The Invalidation of Caitlin Clark

Whether you are an ardent sports fan or prefer to do something productive with your spare time, even if you live outside the United States you have probably heard of a young female basketball player named Caitlin Clark. Having literally graduated over the past year from the college game to the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA), and having recently concluded her first season as a professional, I want to look back not only at her accomplishments, but at the cultural narratives which swirled around, at at times obscured, her play on the court. And the first step in that journey begins with a series of disclosures, so you know where I am coming from.  

Disclosures
I am old, White and male, and if I had a lawn I would tell you to get off it. I have not only lived most of my life in Iowa, but specifically in Iowa City, which is home to the University of Iowa, where Caitlin Clark played college basketball while being an annoyingly good student, and where decades earlier I shot a lot of pool in the Memorial Union while cutting class. Despite my delinquency, I inexplicably graduated from UI with a bachelor’s degree, and many of my family members have degrees from or associations with the school which reach back generations. And because all of that might understandably lead you to conclude that I am a homer for all things Hawkeye, I would add that I did also spend roughly five years ripping UI in these pages on a weekly basis, after a small cabal of co-conspirators used a fake, state-funded search process to hire an unqualified stooge to preside over the school.

As to sports in general I have been a longtime fan of various teams, and particularly so of the Los Angeles Lakers, starting with Wilt Chamberlain, Jerry West, and my first sports idol, Gail Goodrich. While I have always enjoyed being a fan, it’s also important to keep in mind that sports are essentially meaningless in the greater scheme of things, which I mention at least in part to prompt irrational rage in those readers who are unrepentant fan-atics. In terms of the WNBA I am one of the many new fans who was swept along by Caitlin Clark’s college exploits, and after having never watched a WNBA game in my life I watched every Indiana Fever game this past season, plus dozens of games between other league teams.

For all of those reasons you might also reasonably conclude that I am an unreserved supporter of Clark’s, but that would not be the case. As absurd as sports can be I do take them seriously as a craft, and as talented as Clark is there are still questions about her game, and particularly about the way she comports herself. Given the incessant complaining that Clark demonstrates after every officiating call that doesn’t go her way, at times I have wondered if she is determined to become an even bigger whiner than LeBron James, which would make her the biggest whiner that ever was. But I digress….

Let’s Talk About Racism
When I was growing up in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, it was commonplace for socially concerned NIMBY liberals to try to inoculate themselves from criticism by claiming that some of their best friends were persons of color. I can only imagine what it’s like to live as a person of color not only in a majority White country, but one where at least a third of the citizens seem to express racist beliefs with zeal, and what I imagine is not good. For the record then, and to avoid any ambiguity in the remainder of this post, while I don’t have any friends who are persons of color, I do unreservedly believe that racism is wrong. If you can’t feel good about yourself without belittling someone else’s ethnicity, or any other aspect of identity, then you’re the person with the problem.

As to how racism factors into a post about Caitlin Clark and the WNBA, here it is important to know — if you did not already — that Caitlin Clark is White, while the majority of the players in the WNBA are persons of color. (We could engage on other aspects of identify as well, including sexuality and even gender broadly, but because I’m trying to keep this post under 10K words we will set those to the side.) Clark’s race in itself is not particularly noteworthy, however, because there are any number of White players in the WNBA. What is noteworthy is that when Clark joined the WNBA, not only did she bring an unprecedented number of new fans to the league, but a small but vocal subset of purported fans were aggressively racist.

To be clear, not only is there no evidence that Clark herself is racist (growing up her favorite player was Maya Moore, who is a person of color), but there is no evidence that Clark has encouraged racism in her fans. In fact, when others have accused Clark of passively tolerating racism, she has addressed those concerns, and continues to do so. At the same time, Clark is correct when she says that she is powerless, legally or otherwise, to prevent people from professing support for her while directing hatred at others on the basis of race, or any other aspect of identity. But of course that is no consolation to WNBA players of color who have been and are being targeted for racist abuse.

Racism and Social Media
Over the past calendar year or so, spanning Clark’s senior year at the University of Iowa and her rookie season in the WNBA, the extent to which her success on the court permeated the greater cultural conversation was unprecedented for a young female basketball player. That Clark was White, while many of the sport’s best players past and present were Black, opened the door to speculation about the degree to which race itself not only fueled Clark’s popularity but consequent financial benefits, which were equally unprecedented for a female basketball. (Even allowing for the complete happenstance of the economic advantages afforded by name, image and likeness [NIL] deals in college, Clark became a marketing juggernaut across all mediums and repeatedly drove record turnout and viewership for her teams.)

While questions about the relationship between Clark’s race, popularity and compensation were valid — just as they were decades earlier when Elvis Presley popularized Black music for White audiences — you will probably not be surprised to learn that the vast majority of racist abuse that followed originated not at WNBA games, or in mainstream media, but in what is rather innocently described as social media. In reality, what social media corporations the world over present as a neutral or benign service has become the de facto sewage system for cultural conversations worldwide. If you want to beat everyone in a race to the bottom on any topic, all you have to do is head to virtually any social media platform and you will find thousands if not hundreds of thousands if not millions of other people who share your biases and hatreds.

While the online abuse directed at persons of color in and out of women’s basketball by self-identifying fans of Caitlin Clark was indefensible, complaints about that abuse were tantamount to complaining about urine and excrement in a toilet. Whether the toilet was a technological marvel or little more than a trench slashed in the earth, urine and excrement is exactly what you would expect to find. And at this point in our collective journey through the Digital Age I think the same expectations hold for social media and online hatred.

