International League Scheduling

With the new Prioritization rules hitting the WNBA this season and set to get stricter next season, there has been a lot more scrutiny about the scheduling of leagues in other countries. In order to help players avoid fines and to avoid a situation where players were left unable to play in the WNBA at all this year, many top leagues made tweaks to their formats or schedules to end earlier. It remains to be seen how much more can be changed next year if the same leagues are going to try to end early enough for players to make WNBA training camps by May 1st.

From a WNBA-centric perspective, people have been happy at these developments and have wondered why more cannot be done to shorten seasons further in many countries. What has not been spoken about as much is the impact of changes on players and teams that have no WNBA involvement. In the same way that the WNBA is still short of the NBA when it comes to teams and season length, virtually every women’s league around the world is smaller and shorter than the male equivalent in their country. Shortening that further has already created some discontent among players who are losing in-season practice time and key postseason games as one solution that leagues have used is shortening the playoffs.

Many people have wondered if there can be some kind of agreement or compromise that gives space for both WNBA training camp and the European competitive season. It is worth noting that FIBA is the global governing body for basketball, but it does not have the power to tell individual leagues when they can and cannot run, only possessing power to preserve national team play. Leagues in Europe run on their own schedules, although most are similar, but FIBA’s own international club competitions there already end in mid-April, well before the WNBA season starts. Leagues in other parts of the world run at times that make sense for their local needs. League structures also vary around the world with some being more like a traditional American league where the teams own the league and vote on decisions while others are more like competitions where a national federation or other body organizes the competition and individual teams have limited say in how it operates.

Not all arguments about how the basketball world should be arranged are based on data so we have assembled some numbers on leagues around the world that show the formats in place. We then assembled the same data for the men’s leagues operating in the same places. Since comparisons are being made between the two, we are only including countries that have similar enough formats for both leagues as there are countries where teams participating in international competitions have an altered schedule in their domestic leagues. Each competition has its number of teams listed, followed by the number of games that each team plays in the regular season as well as the number of days that takes. After that, the minimum number of games that a team must participate in to win the championship is included followed by the maximum number of playoff games possible.

WNBA/NBA

Our first comparison point is the NBA and the WNBA. Even with schedule and postseason expansion, the WNBA is still running below half the games of the NBA, not even counting the effect of shorter games. With travel disparities and other factors, the WNBA games are more spread out than the NBA, which is close to a game every other day.

FIBA

FIBA currently offers comparable men’s and women’s continental competitions on three different continents. The NBA has a say in the men’s competition in Africa, but it is comparable to the women’s competition, which plans to expand and take on similar branding. In South America, the men’s competition is bigger and has far better representation of all of the countries in the region. The other big difference is that teams are fed from there to an Americas-wide competition, but there are rumors that a similar women’s competition will launch with eight teams.

In Europe, FIBA does not administer the two men’s continental competitions historically considered the most competitive so here we are comparing the two that they do operate to the only two competitions on the women’s side. After qualifiers are complete, the same number of teams compete in the regular season on each side, but those teams are distributed differently between the two competitions. EuroLeague Women guarantees more games than the Basketball Champions League, but the second group stage for the top sixteen teams in the latter makes the total games for the last four teams standing end up pretty close. FIBA Europe Cup also has a second group stage instead of five knockout rounds like EuroCup Women.

Asia

This section includes a number of domestic leagues in Asia and Oceania as well as the Arab Club Championship as cross-national competition run by FIBA is still just getting organized on the men’s side. Given the increasing insularity of the strong women’s leagues, there certainly seems to be room for an eight team tournament featuring the top two teams from Australia, China, Japan, and South Korea with hopes of that expanding to sixteen teams in the eastern half of the confederation. The Arab Club Championship did not get to full complement of teams this past season, but actually was set up for their top teams to play more games than the men’s competition, which had more teams.

Australia’s men’s league includes a team from New Zealand, which is not the case on the women’s side, but the two New Zealand competitions both run in the offseason of the national Australian leagues. Australia’s leagues differ in teams and games, but both have similar regular season lengths as they compete with more popular sports for time in a crowded calendar in the country. The numbers for New Zealand are for the men’s league season in progress and the upcoming women’s league season. The men’s competition has plenty of history while the women’s competition being an actual league is a recent development

China’s women’s schedule is an approximation of what ended up happening after virus issues wreaked havoc with their originally planned format having already strongly negatively affected the league overall from what could have been a strong finish in 2020. The men’s side has also been affected, but not to the same extent and it is worth noting that they play 48 minute games. There is a pretty clear disparity in South Korea and Japan, even before taking into account that Japan has a fourteen team second division and sixteen team third division with no equivalent on the women’s side.

