Women basketball analysts

The WNBA is lucky to have these two

In my book Who Let Them In? Pathbreaking Women in Sports Journalism, I devoted a chapter to the women broadcasters who have broken the glass ceiling and have made a name for themselves covering professional or collegiate men’s competition. Chief among them were Doris Burke (ESPN and ABC), Kate Scott (NBA 76ers network), and Beth Mowins (MLB, ESPN).

Lately though I’ve been giving thanks for the two female broadcasting analysts who’ve made a name for themselves on the women’s side: Rebecca Lobo and Nancy Lieberman. They are a gift to the WNBA and I hope they never decide they need to “move on” to covering men’s sports.

First off is Rebecca Lobo, a member of the A team when it comes to NCAA women’s basketball and WNBA national broadcasts. She and Ryan Ruocco have been teaming up to cover the WNBA since 2013. I love his signature call (“You bet!!”) when Caitlin Clark or Sabrina Ionesco hits a 3. But they wouldn’t be the A team if not for Lobo, a pioneer who was there at the beginning of the WNBA. In the picture above, she’s shooting for the New York Liberty. On the left, there’s Nancy Lieberman, #10 with the headband, for the Phoenix Mercury. (I took this photo during the WNBA’s inaugural season).

At first, when Lobo and Ruocco did NCAA games featuring UConn, Lobo might have, on occasion, seemed guilty of being a bit of a homer. She and Geno Auriemma go way back after all (to UConn’s first championship in 1995) and it was hard, I suppose, to find fault with anything Brianna Stewart or Napheesa Collier did.

But Lobo, who is pictured in the middle between Doris Burke and Holly Rowe during her early broadcast days, has matured into a funny, insightful analyst, who gets excited at any player’s outstanding play and is pretty good at predicting what someone is going to do. She is not given to over-dramatization, a cardinal sin in my mind. As Andraya Carter, a fellow ESPN analyst, said. “She has just been consistently steady and trustworthy.”

The second analyst on my list is Nancy Lieberman. She also played at the very beginning of the WNBA, though she was 39 years old and past her prime that season. She also played for the Dallas Diamonds in the forerunner to the WNBA back in the early 1980s (the WBL or Women’s Professional Basketball League). She also played in a men’s semi-pro league, the first female to do so.

I devoted a lot of space to Lieberman in my women’s basketball book, Finding A Way to Play: The Pioneering Spirit of Women in Basketball. In one sense she was Caitlin Clark before Caitlin Clark. While the media in general did not pay much attention to women’s basketball in the late 1970s, they paid attention to Lieberman. Being from Brooklyn, and possessing a swagger that matched her game, the New York writers loved her big smile and her no-look passes and half-court shots. She led Old Dominion to two national championships. She was considered the GOAT of women’s basketball before Diana Taurasi came along. Since the year 2000, the NCAA’s award to the top point guard in the country has been named after her. She’s in the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame as well as the Women’s Basketball Hall of Fame. She also has an Olympic silver medal on her resume.

After retiring, Lieberman coached in the NBA’s G-league. I took this picture the day she came to Portland, Maine to coach the Dallas entry in the G-League. (They were playing Portland’s Red Claws and I and my basketball teammates got to meet her afterwards). Lieberman also coached in the WNBA for several seasons before becoming a full-time broadcaster for the NBA’s Oklahoma City Thunder.

Now Lieberman is an analyst on the WNBA Dallas Wings local broadcasts, which sometimes go national when Wings’ games are on the Friday night Ion broadcasts. Alternately, you can catch her broadcasts if you have a WNBA League Pass subscription, which entitles you to stream every WNBA game (some of them after they have aired regionally or nationally).

What I like about listening to Lieberman is the way she weaves in the history of the women’s game in her comments about such Wings’ players as Paige Bueckers. She also has the insights you might expect from someone who has analyzed the game from so many different angles. The Wings are struggling this season despite the presence of Bueckers and their other all-star guard, Arike Ogunbowale, and will likely need another solid lottery pick and some free agent help to become competitive next year. Lieberman doesn’t sugar-coat their flaws, but she is quick to praise the things they are doing right. I’m glad she’s still around the game. I mean, how could such legends as Lobo and Lieberman not be?