To be clear, it is more than understandable that anyone on the receiving end of such hatred might feel destabilized by online attacks, and that’s particularly true for a relatively small community like the WNBA and its fan base, which may not have been targeted at scale before. That said, however, online haters have descended on other communities in the same way, and because of that history there is also room to criticize the WNBA as an organization for failing to have a plan in place for such an eventuality. Maybe it would never have come to pass, but all the WNBA had to do was look at other minority-dominated or female-dominated communities and the risks would have been wildly apparent.

Before masses of miscreants from social media set their sites on the WNBA, they laid waste to communities in the entertainment industry, and continue to do so. And before that there was an explosion of sexism and racism in the rapidly expanding online gaming industry, to which I had a front-row seat while working in interactive entertainment from the mid 1990’s through the 2000’s. Much like the WNBA today, in the early 1990’s computer games were still a small market, but then came Microsoft and Sony and their competition for eyeballs. That marketing war incentivized computer game developers to provide a permissive playing environment, and that in turn led to what is now called Gamergate. (In a bit of hilarious irony, one of the worst of the game development companies is now complaining about the toxicity of the gaming community that it helped create.)

Again, to be clear, the WNBA is not complicit in the online abuse that has been directed toward its community. But I would be surprised if anyone at the ownership or executive level in the WNBA knew what a griefer was, and in this day and age that kind of obliviousness is simply not acceptable. In terms of online abuse the WNBA should be much farther along in anticipating and responding to threats, whether literal or figurative, and I believe it needs to hire qualified people to help it catch up.

Finally, to underscore the degree to which modern technology amplifies the worst inclinations of humanity, note that the kind of cultural appropriation to which Caitlin Clark herself has been subjected to by toxic fans is not new. In my youth there was no more popular and successful band than the Beatles, and their heavily manicured image was one of frivolity and innocence. Then one day a murderous cult leader latched onto one of their songs, the avaricious media promoted that association for profit, and Christian fundamentalists exploited that association for their own ends. Despite essentially owning the Western world at that point the Beatles were powerless, and it was only decades later, after that grisly association faded, that another band was able to return the Beatles’ song to popular culture. (The Beach Boys fared even worse, but that’s another story.)

The Racism Economy
So far we’ve been talking about racism as a reprehensible belief system, but humans being what little they often are it’s also possible to look at racism as a product. On one side you have people selling t-shirts and producing podcasts in support of racism, and on the other side you have people selling t-shirts and producing podcasts in opposition to racism. And because a great deal of those sales are today facilitated through social media, that only tends to ratchet up online tensions — and thus also the potential profit — on both sides of the ideological divide.

What should not be lost in this entrepreneurial scuffle, however, is the fact that just as most online harassment originates on social media, most of the attempts to leverage intolerance for profit — whether for or against — also originate on social media. Yes, the WNBA proudly positions itself as inclusive, and has from its inception, but the anti-racism economy that exists outside the WNBA almost certainly dwarfs the sale of tolerance-focused WNBA merch. Which is to say that once again we find ourselves having a conversation not about anything that happened on the court in the past year, but about events in social media which were intended, at least in part, to drive sales.

Just as most social media companies are for-profit corporations focused on driving profits by any means available, it’s fair to question the motives of people who are attempting to generate money even if we approve of their objectives. That is in fact one of the reasons we think of non-profit corporations — which can admittedly become scams themselves — as inherently more noble than the average for-profit business. We like the idea that someone somewhere might do the right thing, even if it means leaving money on the table.

Unfortunately, in the fetid marketplace of ideas that is social media — if not American culture writ large — not only are there plenty of people trying to make money by race-baiting, there are plenty of people trying to make money by playing the race card, and both groups have repeatedly attempted to use Caitlin Clark’s notoriety and success in their marketing and sales. The fact that most people oppose racism doesn’t mean most people support whatever means might be used along the way, and that’s particularly true when money does seem to be the motivating factor. (Whether you think this example by a multi-millionaire is hilarious, deeply offensive, or both, it’s a reminder that even people who have suffered abuse in their life may invoke race not to combat social injustice, but to advantage themselves.)

Racism and Remuneration
Earlier I said that questions about the relationship between Clark’s race and her popularity and compensation were valid. Far too often in American history, and indeed world history, people of lesser accomplishments have received greater recognition because of their race or gender as opposed to their talents or contributions. If Clark was raking in more attention and money not because she was a transcendent player who also happened to arrive at a fortuitous historical moment, but because she was White, that would be worthy of objection.

At the same time, the fact that Clark was raking in attention and money through her senior year was not in itself evidence of any racism or cultural bias. And of course when Clark entered the WNBA it would be understandable if current and former pro players felt they were being overlooked after toiling in relative obscurity for relatively low wages, but such outcomes are in the very nature of professional sports. For example, players of every ethnicity were not only paid next to nothing in the early days of the National Football League, but until recently it was exceedingly rare that professional football players even had guaranteed multi-year contracts. The same goes for the men’s National Basketball Association (NBA), where players used to ride buses and play three games back to back, for salaries which are dwarfed by today’s contracts, even after adjusting for inflation. (Moral of the story: you don’t want to be a player in the early decades of any professional league.)

