The road to hell is built with the best intentions and no doubt Larry's intentions are good - he wants to save the WNBL. It's a commendable thing to want to do. But we should look at other examples to see how that will work out.
The WNBA loses the NBA tens of millions every year and has never turned a profit. What's worse, we have constant complaints about equal pay, as though it were feasible to pay A'ja wilson like Lebron James.
The same thing happened in the WAFL. The AFL literally gifted women a professional league and it took about 5 minutes and a single sell out game (with free tickets, mind you) for pay comparisons to creep up.
In US soccer there's some pay parity deal where the women get paid the same as the men. Sounds great, except the revenue raised from the men's national team is many times more than that of the women's, despite the women's being indeed more popular and successful.
There are examples of these issues across world sport and it would be ignorant to think the NBL and WNBL wont be yet another problem.
You can try to save women's sports or even create the platform and hand it to them but with absolutely no legwork of their own and no revenue nor fan interest and theyre still going to have expectations, and the NBL and Larry will be forking the bill and being held over the barrel by the media if they don't.
Not something I'd have signed up to personally. Cooperation with the WNBL, and having them play double headers, and some sort of partnership? Sure. But the way things are going I wouldn't be bank rolling both a men's and women's league at the same time, because if you pay and fund the men more you're going to have non stop headaches.
