Caitlin Clark reacts on court prior to the 2025 AT&T WNBA All-Star Game at Gainbridge Fieldhouse on Saturday in Indianapolis.
Photo: Steph Chambers/Getty Images
This past weekend’s WNBA All-Star Weekend was, in every way, about Caitlin Clark. It was held at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indianapolis, the home stadium of Clark’s Indiana Fever. It featured a 3-point contest in prime time, specifically constructed to showcase Clark. One of the teams in the All-Star Game itself was literally named Team Clark. The only thing it was all missing? Caitlin Clark.
Much to the chagrin of the WNBA, Clark missed the All-Star festivities thanks to a lingering groin injury (along with a separate quad injury) that has been plaguing her all season. She was still in attendance, and along with her fellow stars, wearing “Pay Us What You Owe Us” shirts — another gambit in the ongoing labor negotiations that threaten to envelop the league before an October deadline. And Clark was the center of every conversation, even the ones complaining about how she was the center of every conversation.
Caitlin Clark’s sophomore season — after a rookie season in which she seemed, unwittingly and unwillingly, to find herself in the middle of every sports culture-war crossover imaginable — has been a strange and frustrating one. Clark’s numbers are down across the board, particularly her 3-point shooting, the signature (though far from only) part of her game. She’s shooting 27.9 percent from the field, down nearly 7 percentage points from her rookie year and nearly 13 from her career high in college. She’s scoring less — she hasn’t played enough games to qualify for the points-per-game leaderboard, but if she had, her 16.5 ppg would be 15th in the league — and her team, despite a new coach and some aggressive offseason moves, is treading water, with roughly the same record as last year. Clark, when she has played, arguably hasn’t been the best player on her own team; that would be fellow all-star Aliyah Boston, who was the key Fever player before Clark ever got there.
Clark’s downturn is largely because of her injury woes, and there’s reason to think she and her team can go on a second-half run if she can get healthy. But there’s no question that Clark’s struggles are coming at an awkward time for the league, which is currently getting all the bad stuff that comes with Clark and not enough of the good stuff. As with last year, there is a certain sort of basketball fan whose only relationship with the WNBA is through Clark: how she’s playing, how she’s being marketed, how the other players in the league are treating her. While the right-wing social media machine hasn’t quite been as attuned to the league as it was last year — when Charlie Kirk and company basically spent the whole year claiming Black players were “thuggishly” targeting the rookie — the WNBA has remained a punching bag for a certain kind of lowbrow bro who imagines the league is like abandoned mall that would have gone out of business had Clark not arrived to save it. (Exhibit A: host Shane Gillis’ gag at the ESPYs in which he pointed out a Black woman in the crowd, claimed it was WNBA All-Star Brittany Hicks, instructed attendees to applaud and then revealed the woman was actually just the wife of a friend of his.) There is a certain percentage of the American public that insists on seeing Clark at the league’s savior.
Not only is this not true — the league was growing exponentially before Clark got there, resulting in a $2.2 billion television deal a year ago; the New York Liberty just sold a “mid-teens” stake for $450 million; and attendance across the league is at an all-time high. The savior chatter isn’t doing Clark any favors, either. For all the talk about her getting “bullied” last year, someone who definitely didn’t feel that way was Clark herself. She has spoken about how she actually embraced the physical play, knowing not only that it has long been common in the league, but would in fact make her a better player. And for all the talk of the rivalry between Clark and Angel Reese — who will be on the cover of the next NBA2K video game — both players are well-known for admiring each other as competitors, both publicly and privately, and see the rivalry as good for the league on the whole. But the Clark-as-savior fans have turned the rivalry toxic, attacking Reese online and in the stands, to the point that Clark and her teammates have had to tell them to knock it off.
The whole thing is giving Clark an outsized platform in the WNBA, one that, along with the injuries, could be hindering her development as a player. No one wants that, least of all a league that is growing but obviously sees her as the catapult to crossover mainstream success that she is. That it’s all combined with an injury plagued season and a looming labor dispute that has a chance to change the way all athletes are paid, is deeply unfortunate timing. But there’s also a hopeful analog in NBA history, one that will be a familiar one to those steeped in Clark lore (and hyperbole): Michael Jordan.
In Jordan’s rookie season, he took the NBA by storm, instantly becoming the face of the league, much to the chagrin of established stars like Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, and Isiah Thomas, who all resented the publicity the flashy, charismatic phenom generated. (NBA players were accused of being too physical toward Jordan back then as well.)
Jordan came into his sophomore season expected to reach even higher peaks … and then broke his foot in the third game of the season, causing him to miss the next 64 games. The league, already elevated because of Jordan’s presence, upped its game without him. It was perhaps Bird’s best team and his last title. The All-Star team featured Bird, Magic, Thomas, Dominique Wilkins and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar (five of perhaps the 20 most decorated players in NBA history), and it was the year the Knicks drafted Patrick Ewing. And the league still got to welcome Jordan back for the playoffs, where he famously scored 63 points against Bird’s Celtics, inspiring Bird to say, “if he scores 63 against me again, I’ll retire.” That game is one of the most famous of Jordan’s life, part of his origin story, and it happened during the worst year of his career, during a season when more eyes were on the NBA than ever before — because of him, but not on him.
This can be that season for both Clark and the WNBA: The year the league was able to show off its greatness while its breakthrough star was mostly sidelined, then able to return just in time for it all to come together. (And just in time to maximize player leverage in negotiations.) Caitlin Clark and the WNBA are going to grow together — rapidly, exponentially — for years, perhaps decades to come. This is just a small, early, but pivotal chapter in that journey. This is just beginning.
Sign Up for the Intelligencer Newsletter
Daily news about the politics, business, and technology shaping our world.
Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice