WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark is averaging 18.7 points and a league-best 8.4 assists per game, and is not only a leading candidate for Rookie of the Year, but is getting some talk about being in the MVP race, because she has her Indiana Fever team, 13-27 a year ago, currently at 17-16, with an 8-2 record in their last 10 games.
Clark, the NCAA’s all-time leading scorer, has also found herself caught up in the culture wars, because of comments from outspoken veteran players and former players who are obviously upset with the outsized attention being given to Clark, who is white, in what is a 75 percent black league.
NBA Hall of Famer Charles Barkley, who gets himself in trouble all the time for saying what he thinks, offered a strong take on the Clark story in a visit this week with “The Bill Simmons Podcast.”
His take: “they cannot have f–ked this Caitlin Clark thing any worse if they tried.”
“The number of eyeballs she’s brought to college and the pros, and for these women to have this petty jealousness, you’re saying to yourself, Damn, what is going on here? And the thing I love about her, she never says a word. But these ladies, who I love and respect their game, they couldn’t have f–ked this thing up any worse. There’s been so much negativity, and a lot of it is petty jealousness,” Barkley said.
He’s not wrong here.
The WNBA has long been a subsidized league – the subsidy coming from the NBA, which has lost money for years in the effort to keep the WNBA afloat.
The attention being brought to the game by Clark and the league’s other attention-getting rookie, Angel Reese, should be the WNBA’s version of the Larry Bird-Magic Johnson story.
You might not believe this now, but before Bird and Johnson got to the NBA in 1979, the NBA Finals were broadcast on tape delay after the late local news.
The arrival of the two college stars reignited the Boston Celtics-Los Angeles Lakers rivalry and breathed life into the NBA across the board.
The veterans and former WNBA stars who have taken to the airwaves and interwebs to bemoan the attention being given to Clark – oddly, Reese has been immune to the scorn – are guilty of looking the gift horse in the mouth here.
It shouldn’t matter that WNBA players toiled for years to keep the league moving forward to get to this point, where an injection of fresh faces with personality and game is finally getting the women’s game the attention it maybe deserved all along.
How about just being happy that the new TV deal struck with Disney, NBCUniversal and Amazon is worth nearly four times the ongoing TV deal, with the new TV partners set to pay $2.2 billion over the next 11 years to broadcast WNBA games?
So what if the white girl is getting a lot of the attention?
It happens that she’s good.
In that 10-game stretch in which the Fever have gone 8-2 to get into the thick of the 2024 playoff race, Clark has averaged 23.3 points and 10.1 assists per game, shooting 46.7 percent from the floor in that stretch.
It’d be different if she was stinking up the joint.
She’s not, TV ratings are up for her games, ticket sales for the Fever, at home and on the road, are through the roof, the WNBA is making more money than it ever has, and still, the negativity is there, and it’s not going away.
It makes you wonder if her peers want the WNBA to succeed, if success has to come with a white girl from Iowa getting people to want to be fans.
Video: What’s the WNBA’s beef with Caitlin Clark?
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Chris Graham
