10/23/2024
Caitlin Clark Is a True Basketball Trailblazer
As Caitlin Clark’s rookie season in the WNBA ticked down to its final seconds in the first round of the playoffs, Clark remained inscrutable, her arms around her teammates in the huddle as the cheering crowd — there both to support her and root against her in Connecticut’s Mohegan Sun Arena, home of the Connecticut Sun — recognized the moment.
It was a chance for the home team to advance, but it was also the end of the beginning. What Clark’s rookie year truly signified, we will only come to fully understand in the years ahead. What we do know is that her rookie season was unlike anything anyone had ever seen.
Fittingly, even in defeat, Clark set another record, adding to the endless catalog of them that peppered her first pro campaign, the “never befores” and “first tos” blending together into a tapestry so thick it would be impossible to list them all. A final-game stat line of 25 rebounds, nine assists and six rebounds provided a perfect display of the varied strengths of Clark’s game. No other rookie had ever gone 25-5-5 before in a playoff game. Clark didn’t come out of the game for a single second.
“There’s a lot for us to hold our heads high about,” Clark said, with head coach Christie Sides and Aliyah Boston, the signature big who paired so well with her, sitting next to her as she reflected in the back corridors of the arena after the game. “This is a team that won five games two years ago. We’re a young group, an inexperienced group, but we came together and had a lot of fun playing with one another. That’s sometimes the worst part of it. You feel like you’re playing your best basketball, and it had to end.”
Clark was clearly exhausted. She’d carried the expectations of an entire league — not to mention attracting the curious new eyes of countless people discovering women’s basketball for the first time — on her shoulders, and at the same time, she had to learn to serve as the primary playmaker and scorer for a young team with playoff aspirations.
Before she’d even been selected officially by the Indiana Fever — though no one doubted she’d be the top overall pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft — she’d already begun to impact the league’s financial trajectory, something her head coach at Iowa, Lisa Bluder, pointed out.
“I think that Caitlin is going to continue to have this kind of impact in the WNBA,” Bluder told the assembled scribes at her postgame press conference after Clark’s final college game, a national final loss to South Carolina. “Indiana is doing well with their ticket sales. I know Las Vegas had to move to a different, bigger arena when Indiana comes to town. So those are all really good signs that women’s basketball is in a good spot.”
It was just the beginning. The size of the popularity wave amazed even Bluder when we spoke about it late in the summer.
Clark spent the entire year in the WNBA experiencing precisely what she’d brought to the college game, leveling up without any signs that she would struggle with the new set of assignments, even after a rocky start attributable as much to the schedule as to her own limitations.
And the world noticed. For nearly three decades, the oldest women’s pro league in America had wondered what it would take to convert the fans of the NCAA Tournament madness into a reliable, durable audience for the WNBA season that immediately followed. Turns out, Clark was the overarching answer to that question.
Of course, there are other factors, from the NCAA eliminating the self-defeating rule allowing only the men to use March Madness branding to ESPN finally, belatedly televising the entirety of the women’s tournament, a benefit that fans of the men’s game took as a birthright.
A strong, growing league had been seeing rising television audiences in the years leading up to Clark’s arrival in the WNBA.
But Clark’s presence meant eyeballs at a level the league hadn’t experienced before, not even in the heady first few years after its founding in 1997, and certainly not in the decades that followed. An average of 1.19 million people watched each WNBA game on ESPN in 2024, a 170 percent increase over 2023 — and total viewership numbers in 2023 were up 22 percent over 2022. A growing league welcomed its signature star, and Clark provided rocket fuel for the entire enterprise.
Viewership joined massive expansion in merchandise sales and coverage in media corners where the WNBA typically never registered. All symptoms of Caitlin fever.
Another: the soaring value of individual franchises. The 13th WNBA team, an expansion franchise in Golden State, cost $50 million back in October 2023. The 15th team in Portland, announced in September, cost $125 million. Plans for a 16th team by 2028, announced by WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert, include hiring investment bank Allen & Company to fetch an expansion fee well beyond even that, on the heels of a media rights deal that will explode the league’s annual revenue by a factor of between eight and 10 by the time it is implemented after the 2025 season.
Nor did the novelty wear off as Clark’s rookie season progressed. Five of her games drew television audiences of more than two million people: her season opener in May, a pair of games against Angel Reese and the Chicago Sky in June, a matchup with Seattle in August and her Game 2 playoff loss to Connecticut in September.
“I don’t think any one of us were ready for what that was going to be like,” Sides reflected a few days after the Fever’s elimination.
Climbing mountains is nothing new for Clark. She declared the Final Four a goal on the day she signed with Iowa, and she reached two of them, in her junior and senior seasons. Upon her arrival in the WNBA, she declared the playoffs a goal, but the Fever, hit with a schedule that called for 11 games in 20 days, including numerous trips and the last of the non-charter flights in WNBA history, lost nine of their first 11 games. But she didn’t let the slow start derail her. “Absolutely,” she said, prior to a loss in early June in New York that dropped Indiana to 2-9, when asked if she was having fun amid the difficult start. “I mean, this is my childhood dream. So if I’m not having fun doing this, there’s probably a bigger issue. But also, I always remind myself — sure, there’s moments where I’ve been frustrated, upset, we’ve lost here, I haven’t performed here. But there are so many people who would love to be in my position, would love to have this opportunity. I get to do this as my job. And sure, sometimes that’s hard to remind yourself of, to put that in perspective, but at the same time, that really allows me to take the pressure off, to have fun and keep playing the game I love.”
