{"id":191488,"date":"2025-10-05T14:49:11","date_gmt":"2025-10-05T14:49:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/191488\/"},"modified":"2025-10-05T14:49:11","modified_gmt":"2025-10-05T14:49:11","slug":"wnba-cathy-engelbert-fumbled-caitlin-clark-and-now-league-is-imploding","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/191488\/","title":{"rendered":"WNBA, Cathy Engelbert fumbled Caitlin Clark and now league is imploding"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"play\"<\/p>\n

A’ja Wilson on WNBA commissioner comments<\/p>\n

A’ja Wilson expresses appreciation for Napheesa Collier after she shared WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert’s comments on CBA negotiations.<\/p>\n

Sports Pulse<\/p>\n

An embarrassing controversy involving the WNBA<\/a> and its biggest names exploded into public view just this week, but its roots go back almost a year and a half, to April 15, 2024, the day Caitlin Clark<\/a> was drafted.\u00a0<\/p>\n

From that moment, the WNBA has found itself curiously out of step with the nation\u2019s fondness for Clark. She\u2019s theirs, but sometimes you wonder if they really want her. The league and the women\u2019s basketball ecosystem that surrounds it has twisted itself into knots trying to minimize Clark\u2019s immense and historic impact rather than embrace it. Both the WNBA and the NBA, its big brother and longtime business partner, appeared to be stunningly unprepared for the arrival of the most significant female team sport athlete, and the most popular women\u2019s basketball player, of all time.<\/p>\n

More: Mercury and Aces are blocking the drama, focusing on the WNBA Finals<\/a><\/p>\n

When Clark arrived from Iowa and the Big Ten, she brought a following of millions to a league desperately seeking attention after being virtually ignored for decades by the male-dominated mainstream sports media. Instead of welcoming this development, the league \u2014 players, coaches, owners, commissioner \u2014 at times seemed to recoil from her, sometimes even making snide remarks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Washington Mystics owner Sheila Johnson spoke on CNN about players\u2019 \u201chard feelings\u201d<\/a> when Time magazine was \u201csingling out\u201d Clark for its Athlete of the Year award last December, going so far as to say she wanted \u201cthe whole WNBA on that cover\u201d \u2014 even as Johnson made hundreds of thousands of dollars off Clark by moving two 2024 Mystics home games with Indiana to the 20,000-seat Capital One Arena that was filled to capacity to see Clark.<\/p>\n

Opinion WNBA’s Cathy Engelbert forgets first rule of being a commissioner<\/a><\/p>\n

Commissioner Cathy Engelbert couldn\u2019t manage to say Clark\u2019s name in a 27-minute season-ending 2024 press conference in which she trumpeted records and milestones that occurred only because of Clark.<\/p>\n

Even ESPN was acting strangely. The WNBA\u2019s media business partner sent out a post on X in July proclaiming \u201chistoric viewership<\/a>” for the \u201925 #WNBAAllStarWeekend.\u201d Only problem was it wasn\u2019t historic. It was a massive decline. ESPN left out 2024, Clark\u2019s rookie year, referring to it only in the fine print. In 2025, with Clark injured, 2.2 million watched the All-Star Game. In 2024, with Clark starting, 3.44 million watched.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As Clark packed Big Ten arenas while barnstorming the country her senior year, then drew four million more viewers for the women\u2019s NCAA championship game than the men\u2019s final the following night, one might have thought the WNBA and NBA would have been preparing security and travel plans for this immensely popular player. She had become not only one of the most famous athletes in the country, she was one of the most famous people in the country.\u00a0<\/p>\n

More: WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert denies comments on Caitlin Clark, will not resign<\/a><\/p>\n

Instead, the WNBA demanded she fly commercial, something that would have been unthinkable for a male athlete of her caliber until a journalist (me) called and asked about it. Four days later, Clark and the WNBA had charter flights<\/a>. What kind of leadership was that?\u00a0<\/p>\n

