A Reason To Be A Spurs Fan

They just hired Becky Hammon to be the NBA’s first full-time female assistant coach. Yglesias isn’t surprised by the move:

As Slate’s Amanda Hess wrote in a well-timed piece published yesterday, the NBA is generally much more aggressive at promoting women into non-playing roles than the other sports leagues. One reason for that is that unlike football or baseball women do play basketball at very high levels of competition – Division I NCAA, pro leagues in the US and Russia, the Olympics – so women are networked in to the world of big time hoops in a bigger way. The NBA also has a more politically liberal fanbase than the other men’s sports leagues (the WNBA is even more leftwing) and former commissioner David Stern had a personal commitment to the project.

Kavitha Davidson assures fans, “this isn’t some Battle of the Sexes, anything-you-can-do-I-can-do publicity stunt”:

This is a historic move by the Spurs, a progressive organization with a reputation for turning innovation into success – their roster of foreign-born players was also controversial until it started winning rings. As Hammon put it, physical differences will likely always separate men and women on the court, “but when it comes to things of the mind, things like coaching, game-planning, coming up with offensive and defensive schemes, there’s no reason why a woman couldn’t be in the mix.” As women continue to break down barriers in business, politics, and culture, the Spurs have signaled that a basketball team with much at stake has something to gain from a woman on the bench.