Fortunately, and unlike complicated cultural issues such as how to combat racism, let alone racism on social media, uncertainties about Clark’s talents as a player would be objectively answered on the court, in full view of every invested party. Even in her senior year in college, as Clark was racking up records and awards, all anyone had to do was watch her play to confirm that it was her talent as an athlete that was at the core of her popularity and success. Unfortunately, however, as Clark was closing in on and setting college record after college record, people started lining up to patiently explain why Clark wasn’t special, and why plenty of players who came before her, including particularly players of color, were as good or better in their day. At the same time, the fact that Clark’s large and growing fan base — which was presumed to be mostly White — apparently didn’t know about those former great players was also characterized as cultural cancellation.

Expert Testimony
While Clark’s considerable talents were on display from the moment she enrolled at Iowa as a freshman (and even before that, during her high school years in Des Moines), it wasn’t until her junior year that she began receiving regular attention from national sports media. What no one could have predicted, however, was that by the middle of her senior year, as she was closing in on the all-time NCAA women’s scoring record, that she would become as popular — and tangentially polarizing — as any sports figure in recent memory, male or female.

By that time the social media dynamic around Clark was also fully and predictably engaged, and national sports outlets like ESPN were often acting like little more than troll farms themselves in order to exploit that dynamic for ratings. In that fevered context, anyone and everyone who had ever been associated with women’s basketball in America was being asked whether Caitlin Clark was a truly unique athlete, or whether there might be another reason for all of the attention being directed at her by fans and the marketplace.

While there were plenty of people on social media and in popular culture who were willing to come right out and say that Clark was all hype, and the only reason anyone was paying attention to her was because of her skin color, people who played or coached the game of women’s basketball were notably more circumspect. For them the question wasn’t whether Clark was talented or not, because she clearly was, but whether the incredible interest that she was generating was in proportion to the uniqueness of her athletic prowess.

In a majority White country Clark’s skin color certainly helped her in terms of the reach and consequent value of sponsorships and marketing deals, but that’s not what the game’s great players and coaches were being asked. What they were being asked was how good she was on the court, and in that context the response was largely consistent. Clark was a good basketball player, maybe even great in college, but she was simply not as good as her fans seemed to believe. And starting about halfway through her senior year, at the beginning of 2024, expert after expert lined up to make that case based on statistics and their own personal experience with the game.

Passing the Torch of Invalidation
On January 29th, 2024, former college and WNBA star Sheryl Swoopes — who was respected if not beloved in the greater women’s basketball community — appeared on the podcast of former NBA player Gilbert Arenas. When prompted about how Clark’s game might translate to the WNBA, and before eventually responding that Clark would not “immediately” become a dominant player in the league, Swoopes changed the subject to note that Clark was taking five years to break the all-time NCAA women’s scoring record then held by Kelsey Plum, and to insinuate that Clark was a twenty-five-year-old player competing against twenty-year-olds. Later, Swoopes also noted that Clark took 40 shots per game in college, which she would be unlikely to get on a much more competitive WNBA roster.

The problem with those statements by Swoopes — about Clark’s number of years in college, her age, and shots per game — was that they were all false. (To the show’s credit the first error was corrected in real time, but elicited no follow-up by Swoopes or the host.) Caitlin Clark did in fact only play four years of college basketball, and as such broke the all-time scoring record in the same amount of time as the previous record holder. Clark also turned 22 during her senior year in college, and played her entire rookie year in the WNBA at that same age. And as to her shots per game in college, Clark took slightly less than twenty-three 23 shots per game in her senior season, not 40.

To no one’s surprise, Swoopes’ comments about Clark produced a geyser of social media sewage that was visible from space. (More on the fallout here and here.) While plenty of people were eager to ascribe various motives to Swoopes’ comments, however, what intrigued me was the fact that her statistical assertions were so egregiously wrong. Even a malignant troll with the worst of intentions would try to avoid the kind of public faceplant that Swoopes experienced, and it was beyond credulity that Swoopes was willing to destroy her credibility to assert falsehoods that could easily be checked.

On February 21st, 2024, A’ja Wilson — one of the most decorated college and professional women’s players in history — was asked where she would rank Caitlin Clark, all-time, in the history of the college game. Wilson’s response, in part, was that to even be in the conversation as greatest of all time Clark would have to win a national championship — which Wilson herself did at South Carolina, one of the premier women’s basketball programs in the country. (Clark would eventually fall short of that goal by one game in her senior year, after also reaching but loosing the championship game in her junior year.)

The idea that great players should win championships is not only not new, it makes sense. The objective of competition is winning, and if you can’t beat everybody else in a given season how can claim to be the best? The problem with asserting that titles are proof of individual greatness is that the teams that win titles at any level of play are usually not successful because of a solitary phenom, but because of multiple great starting players and a strong bench. The women’s college game in particular has been dominated by programs like Tennessee, Baylor, LSU, Stanford, South Carolina and UConn in particular, which at their peak have also dominated the recruitment of top-ranked high school prospects.

Arguing that championships equal greatness can also lead to outright incoherence. For example, Michael Jordan’s 6-0 record in the NBA finals is often held out as proof that he is the greatest of all time, when that claim actually rewards him for failing to reach the finals in other years — meaning he benefits from losing earlier in the years that he didn’t reach the finals. Likewise, arguing that titles equal greatness also means lesser players who have a championship ring can claim superiority over better players who don’t have a ring. (Which do you think is harder: winning a championship on a team loaded with great players, or leading a gritty team to the championship game as a solitary phenom, even if you eventually lose?

On April 5th, 2024, following Iowa’s improbable victory over perennial powerhouse UConn in the semifinals of the NCAA championships, legendary women’s player Diana Taurasi — herself a former three-time college champ for the Huskies, and three time WNBA champ — was asked how Clark and other rookies would be welcomed by the veterans in the WNBA. Channeling Swoopes’ comments months earlier, Taurasi noted that college players can look “superhuman playing against eighteen year olds”, but in the WNBA they would be playing against “grown women who’ve been playing professional basketball a long time”.

