The United States was always going to have a great pro basketball league, but it didn’t have to be the WNBA, or at least WNBA history didn’t have to unfold exactly as it did. When the WNBA began play in the late 1990s, there already existed another (and many said better) women’s pro basketball association in the US: the American Basketball League. The ABL lacked major corporate backing and huge sponsorship deals, but it had a superior pool of talent, relatively high salaries, and superior benefits for its players.
Perhaps because of its backing from the NBA, the W was always going to outlast the ABL, but that wasn’t a
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