Even that slow start, a period during which her backcourt running mate Kelsey Mitchell was still building up strength in her previously injured ankle and Boston was fighting to regain the form that had earned her 2023 Rookie of the Year status, included the kind of success that immediately marked her as WNBA royalty. Her 70 assists through 11 games were second all-time over the span of a player’s first 11 contests, trailing only Suzie McConnell Serio, and her 172 points were more than almost all of the top 20 in scoring over the first 11 games of a career — trailing only Cynthia Cooper, whose 1997 rookie campaign came deep into her 30s, and Sue Bird, the point guard whose legacy Clark is chasing. (Thanks to Sports-Reference.com for all these span stats.)
And then, with rest, a more reasonable schedule and an Olympic break — no, she wasn’t selected for the team, mostly because the sheer amount of talent USA Basketball has at its disposal meant it didn’t need to rush a Clark call-up — she reached a level virtually indistinguishable from her Iowa stardom, heightened competition be damned.
Over her final 29 regular-season games, she tallied 267 assists. Only Ticha Penicheiro had managed to eclipse 200 in a 29-game span of her rookie season. Bird checked in at 173, Dawn Staley at 159, Lindsay Whalen at 140; Clark lapped the field of all-time greats. She also scored more over those final 29 regular-season games than anyone, save Seimone Augustus, A’ja Wilson and Arike Ogunbowale. Clark’s efficiency and frequency of 3-point shots drove her true shooting percentage to 60.3 percent, well above the 53.3 percent or below from those other three.
Her true shooting percentage in her senior year at Iowa? 61 percent. By the second month of her rookie season, she was scoring in the WNBA with the same deadly efficiency she’d shown in college. No wonder people couldn’t stop watching.
By July, Indiana was winning, and Clark was notching triple-doubles. Ask around the league and you’ll hear folks marvel at her passing as much as her shooting, if not more. It meant her teammates found new levels of success as well, and Clark’s first triple-double came on July 6. Boston used it as a chance to promote her teammate and former rival; the two had played in college on opposite sides of one of the great recent Final Four battles, Clark’s Iowa against South Carolina’s Boston in 2023, a 77-73 Iowa win in the national semifinals.
“I think that the best way for our league to continue to grow and flourish is to always build players up,” Boston said after the season. “There are too many narratives with bad intentions or that don’t build up our league, and I think it’s important to focus on accomplishments on the court more than anything else.”
Clark was used at times as a cudgel by bad-faith actors to come after the WNBA as a whole, particularly its Black players, but this is merely a reflection of the fact that our larger society is in a deeply combative place, and the WNBA, no longer in the shadows, is now part of the everyday conversation. She reiterated how antithetical racism was to her in her exit interview after the season.
“It’s definitely upsetting,” Clark said. “Nobody really should be facing any sort of racism, hurtful, disrespectful, hateful comments and threats. Those aren’t fans. Those are trolls. It’s a real disservice to the people in our league, the organization, the players in the WNBA, but there are a lot of really good fans, whether they’ve been fans for 20-plus years or whether they are new fans in our league, I think continuing to uplift this league in a very positive light is the best thing we can do because there are so many great players, so many great teams, so many positive storylines that can be written and celebrated, and for me, that’s why I became a fan of this league because these people were my idols. I grew up wanting to be like them, so I think continuing to uplift and represent this league in a positive way is the best thing that we can do.”
Instead of feeding fires, the 22-year-old Clark was content most of the time to simply remain her unflappable self, somehow more self-assured in the center of the most intense public scrutiny any women’s basketball player has ever faced than most of us would be going to the grocery store. “Yes, it must be tough,” her Fever teammate Kristy Wallace mused, reflecting on it when it was all over a few days after the season. “She’s got a lot on her plate, the madness. And I think we all forget that she’s still so young.”
That is, truly, the most remarkable part. This is a story that’s just beginning to be written. Clark won’t turn 23 until Jan. 22, 2025. During the offseason, she’ll enjoy some well-earned rest, play a little golf and reconnect with friends and family back home.
The WNBA season is the longest it has ever been, so as we compare Clark through 40 games to other greats, let’s remember how much she did without a break for nearly a full calendar year. Clark has 337 assists in her first 40 games, with no other WNBA player topping 250. She hit 122 3-pointers in those first 40 games, easily outpacing Rhyne Howard, who had 100 in her first 40 games. Her true shooting percentage — despite all the attention, all the scouting reports focused on her, all the hopes of a fan base now larger than before thanks to Clark — stood atop the list of the 30 highest-scoring rookies in WNBA history through their first 40 games. Productivity did not cost Clark efficiency. Fatigue didn’t, either: She scored 35 points, a rookie record, on Sept. 15 in the penultimate game of her regular-season marathon.
And somehow: The best is still yet to come. Clark just showed us the minimum of what is possible for her in the WNBA. Her Fever team, a five-win group from 2022 that turned 13 wins in 2023 into 20 in 2024 — yes, it was a longer season, but the winning percentages keep rising, too — is poised to become a championship contender. Team architect Lin Dunn, the Fever’s general manager, will make sure of it.
Clark and the game itself will keep getting better. More and more people will watch it. There’s more money to invest in better player experiences. The WNBA is finally approaching the potential it always had at the precise moment the world can fully experience Clark — and Clark’s teammates and opponents at the same time.
“I’m a competitor and someone who loves to work,” Clark said, breaking into the smile she saves for off-the-court moments. “So it won’t be hard for me to want to get in the gym, and get better, get better for my teammates. … We won 20 games, were the six seed this year, but I feel like there’s so much more we can accomplish.”
If that’s hard to imagine, there’s a good reason why: All of this is unprecedented. And come next spring, the Caitlin Clark Show will return, the rare sequel that promises to be even better than the original.