Taurasi did add that great players are great players, but “there is going to be a transition period, where you’re going to have to give yourself some grace as a rookie, and uh…you know…it might take a little bit longer for some people.” Needless to say, social media met Taurasi’s veiled comments with all of the maturity one would expect, but her point was clear. Whatever accomplishments Clark and other rookies had in the NCAA, the competition in the WNBA would be exponentially more difficult not only because of the concentration of talent, but because many of the greatest women’s players in the world had already been plying their trade as professionals for a decade or more. In that context, no rookie, including Caitlin Clark, could be expected to compete against, let alone outperform, the best players in the league.

On June 6th, 2024, a little less than a month into the WNBA season — during which Clark’s team was 2-9, and Clark herself clearly struggled — famed UConn head coach Geno Auriemma not only questioned Clark’s ability to succeed in the professional league at her size, he repeatedly ridiculed the fans who believed in her:

If you’re a college player, and you’re a great college player — like Caitlin was — the delusional fan base…that follows her…disrespected the WNBA players by saying she’s going to go into that league and tear it apart. There were actually odds on…what are…she’s actually third or fourth in betting odds on being MVP of the WNBA. These people are so disrespectful and so unknowledgeable and so stupid, that it gives women’s basketball a bad name. Okay? So the kid was set up for failure right from the beginning.

Later in the same interview, Auriemma — who coached the most dominant program in the history of women’s basketball, and some of the greatest players to play the game, including Diana Taurasi — patiently explained why Clark herself would be limited in her effectiveness as a professional:

She’s just not built for the physicality of this league. And she’s not quick enough to get away from the physicality. So there’s a lot of learning curve like Diana said. And when she gets it she has elite skills that are going to really help her. But she needs to be on a better team, and she needs to be more experienced — and that will come.

On July 5th, 2024, two months into the WNBA season and just ahead of the quadrennial month-long Olympic break, ESPN basketball analyst and former Division 1 basketball player Monica McNutt was asked to size up the hotly debated race for WNBA Rookie of the Year (ROY) between Clark and another player. Despite the fact that Caitlin Clark was rapidly adjusting to the professional game and turning heads with her play, it was McNutt’s view that because Clark played on a team with another first overall draft pick and former ROY, that doing so actually diminished Clark’s rookie accomplishments. Meaning where Clark’s college career was devalued because she didn’t win a championship by playing on a team loaded with talent, she was now being devalued as a professional because her team had — marginally — more talent than that of another rookie.

I could cite another fifty examples of women’s basketball experts explaining why Caitlin Clark was not great when compared to other great players, or even to other rookies, but hopefully you see the pattern. No matter what Clark accomplished — meaning no matter what she actually produced on the court — someone with credibility to burn was there to step forward and patiently explain why Clark was not a transcendent athlete or generational player. And of course that also led to implicit and at times explicit lectures about how Clark’s fans were simply irrational about her skills and professional potential — as if the fans of players in any sport are always entirely rational.

The Good Old Girls Club
In choosing to side-step the social media ravings of random fans of Caitlin Clark, whether racist or not, and focus instead on the virtual unanimity of opinion by experts in women’s basketball at both the college and professional level, we are left with two obvious questions. First, why were all of those experts convinced that Clark’s apparent talents would struggle to translate to the professional game? What was driving the consensus view that Clark would simply not be as successful as a pro player as her ardent and vocal fans believed she would?

One possible answer, obviously, would be some form of reverse prejudice or bias, but I don’t think that explains the consistency of the impulse to invalidate Clark or her fans. Humans being the flawed creatures we are it’s a given that some people will hate Caitlin Clark simply because of her skin color or some other aspect of identity, but I also think those people are relatively few and far between.

Another possible explanation, given Clark’s wide popularity and consequent financial benefits, would be jealousy of some sort, but again I don’t think that explains the consistency of disregard for Clark’s on-court skills. In fact, precisely because Clark’s white skin and Midwestern image are economically advantageous in a majority White country, that inequity can be argued directly, without calling Clark’s athletic abilities into question. Yes, some players are probably jealous of Clark for off-the-court reasons, but that doesn’t explain why so many experts questioned Clark’s talents on the court.

For all of the efforts by racist online trolls to co-opt Caitlin Clark’s success for their own malevolent ends, and all of the efforts by media companies to exploit and profit from Clark’s celebrity, the central dispute about Clark was always about her ability as a player. On the one hand there were ever-growing legions of fans who said they were drawn to Clark because of her unique abilities on the court. On the other hand there was virtual unanimity among experts in the women’s game that not only was Clark not unique, but claims that she was were inherently disrespectful to current and former players who were just as talented, but who were unknown to fans that were new to the WNBA.

While it does make sense to give deference to people with expertise in any field or discipline, it is also important to recognize that there are power dynamics at play in any community, and that is both figuratively and literally true in sports. Among athletes and former athletes, dominance is not simply a consequence of competition, but the actual point. And in most sports the size of the athletic community which competes for dominance is much, much smaller than the size of the audience that watches those competitions.

