The New York Liberty played the Seattle Storm at Barclays Center on Monday night, and the most-shared clip of the evening was not a basket.
It was Hillary Clinton, seated courtside, watching a seven-foot purple elephant execute a halftime headstand with an expression somewhere between delight and mild alarm.
The arena cameras found her, the big screen put her face up for the crowd, and Clinton did the only reasonable thing available: stood up, turned around, and waved. The clip went everywhere by Tuesday morning. It is a small, genuinely funny piece of internet, and it is also a fairly precise illustration of what the Liberty have built over the past five years.
Ellie Is Not a Mascot, She Is a Production
The instinct is to file this under “sports mascot does silly thing, famous person reacts,” a genre roughly as old as televised sport. That undersells what is happening at Barclays Center considerably.
Ellie debuted on May 6, 2021, when the Liberty moved to Brooklyn, and she was designed rather than merely commissioned. Criscia Long, senior director of entertainment for the Liberty and the Nets organizations, told the Brooklyn Paper that the team approached the character as a cultural question first. “When we were ideating on what our new mascot was going to resonate like, we really had to think about not just our fans but the wider world,” Long said in an interview about the creative group behind the character, a team that refers to itself as Ellie’s aunties.
The performer inside the suit is from Brooklyn, which Long describes as non-negotiable rather than incidental. “You can feel it; you feel like you’re having a true conversation because this person actually understands what it means to be a Brooklynite,” she said. There is a handler crew called the Stompaz who manage crowd navigation, because Ellie’s routines involve going into the stands rather than staying on a sideline.
And there is the music, which is the part most casual observers miss entirely. Ellie’s halftime sets run on Ciara, Missy Elliott, BeyoncΓ©, and Lil’ Kim, and the Brooklyn Paper devoted a separate piece to the playlist logic because the song selection is the routine. Most mascots dance to whatever the arena DJ has queued. Ellie’s performances are choreographed to specific tracks by people who care which track.
That is not a costume budget. That is a small entertainment department with a point of view, and the point of view is explicitly rooted in Black culture and Brooklyn specifically rather than in the generic goofy-animal register every other mascot occupies.
Why a Dancing Elephant Is Worth Real Money Right Now
Here is where the fun thing connects to a serious thing.
The WNBA is in the middle of the most consequential financial stretch in its history. Attendance and television numbers are up substantially, expansion is underway, and the players are in a labor fight over what share of a suddenly larger pie they receive. That negotiation has been openly tense, and league messaging has been managed carefully enough that we wrote about the WNBA quietly pulling a video featuring Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese while those talks were live.
In that environment, a mascot who reliably generates free national coverage is not a novelty line item. She is distribution. Monday’s clip put the New York Liberty in front of an audience that includes people who did not watch the game, do not follow the league, and clicked because Hillary Clinton made a face. Fox’s OutKick, not a natural home for WNBA coverage, ran the clip. That is reach the league’s own marketing cannot buy at any price.
Sports franchises have understood this asymmetry for a while: the Philadelphia Flyers turned Gritty into a merchandising business, and the San Diego Chicken did a version of it decades before anybody said “content.” What makes Ellie different is that she arrived as a deliberate cultural artifact rather than backing into virality, and she is attached to a league that genuinely needs the attention rather than one drowning in it.
The Clinton Factor
Clinton’s presence is doing some work here too, and it is worth being clear-eyed about it. High-profile attendance at WNBA games has become its own signal, a way of publicly siding with women’s professional sport at a moment when its economics are contested. HITC noted the crowd’s reaction when she appeared on the screen, which was warm.
But the reason the clip traveled is that she was not performing. She was watching a large purple elephant stand on its head and reacting the way anybody would, which is to say involuntarily. Political figures spend enormous effort constructing moments of relatability and almost never land one. Ellie produced a better one by accident, in about four seconds, at halftime.
The Liberty will not say this out loud, so it can be said here: the mascot is currently one of the franchise’s most effective media assets, and a not-insignificant number of people in that building bought tickets partly to see her. That is a strange sentence to write about professional basketball. It is also, on the evidence of Monday night, true.