they consider our reframing of women's sports and the context that we provide, in historical context that we provide to show that women's sports are doing fine, they're doing great, they're excelling, and understanding the history and the context of that makes it shows or paints a much clearer picture for everyone.
Well, I'm so grateful to y'all for doing the tough academic research and the actual work to put things down in print that are actually correct, as opposed to those who are willing to and face NOO accountability or repercussions for flinging around misinformation in pursuit of dragging down women because of their weak, sad little egos. Anyway, this is a great book Slaying the trolls.
Everyone get it.
Thanks so much for coming on, Thanks for having us.
Got to pay some bills. Stick around slices, Welcome back slices. Make sure you go out and get the book. And if you're interested in reading more about what Dave mentioned regarding the whole NBA handling of the WNBA TV deal, We're going to put his substack article about.
It in today's show notes. We'll talk to you tomorrow. Slices.
Good Game Nephen Dave, Good Game Spanish tapis Thank you Trolls. Good Game with Sarah Spain is an iHeart women's sports production in partnership with Deep Blue Sports and Entertainment. You can find us on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Production by Wonder Media Network, our producers are Alex Azzie and Misha Jones. Our executive producers are Christina Everett, Jesse Katz, Jenny Kaplan, and Emily Rudder.
Our editors are Emily Rutterer Britney Martinez, Grace Lynch, and Lindsay Crowdowell. Production assistants from Lucy Jones and I'm Your Host Sarah Spain.