In both the NCAA and WNBA, Caitlin Clark was not only a relative outsider, but her success came outside the traditional permission and power structures which dominate those athletic communities. Where a majority of the best players are from a small number of dominant college programs, Clark played at unheralded Iowa, which, like hundreds of other colleges and universities in the United States, offered women’s basketball as a sport primarily to maintain compliance with federal Title IX regulations. Not only did no one ever expect Iowa to compete for a national championship in women’s college basketball, let alone do so for two years running, but I think it was almost impossible to imagine that a truly transformational player would end up playing for what many people thought of as a backwater school. Almost by self-fulfilling definition, great players went to great schools, and great schools recruited great players. Ergo, because Clark played at Iowa, Clark couldn’t be great.

Even the fact that many of Clark’s fans were new to women’s basketball short circuited the usual power and permission dynamics, because those new fans not only didn’t know who they were supposed to revere, they didn’t care. Reputations that had been earned over decades suddenly meant nothing in that new cultural context, and the young woman leading that fan base didn’t seem overly deferential herself. From the perspective of the dominant women’s college programs she may as well have been playing on the moon, but Clark herself certainly didn’t think that playing at Iowa meant she was anything less, or that her team was anything less.

Because of the toxicity of the social media vandals who were determined to spread hate in the relatively small women’s basketball community, and because of the larger cultural conversation about Caitlin Clark’s celebrity, I think it was always hard to notice the extent to which plain old snobbishness was impacting the assessment of Clark’s on-court talents. Likewise, because many of the most-prominent commentators, coaches and players in the women’s game are Black or gay or members of other minority groups, it was always going to be hard to see them as elitist snobs who were bristling at the success of an outsider who blithely bypassed the gatekeeping function of their club. People who thought of themselves as having — and having earned — rank or status in the women’s basketball community were now not only being ignored, they were being told by fans new to the game that a spindly, loud-mouthed, Catholic White girl from Iowa was the truth.

And if that all strikes you as hooey, I can only encourage you to take a step back and consider what we already know about athletics. Not only do athletes and coaches engage in toxic behavior like hazing, but athletic competition — and the coach-player relationship — is intrinsically defined by power dynamics. On every team at every level of play, male or female, abled or disabled, professional, college, high school, junior high, elementary school or preschool, there is a pecking order, and everyone knows it. And that’s true in the media world as well, where success in sports is defined by success in ratings and revenue generation.

In that context, and depending on your point of view, Caitlin Clark was either a disruptor or disrupter because she blew through all of the usual power dynamics and permission structures, and did so starting in her junior year in college. Women who had toiled for years if not decades as professionals were being ignored, while an upstart from a nothing program in a nothing state was being lionized. And at a basic human level I think it’s understandable that the women’s basketball community collectively pushed back against that unwelcome change. What had been a relatively small community where everyone knew their place in the hierarchy and history of women’s basketball, was not only suddenly under siege by racist trash on social media, but being destabilized internally by a player who was not beholden to that community for her success.

And I think that is precisely why people from the women’s basketball community began to demand that Clark herself explicitly acknowledge a debt to former players. Given that Clark didn’t arrive in the public consciousness because of her association with one of the traditional women’s basketball factories, and she didn’t come from a region of the country with a long history of producing great players, Clark had no place in the women’s basketball pecking order. Instead of adding to and becoming an extension of various established legends, she was like a brick through the window of the women’s basketball clubhouse, and that freaked people out.

Because competitors in particular are driven by ego, one of the ways the women’s basketball hierarchy reflexively responded was by invalidating not only Clark as a player, but invalidating her fans as well. Not only were some purported Clark fans actually racist, but all Clark fans had to be racist because what other explanation could there be for her popularity? In that consensus assessment she was not as talented as her fans thought she was, so the only plausible reason for the adoration of those fans had to be her skin color.

All of which brings us now to the second obvious question about the dispute between women’s basketball experts and Caitlin Clark’s fans over Clark’s uniqueness as a player. Who was right?

Rookie of the Year
One of the things that makes sports attractive in cultures the world over — particularly as compared with debates about preferences or matters of taste — is that the final determination of a contest is almost always clear. You may not like the outcome, and passionately so, but absent corruption or outright criminality the result is determined on the field of play, and not by a group of voters or judges who may be swayed by prior associations, biases or prejudices. (While sports are usually meaningless in the greater scheme of things, there are moments when the objective nature of competition has a profound cultural impact as well. For example, see Jesse Owens and the 1936 Olympics.)

As of this writing the 2024 WNBA finals are just getting underway, while Clark’s team was eliminated from the playoffs several weeks ago — albeit after reaching the postseason for the first time since 2016. Unlike the majority of quotes in this post, then, which originated between the end of Clark’s senior year in college and the beginning of her rookie season as a pro, we no longer have to speculate about how successful Clark could be or would be when making that leap. Instead, we can actually look at her accomplishments.

To my mind one of the least impressive feats during Clark’s first year in the WNBA was the fact that she was voted 2024 Rookie of the Year, yet even there we see evidence of the pettiness of the good old girls club at work. Specifically, the final tally showed 66 votes for Clark and 1 vote for another rookie, meaning that single vote forever denied Clark a unanimous result. Then again, if you’ve been around sports for any amount of time you know there is a time-honored tradition of small, petty, vindictive media figures and former players perpetrating such juvenile acts — often under the protection of presumed anonymity — so that solitary vote was not particularly unique, even as it was telling. (If you can deny Caitlin Clark an accomplishment, you do it.)

We will never know the motivation of the single voter who didn’t vote for Clark as the runaway Rookie of the Year, and that’s true even if they step forward or are outed later, because they could simply lie. It’s even possible that the vote was racially motivated, but I want to stress that this kind of juvenile trolling happens routinely, to players of all identities. For example, last year one petty voter had A’ja Wilson fourth on their MVP ballot, which was equally ludicrous at that time.

