The Houston Comets won the first four WNBA titles in a row
When the WNBA tipped off in June 1997, its marketing leaned on Rebecca Lobo, Lisa Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes. Yet the first real star was Cynthia Cooper of the Houston Comets. With Swoopes and Tina Thompson beside her, Cooper led Houston to every championship from 1997 to 2000, taking the Finals MVP award each time.
The NBA approved the women's league on 24 April 1996, riding the buzz of the US team's Olympic gold that summer. It started with eight teams. The opening game, on 21 June 1997, saw the New York Liberty beat the Los Angeles Sparks 67–57 before 14,284 fans, shown nationally on NBC. A rival, the American Basketball League, launched months earlier, but it went bankrupt in 1999, and many of its Olympic stars, such as Dawn Staley, moved across.
Growth came quickly, then stumbled. Expansion took the league to 16 teams by 2000, and its 1999 deal with players was the first collective bargaining agreement in women's professional sport. But at the end of 2002 the NBA sold off its WNBA teams, pushed by the dot-com bust, and clubs in Miami and Portland folded when no buyers appeared. Even the Comets closed in 2008 when no owner could be found.
Dynasties kept emerging. Coach Bill Laimbeer took the Detroit Shock from worst to first, winning the 2003 title before a record crowd of 22,076. Seattle, built around top picks Lauren Jackson and Sue Bird, won in 2004 as Anne Donovan became the first woman to coach a team to the championship. Phoenix scored a record 89 points a game in 2007 on the way to its first crown.
In 2006 it became the first team-based women's professional league to last ten straight seasons. Today it has 15 teams, one of them in Canada, with plans for 18 by 2030.
Source: Women's National Basketball Association
