Steve Kerr Makes Feelings Clear on WNBA Scheduling Problem Amid Misogyny Debate

Steve Kerr has been a regular presence around the Golden State Valkyries, even sitting courtside with owner Joe Lacob earlier in this WNBA Finals. So when the league set Game 6 for a weekday lunch hour, he was always going to be asked about it. His answer, a joke, landed him in the middle of a much sharper argument over how the WNBA handled its own championship.

Game 6 between the Valkyries and the Atlanta Dream will tip off Thursday at 12:30 p.m. ET at State Farm Arena, or 9:30 a.m. in the Bay Area. The decision wasn’t settled until hours before Game 5 on Monday, after what ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne described as a weekend of frantic negotiations.

The problem was the venue. The Dream’s regular home, Gateway Center Arena, seats about 3,500. They wanted the 17,000-seat State Farm Arena, but the Hawks were scheduled to host the Cavaliers there Thursday night.

The solution was keeping both games on the same day. Game 6 in the afternoon, and the Hawks-Cavs game pushed from 7 pm to 8 pm.

Asked about the odd timing, Kerr leaned into it rather than criticizing the league.

"We’ll be having breakfast at about that time, I think,” Kerr said. “I guess we’ll have a day off that day, so yeah, I’ll be watching."

Then he went on to defend the decision.

“It’s better than, you know, having it at the YMCA that night in front of 75 people,” Kerr said. “So they’re doing what they’ve got to do.”

The comment was clearly a joke, but he was able to make his point. He framed a noon tipoff as the clearly better alternative to playing a potential Finals-clinching game in a near-empty gym.

Game 5 decided who would get the chance to finish it. The Valkyries won 64-55 on Monday night to take a 3-2 lead, so they can win the title on Thursday. According to Shelburne, if they do, the celebration might have to move to a practice court so the arena can be turned over for the Hawks.

Not everyone treated the scheduling saga as ordinary. One fan argued the decision to move a Finals game into the middle of a workday, in deference to a regular-season NBA game, was "not only DEEPLY misogynistic but also a blatant cash grab by everyone involved," saying fans' ability to actually watch the game clearly wasn't considered.

Rachel Morris pushed back.

"I'm sorry, the WNBA Finals scheduling fiasco is DEEPLY misogynistic? No," Rachelle Morris wrote. "The Game 6 scheduling blame is fully on the WNBA and Atlanta Dream leadership. As ESPN reported over the weekend, the NBA said they could've been flexible with more notice, but they couldn't blow up their schedule on just a few days' notice."

Morris argued the real issue was logistical mismanagement rather than gendered disregard. She pointed out that stretching the term "misogyny" to cover a venue-booking failure risks diluting the word for situations that actually warrant it.

Her take put the responsibility on the WNBA and Dream's late handling of a conflict that had been building across all three Atlanta games in the series, not on the NBA's unwillingness to rearrange its own schedule on short notice.

Kerr's lighthearted jab never engaged with that deeper argument directly. But it became part of a broader conversation questioning why a championship series kept ending up as an afterthought to arena logistics the league should have settled months in advance.