Speaking of the annual vote for WNBA MVP…remember when UConn coach Geno Auriemma excoriated Clark fans for bidding her up to third or fourth in the race for 2024 MVP? Well, when the final vote was announced — following a brutal start to the season for Clark, including being aggressively targeted by the defenses of many of the teams in the league — Caitlin Clark was voted the fourth best player in the WNBA. Meaning she was voted ahead of roughly 140 other players, most of whom had multiple years of professional experience under their belts.

Among the preposterous list of accomplishments and records set by Caitlin Clark in her rookie year in the WNBA, including the all-time record for assists in both a single game and a single season, I want to focus on a stat that some sites won’t even produce because Clark has yet to qualify for that metric. Specifically, Clark averaged 8.43 assists for the season, placing her behind only one other player, who surpassed that total on four occasions. If you look at the WNBA career leaders for assists per game, however, on some site you won’t even find Clark listed — even though her 8.43 average obliterates every other player on that list — because you have to have a minimum of 500 career assists to qualify for inclusion. (In her first season Clark ‘only’ had 377, which, again, set the single-season record not only for rookies, but all-time.)

If you’re a Caitlin Clark fan you can point to dozens of other stats from her rookie year, many artfully crafted or ironic. (For example, if you want to see how Clark’s rookie year stacks up against the 2002 MVP season of Sheryl Swoopes, click here.) Even if you don’t have an axe to grind in the great Caitlin Clark debate, however, it should be abundantly clear that in the entire history of the WNBA there have been few players who have had such an immediate impact. (And in terms of guards I would argue that there have been no players who had an equivalent impact.)

Even allowing for caveats and qualifiers by Clark’s doubters and naysayers, the reality is that the people who said Clark was different and transcendent and generational were right, and the people who said she wasn’t were wrong. Did it take time for Clark to adjust to the pro game? Yes, but by my eye — and I watched every Fever game this season — that transition took about four weeks, and only accelerated after Clark had time to rest during the Olympic hiatus. Despite having essentially no break between the end of her senior season, which included a deep run into the NCAA championship, and the start of her first WNBA season, and despite an almost unprecedentedslate of 11 games in the first 18 days of her pro career, and despite the entire league setting out to prove that she wasn’t the player her fans thought she was by relentlessly blitzing her on defense, bullying her physically, and just plain knocking the crap out of her, she actually was the player her fans thought she was. And by the time Caitlin Clark’s rookie WNBA season came to a close, everybody knew it. Everybody.

Crickets
Following an entire year in which everyone in the sports world, and an improbable number of luminaries in celebrity culture, were swept up by — or at least motivated to tag along with — the phenomenon that was Caitlin Clark, the verdict was finally in. The doubters, naysayers and haters were wrong about the success Clark would have in her rookie seasons, and her deluded, irrational fans were right. After getting off to a slow start, which was partly the result of the WNBA’s punishing early schedule for Clark’s team, and facing competition that was not only motivated to win but to embarrass Clark as a player, Caitlin Clark made the necessary adjustments in a matter of weeks.

Not surprisingly, none of the doubters, naysayers and haters have admitted they were wrong about Clark, or wrong about Clark’s fans. The closest I’ve seen is a few media figures acknowledging that Clark exceeded expectations, but even that admission lays claim to authority while simultaneously avoiding accountability. Instead of admitting that Clark proved them wrong, people who couldn’t wait to pontificate about Clark when there was still some uncertainty have either had nothing to say, or at most grudgingly praised her in an offhanded way which reaffirms their right to set expectations.

Well not only did Clark prove those people wrong, but she proved that her fans — meaning her real fans, and not the parasitic racist trash that latched onto and tainted her celebrity for their own toxic amusement — were correct in their assessment of her talents. She may have exceeded the expectations of the so-called experts, but among her legions of fans she met their lofty expectations and then some. And again she accomplished that even after much of the WNBA set out to prevent her from doing so by any means.

The great irony in the conspicuous silence following Clark’s rookie year is that every person who shot their mouth off about Clark could have kept their mouth shut earlier, or announced that they were reserving judgment. In a world where social media is not just a force for hate, however, but a viable avenue for celebrity branding, a lot of people — including a lot of people who professed to have expertise in evaluating the talents of female basketball players — decided to set the world straight on Caitlin Clark’s limitations as a player. And now that we know they didn’t know what they were talking about, they don’t want to revisit the part they played in spurring that lucrative cultural debate.

Why Caitlin Clark is Different
I have watched a lot of basketball in my long life, most of it professional and the vast majority male. In trying to articulate what I saw in Caitlin Clark from the moment I first watched her play — which I think also attracted most of her fans, even if they can’t explain it — I will have to get into the strategy of the game a bit, but even if you’re not a sports fan I think you will be able to follow along.

Start with any pool of basketball players at any level, and the first distinction that will usually be made between them is the degree to which those players are able to score points. And of course that distinction makes sense because the team that scores the most points in the allotted time wins, so having players who are better at scoring increases your chance of winning.

Some players are so good at scoring, however, that against a normal defensive scheme — meaning one where they are defended by a single player — those talented scorers can still get a high-percentage shot. In response to such players, defenses will usually send a second defender to double-team the scoring threat, forcing that player to either take a lower-percentage shot, or to pass the ball to a player who is not as effective at scoring.

