The Women's National Basketball Association (WNBA) is a women's professional basketball league in the United States. It currently is composed of twelve teams. The league was founded on April 24, 1995, as the women's counterpart to the National Basketball Association (NBA). League play started in 1997; the regular season is currently played from June to September with the Finals in October.
Many WNBA teams have NBA counterparts and play in the same arena. The Connecticut Sun, Seattle Storm, and Tulsa Shock are the only current teams to play without sharing the market with an NBA team (although the Storm shared a market with the Seattle SuperSonics before that team's relocation). In addition to those three teams, the Chicago Sky is the only other team that does not share an arena with an NBA counterpart. The four aforementioned franchises, along with the Atlanta Dream and the Los Angeles Sparks are all independently owned. This independent ownership is important to the WNBA's growth; at one time, all teams in the league were owned by the NBA.
Read more about Women's National Basketball Association: Teams, The WNBA Draft, Regular Season, The WNBA Playoffs, The WNBA Finals, Players and Coaches, Rules and Regulations, Media Coverage, All-Time Franchise History
Famous quotes containing the words women, national, basketball and/or association:
“We cannot expect in the immediate future that all women who seek it will achieve full equality of opportunity. But if women are to start moving towards that goal, we must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us; we must match our aspirations with the competence, courage and determination to succeed.”
—Rosalyn Yalow (b. 1921)
“Just so before we’re international,
We’re national and act as nationals.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)
“Perhaps basketball and poetry have just a few things in common, but the most important is the possibility of transcendence. The opposite is labor. In writing, every writer knows when he or she is laboring to achieve an effect. You want to get from here to there, but find yourself willing it, forcing it. The equivalent in basketball is aiming your shot, a kind of strained and usually ineffective purposefulness. What you want is to be in some kind of flow, each next moment a discovery.”
—Stephen Dunn (b. 1939)
“It is not merely the likeness which is precious ... but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing ... the fact of the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever! It is the very sanctification of portraits I think—and it is not at all monstrous in me to say ... that I would rather have such a memorial of one I dearly loved, than the noblest Artist’s work ever produced.”
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)