For Taiwan, we are comparing the two competitions that are administered by the same body, which worked on having fairly comparable formats for each league. With two higher level men’s leagues competing heavily right now for supremacy, there have to be hopes that the neglected women’s side will get more attention in the future. Even though we are not making comparisons in European leagues where one team has a special format, it seemed important to include Kazakhstan here as the women’s league is in the unusual position of having twice the number of teams as the top men’s division. Part of the difference is that all of the teams on the women’s side are in the same division while there is a second tier on the men’s side featuring ten independent teams and two reserve sides.

Europe

Data from a large number of leagues in Europe is included here and there are a few exceptions, but the trend is pretty clear. The two British leagues have the same season length, but even with the women’s league having more teams, the men’s league plays significantly more regular season games and the postseason leading up to the championship game has two-game series instead of single-elimination. The only country that plays more games on the women’s side is Iceland, but the men’s top division has 50% more teams and thus has double the teams in the playoffs. Luxembourg is actually pretty close to equal, while Greece is the same until the playoffs, which features an extra round on the men’s side and longer series, although the women’s league has a quirky format that includes regular season results in the series count, meaning that the actual number of postseason games played is affected by whether teams split or sweep their regular season matchups.

Focusing on the countries that have historically had the strongest women’s leagues, disparities are clear. Both leagues in Turkey had their schedules affected by the earthquake this season, but the men’s side had the luxury of not needing to try to fit in the rest of the regular season in a timeframe that would allow their star players to leave. The difference in the size of the top divisions in France is apparent, especially with the two playoff formats, but overall season length in the country not only interferes with the WNBA as the NBA is certainly rooting for a sweep in their finals so that prospects can have plenty of time to make their way to the draft. Playoff shrinkage is also a continuing story in Spain and Italy, which runs a best of seven finals on the men’s side while reducing the women’s semifinals and finals from best of five to best of three in recent seasons. Poland has had trouble even getting to an odd number of teams in the women’s top division. In Israel, the season was compacted a bit for the top group of teams to hurry through the playoffs for WNBA players, which explains the difference in number of days for the bottom group of teams, which had no further games after their regular season. Even Hungary, which is considered one of the strongest investing countries in women’s basketball while their men’s league and national team have had nowhere near the same level of recent success, still has a bigger men’s competition.

Top divisions in Portugal, Slovakia, and Sweden are the same size but also feature different regular season formats that result in far more games on the men’s side in the regular season before taking the playoffs into account. Germany is another country that has had recent struggles in keeping their women’s league at a consistent size, but the hope is that young talent and the awarding of the next World Cup to the country can change that. There are certainly a variety of playoff formats used around the world, but the Czech Republic and Israel men’s leagues have the unusual feature of having shorter finals series than semifinals series.

Americas

Disparities are also clear in leagues across the Americas. Argentina is strengthening their women’s league, but it is still significantly shorter than the men’s equivalent and the women’s league is split into regions that do not play each other until the postseason and trialed an experimental format with shorter games. Our comparison for Brazil is using the women’s season from last year and not the season currently being played, which is actually favorable as that team total has dropped to 8 while the men’s league announced during the current playoffs that they expect 20 teams to play in the next season.

Last year is also the comparison point for Puerto Rico, which is not as favorable on the women’s side as this upcoming season is expected to have 8 teams. Both comparison points in Mexico are for last season and there are two different national women’s leagues there, but we are using the LNBPF. That is not a statement on either league, but rather an attempt at the most direct comparison since the LNBP is the only national men’s league and both are part of the same organization and have most of the same teams. Both sides are expanding with the women’s league in the middle of their season with 11 teams and men’s league growing to 13 with only Mexicali and Zacatecas not fielding women’s teams. Both Mexico and Puerto Rico play more often than most leagues, utilizing back-to-back games at the same venue in the case of the former, and taking advantage of having teams cover a smaller geographical area in the case of the latter.