There are also some offensive players who are not only talented at shooting and scoring, but also at dribbling the ball. And because those players are more mobile it is more difficult for defenses to either force them into bad shots or to relinquish the ball. At that point defenses must choose between sending a third defender, and thus leaving two other players wide open, or allowing that players to score while limiting the effectiveness of other players on offense. (You may hear a coach say they let the other team’s star player ‘get theirs’, meaning get their expected points.)

In the entire history of basketball there are a few players who, in their prime, could not be stopped on offense. From the NBA you can think of players like Wilt Chamberlain, Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal and Stephen Curry, each of whom could get a high-percentage shot on every offensive possession. In that same context, and particularly as both a shooter and a ball-handling guard, all you have to do is look at Caitlin Clark’s NCAA scoring records to know that Clark was — at least at the college level — one of those unstoppable scorers.

Now, following her rookie year in the WNBA, Clark not only shows every sign of continuing that success in the pros, but once she adds a reliable mid-range game — which she is working on — to her ability to shoot from the three-point arc and drive to the rim for layups, it will literally be impossible to keep her from getting a good shot any time she wants. As to why that won’t necessarily translate into wins, however, there are two reasons. First, there is always some percentage chance that even a wide-open shot won’t go in, and the more a player shoots the tireder they get, further decreasing their effectiveness. Second, even if Clark scored fifty points a game — and she’s not going to score fifty points a game — she would still need points from others on the team, which brings us to the second way that basketball players are usually distinguished from each other.

Because undefended players usually have a better chance of scoring a basket, and because the ball can move faster than any defender, players who have the ability to pass the ball to open players also have value in terms of offense. Combine the ability to dribble, and to deliver passes which are perfectly timed to match the receiving player’s shooting motion or movement on the court, and it’s not surprising that such players may actually run the offense even if they are not particularly effective at shooting or scoring. In statistical terms such indirect contributions are measured by assists, which are passes which lead directly to a score. (Even if your pass is perfect, you don’t get an assist if the shot isn’t made. A coach’s assist, which is an unofficial statistic, is a pass which leads to a high-percentage shot that was ultimately not successful.)

As you might imagine, players at any level who are both unstoppable scorers and experts at delivering assists are incredibly rare. From statistics and records mentioned earlier in this post it should also be abundantly clear that Caitlin Clark was one of those rare players in college, and that she is already one of those rare players in the the pros. In fact, in her rookie year in the WNBA there was no one — no one — who was better at that combination of offensive skills than Caitlin Clark. (“Her 38.0 points scored or assisted per game in 2024 marked the most in a season in league history.”

While the ability to run a set offense and to consistently deliver the ball where it needs to be is rare and rightly prized, the ability to make the right pass when the offense breaks down or when transitioning from defense to offense is even more uncommon, in large part because it requires reading –mapping — the location and movement of all ten players on the court in real time. With a set play you may only need to pay attention to a few players setting screens or making cuts, but in the chaos of a broken play or fast break any defensive player can prove disruptive — particularly if you don’t see them.

In the entire history of the NBA, meaning the men’s professional league, the are only a handful of players who were unstoppable scorers, who could run an offense, and who could consistently deliver assists even on broken plays or in transition, because they saw the entire floor. In a cosmic coincidence that will likely never occur again, two of those players — Magic Johnson and Larry Bird — burst onto the NBA scene as rookies in the same year, and subsequently redefined the league. More recently, Serbia’s Nikola Jokić was the 41st pick in the 2014 NBA draft — in part because the people who were paid to evaluate his talents were even worse than the people who prognosticated about Clark — and his unique abilities have so far led to three MVP awards and the 2023 championship.

Caitlin Clark is also one of those players. It’s not always apparent because she gets caught between the instinct to take her own shot and the instinct to pass, but in terms of court awareness we have only to look at how quickly she adapted to the length, strength and speed of the WNBA game. But even that isn’t ultimately what sets Caitlin Clark apart, and, I think, what has attracted so many fans along the way.

It’s one thing to run a set offense. It’s another thing to assist on points off broken plays, or to dribble the ball up the court in transition, even at breakneck speed. It is yet another thing entirely to take possession of the ball in the back court, then turn and throw a court-length pass to a teammate streaking toward the opposing rim. Even if you watch a lot of basketball, including contests featuring the best players in the world, you can go entire games without seeing such a play being made.

I am not joking when I say that Caitlin Clark makes that rare play look routine, and it’s not just me saying that. Here’s Tim Legler, who played ten years in the NBA, with a schematic explanation. And from famed Boston sports writer Bob Ryan — who is so old he has seen all of the greatest male basketball players in history with his own eyes — here’s a first-person account:

She makes the pass, in transition, from the back court to the front court — two-hand chest or whatever — dropping a dime for a layup, better than anybody I’ve ever seen. Now that means male or female. Sorry males, none of you, ever, have done [it] better than this young lady does it. It’s remarkable.

The ability to make that lightning-bolt pass, let alone routinely, to a teammate streaking down the court, has all of the flair of a touchdown pass in football, yet usually only results in two points, like any other regular basket. What makes it more than that, however, is that such passes are a constant threat that defensive players must take into account. Instead of jogging back and setting up on defense, and resting for a few seconds until the ball arrives in the front court and the offense runs a play, defenders must race back and account for every offensive players on the fly. And that constant effort not only takes a toll over time, but such passes, if they are accurate, cannot be defended.

