{"id":70547,"date":"2025-08-15T02:34:07","date_gmt":"2025-08-15T02:34:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/70547\/"},"modified":"2025-08-15T02:34:07","modified_gmt":"2025-08-15T02:34:07","slug":"michelle-obama-weighs-in-on-caitlin-clark-vs-angel-reese-debate-wnba-rivalry-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/70547\/","title":{"rendered":"Michelle Obama weighs in on Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese debate, WNBA rivalry"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michelle Obama weighs in on Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese debate, WNBA rivalry<\/a> originally appeared on The Sporting News<\/a><\/p>\n

Michelle Obama has spent time around a lot of important people, and she’s married to a huge basketball fan.<\/p>\n

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That provides her quite the perspective on what happens on the hardwood for both male and female hoopers.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, Obama got to share her thoughts on the never-ending Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese debate, which started in college for Iowa and LSU and has continued into the WNBA with the Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky.<\/p>\n

Now for those hoping that Obama would take a side, she wouldn’t. Instead, she discussed how social media has made an outsized impact on how people view these two stars and the rivalry they have.<\/p>\n

The former First Lady provided her perspective on the All The Smoke podcast<\/a> with former NBA players Matt Barnes and Stephen Jackson:<\/p>\n

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“I think the tough thing is the social media element to it, but that’s true across the board. It just takes a normal occurrence, these young kids today what they have to go through and be able to withstand, because social media is such a huge part of their world, but now the hate is in your room on your phone with you all the time, and you can’t tell these kids to turn it off, because they’re making their living that way. They’re expected to stay engaged. As you point out, that’s happening across sports across gender. It’s just harder now to withstand peoples’ horrible, horrible opinions.”<\/p>\n

The former NBA players on the show compared this to the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics’ rivalry in the 1980s, when it was Magic Johnson vs. Larry Bird. They acknowledged there had been plenty of hate then, too.<\/p>\n

But to Obama’s point, the hate couldn’t follow you home. Now, it can.<\/p>\n

The hosts generally agreed that rivalry and even the hero-villain motif is good for sports, but they also all recognized how it could cross a line.<\/p>\n

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Clark and Reese both have long basketball futures ahead of them, and the discussion isn’t going anywhere. But as the former First Lady recognizes, it’s definitely important to keep a solid perspective and not let feelings on the rivalry get out of hand.<\/p>\n

MORE:\u00a0Fever sign a Greek champion to play point guard with Caitlin Clark still injured<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Michelle Obama weighs in on Caitlin Clark vs. Angel Reese debate, WNBA rivalry originally appeared on The Sporting…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70548,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[724,44152,1222,49,735,48,726,2803,8231,44151,26169,1942,82,44153,630],"class_list":["post-70547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-angel-reese","tag-basketball-fan","tag-boston-celtics","tag-ca","tag-caitlin-clark","tag-canada","tag-chicago-sky","tag-indiana-fever","tag-los-angeles-lakers","tag-matt-barnes","tag-michelle-obama","tag-social-media","tag-sports","tag-stephen-jackson","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70547","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=70547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70548"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}