Race, of course, plays a massive role in the league\u2019s acceptance of Clark, with 74% of WNBA players identifying as Black or mixed race. Many of us who have covered the women\u2019s game for decades would have loved Black women like Lisa Leslie or Maya Moore to have had the fan support and national television impact of Clark, who is white, but that unfortunately did not happen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet now, the spotlight shining on Clark also shines on Black players who deserved attention for years but never received it \u2014 until now. Clark\u2019s teammate Kelsey Mitchell, who is Black, has spoken about the opportunities she is receiving because she is a teammate of Clark\u2019s<\/a>. And four-time league MVP A\u2019ja Wilson\u2019s fame has skyrocketed since Clark arrived. Wilson received 95,860 votes for the All-Star Game in 2023, when Clark was still in college. But with Clark\u2019s name on the ballot, she jumped to 607,300 in 2024 and 986,662 in 2025.<\/p>\n

If race is the reason some want to minimize Clark, that\u2019s terribly unfortunate, Briana Scurry, the first Black superstar on the U.S. women\u2019s soccer team, said in my book On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women\u2019s Sports.<\/p>\n

\u201cCaitlin Clark\u2019s presence, while polarizing for some people, is really a watershed moment for the league, and I just hope that all these amazing Black players are taking full advantage of the fact that the spotlight is on what they\u2019re doing now,” Scurry said. “I understand there\u2019s a lot of frustration and there\u2019s some anger because the league has been around for 27 years before she came. But my goodness, it\u2019s having this moment right now. And please, please, please, as players in the league, do not let this opportunity pass you by to get yours.\u201d<\/p>\n

So here we are: chaos out in the open, two seasons in the making. Watching the powers that be in women\u2019s basketball have such trouble adjusting to Clark\u2019s star power, it isn\u2019t surprising that Engelbert uttered the now well-known comment that Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier said she said this week:<\/p>\n

\u201cCaitlin should be grateful she makes $16 million off the court because without the platform that the WNBA gives her, she wouldn\u2019t make anything.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clark came into the WNBA having made more than $3 million in college NIL deals and having signed an eight-year, $28 million deal with Nike, so even before playing her first game as a pro, she was making almost double what Engelbert said she was making.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If the women\u2019s pro basketball ecosystem doesn\u2019t love Clark, the U.S. marketplace certainly does. And that makes things very interesting as the players\u2019 union and the league try to negotiate a new CBA with a looming Oct. 31 deadline.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is straight up the most important moment in this league\u2019s history,\u201d Clark said Thursday. \u201cThis league\u2019s been around for 25-plus years and this is a moment we have to capitalize on.\u201d<\/p>\n

To fight for more money, the players undoubtedly will bolster their case by relying on recent historic TV viewership and attendance in the league. Caitlin Clark is the reason those ground-breaking statistics exist. Perhaps they will even say her name.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A’ja Wilson on WNBA commissioner comments A’ja Wilson expresses appreciation for Napheesa Collier after she shared WNBA commissioner…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":191489,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[1467,461,1466,1486,49,7075,735,48,7076,8520,10665,10668,5588,1329,1161,3049,1465,2561,26677,4650,26678,8519,729,47,2349,459,525,5608,44051,44,927,10232,10666,1333,44056,82,865,5592,630,4134,4143],"class_list":["post-191488","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-1467","tag-basketball","tag-big","tag-big-10-hub","tag-ca","tag-caitlin","tag-caitlin-clark","tag-canada","tag-clark","tag-collier","tag-columnists","tag-columnists-opinions","tag-conference","tag-content","tag-espn","tag-espn-inc","tag-hub","tag-inc","tag-kelsey","tag-kelsey-mitchell","tag-mitchell","tag-napheesa","tag-napheesa-collier","tag-national","tag-national-sports","tag-nba","tag-ncaa","tag-ncaa-big-ten-conference","tag-negative","tag-news","tag-opinion","tag-opinion-content","tag-opinions","tag-overall","tag-overall-negative","tag-sports","tag-sports-news","tag-ten","tag-wnba","tag-womens","tag-womens-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191488","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=191488"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/191488\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/191489"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=191488"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=191488"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=191488"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}