In sum, if you still don’t think Caitlin Clark is a unique player then nothing else I might say will change your mind. As to a game-related explanation for why so many people were so wrong about Clark, the thing that surprised me most when I listened to or read commentary from people who played or coached the game, was the focus on Clark’s scoring. Yes, scoring matters, and fans — and players — are often obsessed with that metric, but in terms of winning it is an inevitable consequence of great team play. What really sets Clark apart is her playmaking in combination with her scoring threat. (Some of the people who publicly insisted that Clark would be nothing special in the WNBA clearly never watched her play, and likely drew their erroneous conclusions from her collegiate stat lines, and particularly her scoring average.)

Questions for the WNBA
Are more people paying attention to Caitlin Clark because she is White than would be if she was a person of color? Yes, undoubtedly. But Clark is not commanding a huge following because of her skin color, she’s commanding a huge following because the sum of her skill set is incredibly rare across the entire global sport, regardless of sex. (The only conceivable way she could be more impressive would be if she was 6′ 6″.)

More to the point, any suggestion that Clark’s fans are only interested in her because of her skin color, and not because of her objective talents, is a gross insult to those fans, of which I am one. That said, the very fact that I and so many others are suddenly paying attention to women’s basketball instead of paying attention to something else means the WNBA is also going through a period of rapid growth, and growth is often accompanied by instability. It was not a surprise to me that the 2024 WNBA season was both riveting and roiled by various tensions, because the league itself is transitioning from a niche sport to mainstream. (I watched more women’s basketball in the past year than I have watched men’s college basketball, baseball and hockey in the past two decades.)

In that context, what follows are questions I believe the WNBA players, players association, executive leadership and owners should discuss during the off-season, in order to make 2025 as successful as possible.

* One of the things I kept hearing during the 2024 season was how welcoming and inclusive the WNBA was as an organization. Do you think the league was welcoming to Caitlin Clark? Did the league make Clark feel like she belonged, or like she didn’t belong?

* Same questions for Clark’s fans. Did the league welcome Clark’s fans, or did it try to drive them away?

* Do you think the league’s response to Caitlin Clark, individually and collectively, would have been different if she had been a person of color?

* Why was Caitlin Clark repeatedly pressed to acknowledge a debt to the WNBA players who came before her when she entered the league, while Victor Wembanyama was not obligated to do the same when he entered the NBA last year? Was that disrespectful to George Mikan?

* When celebrated players of color enter the WNBA from college, are they routinely required to acknowledge a debt to former WNBA players?

* How did the widespread assumption that Caitlin Clark was primarily popular because of her skin color impact the conversation about racism and social media abuse during the 2024 WNBA season?

* What could the WNBA have done to be better prepared for, and more effectively react to, abuse from social media?

(In my view the WNBA was woefully naive about the modern state of social media and the threat that social media represents. That doesn’t mean the WNBA was complicit in any abuse, any more than a small community would be complicit if a gang of outlaw bikers rode into town, but as noted above this kind of organized hatred is not new. It may have been new to the WNBA, but it exists and that was knowable.)

* What is the responsibility of the WNBA to protect players from harm in third-party relationships which are not mandated by the league?

* Is the WNBA active on Twitter, and if so, should it be? How many WNBA players — including particularly players who have spoken out against online hate, or spoken out against Clark’s fans — are active on Twitter?

(In 2022 the richest man in the world bought Twitter at a substantial loss, renamed it X, then used the site to promote bigoted attacks, including by the owner himself.)

The Invalidation of Caitlin Clark
Finally, on the question of messaging and communication, who decides who will be held accountable for their words in the WNBA? Are there processes in place to assure that statements from everyone involved with the league meet consistent guidelines for fairness and accuracy?

The reason I ask is that in the first weeks of her pro career, Caitlin Clark was pressed on social media by Connecticut Sun guard Dijonai Carrington and others to clarify comments about racism that were deemed insufficient. Three months later, in mid-September, WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert was pressed by individual players and the WNBA Players Association to clarify comments about racism and online abuse from an interview earlier in that week, which were again deemed insufficient. Several weeks later, however, in late September, Connecticut Sun veteran Alyssa Thomas stated that the online abuse she had been subjected to during the 2024 season came from “the Indiana Fever fan base” — meaning fans of Caitlin Clark’s team — yet Thomas was not subsequently pressed to clarify her remarks.

In fact, and without apparent irony, Thomas insisted that “[w]e’ve been professional throughout the whole entire thing”, but how professional is it to smear the fan base of an entire franchise? And of course there’s also the question of how Thomas knew, as a factual matter, that the abuse she was receiving came from dedicated Fever fans, as opposed to online trolls who adopted that association precisely to provoke such a response. (Several days later, and to her credit, legendary and widely respected college and professional player Sue Bird made clear that all Fever fans are not racist, but as far as I can tell there has not been any official pushback in the WNBA about Thomas’s statement.)

There is no place for racism in the WNBA or anywhere else. Unfortunately, not only is safety on social media not a legal right, but the racism economy on social networks cuts both ways. In particular, players who engage in brand-building and monetizing their celebrity on toxic sites like Twitter are not only promoting those sites, they are attempting to profit using outside companies which are themselves racist and hostile to core aspects of the mission of the WNBA. But hey, instead of confronting those obvious and lucrative hypocrisies, let’s just keep invalidating Caitlin Clark as a player, which again lends credence to the smear that her fans are racist idiots who don’t know anything about basketball.

Update 10/16/24: Four days after publishing this post Caitlin Clark was named to the 2024 All-WNBA First Team, and is the first rookie to receive that honor since 2008. Anyone who said that Clark was overrated as a player was wrong, and if they were paid to voice their opinion they should return that money.

— Mark Barrett