Caitlin Clark Has Ruined Women’s Basketball (In a Good Way)

There isn’t a nice way a way to say this, so I will just say it: Caitlin Clark has made people stupid. Perhaps even you, random person on the internet. I don’t know you, but there is still a non-zero chance she has made you stupid. Even if she hasn’t made you stupid, she has made an awful lot of people stupid.

If you don’t know who Caitlin Clark is, well, I’m confused as to why you are reading a clickbait-titled article about her on some random blog. As it stands, Caitlin Clark is a WNBA rookie and very good basketball player. She smashed loads of records in college. She is a prodigious shooter, transcendent passer, stout rebounder (for a guard), and somewhat spotty defender who turns the ball over too much. But the reason Caitlin Clark has made people stupid isn’t explicitly because of her skills on the basketball court.

Caitlin Clark has made people stupid because she has gotten a whole lot of people to start caring about women’s basketball that have never before given even a half-a-shit about the sport. Regardless of any assessment of how well she does or does not play basketball, it is irrefutable that when Caitlin Clark plays basketball, she induces a lot of people to watch. This is one of those assertions that I don’t think needs a lot of evidentiary support. Look at tickets sales, merchandise, ratings…whatever. People show out to watch Caitlin Clark, both in person and on the T.V. (My 70-year-old mother who has never cared about sports purchased a Youtube T.V. subscription for the first time to watch Caitlin play.) Almost every discussion about Caitlin Clark is a discussion because of or about that attention.

Because that attention has absolutely transformed the Media ecosystem around the WNBA. For the longest time, save for a relatively small number of diehards, there was not enough of a following for the WNBA to warrant meaningful coverage in the Media writ large. Certainly the WNBA was the occasional punchline for its lack of viewership or used as a bellwether of men’s sexism, but there just wasn’t that much cultural juice to squeeze. There simply weren’t enough people that cared.

Not anymore. The WNBA, and more specifically Caitlin Clark, have reached cultural escape velocity. There are dollar bills to be made churning out takes, reactions, narratives, counter narratives about everything and anything within and around the WNBA and Caitlin Clark. And anybody that can make a dollar bill will, from ESPN, to Fox News, to CNN, to a bazillion other media outlets, Twitter trolls, and yes, anonymous bloggers. So please understand, when I describe media, I am referring to quite literally everyone and everything that makes a living by competing for your eyeballs.

Let’s start by talking about “legacy” sports media, the folks that should be talking about Caitlin Clark and the WNBA. The weird thing about sports media is that they don’t talk about sports, really. I know that sounds like bunk, but it isn’t. A typical basketball game might last all of two hours. If you watched the game, it isn’t that hard to figure out why one team lost and one team one. And even if you didn’t watch the game, the results come down to some banal math:

Team A shot the ball 55 times at X percentage and Team B shot the ball 59 times at Y percentage, thus team A had more points and won the game. You can use other numbers to provide some context, like rebounds and turnovers. You can extrapolate from there and talk about defensive formations, shot selection, substitution patterns, tempo, or anything else to flush out how the game went. All that stuff is fair game, but for most folks this kind of analysis has the appeal of no-sodium saltines.

Because most people don’t actually consume sports media like that. With all due respect to my fellow nerds, deconstructing sports does not have all that much mass appeal. This is true with most things, really. People don’t overtly care about time signatures and key changes, they just want to listen to music. People don’t overtly care about editing and color grading. They just want to watch movies. How it is made is irrelevant. People just want to eat sausage.

But to continue the metaphor, sports media doesn’t just want you to eat, they want you excited for the next meal and ruminating on the food long after you have eaten it. Take someone like Stephen A. Smith or Skip Bayless. These dudes have made millions of dollars covering sports not because they are providing nuanced insights into how the games are played. Instead, they escalate the stakes and significance of each game before and after it is played by tapping into the real reasons people watch sports: identity, tribalism, a deep-seated desire to be right and the joy of watching other people be wrong, all drapped in Joseph Campbell’s “Hero with a Thousand Faces.”

Think about any claim made by any talking-head dingus ever. It was almost certainly an ad-hoc explanation that was impossible to substantiate. Or grandiose table-setting. Or a lazy bombastic prediction based off of cherry-picked data or some broad, inscrutable narrative, yet delivered with the confidence of Gospel preacher. Being right or fair or intellectually honest is not where the financial incentives are. The money is made in riling people up. And people will watch games, solely or in part, to see their beliefs validated and to see other people wrestle with cognitive dissonance. The mechanics of the game for whole sloths

Case-in-point, what is the biggest storyline in the WNBA? It isn’t whether A’ja Wilson can lead the Las Vegas Aces to the WNBA’s first three-peat since Houston did it in the late 90s. Or if the Connecticut Sun and New York Liberty can end the Aces’ reign for their respective first championship. The biggest storyline is whether Angel Reese or Caitlin Clark will win Rookie of the Year.

Despite both Chicago and Indiana being low-end playoff teams that don’t have realistic shots at winning the WNBA championship, these are the games and players that get the most social-media buzz and viewership, as people fret over Clark and Reese’s statlines to justify a whole host of beliefs that have little to do with basketball. If you scroll the intellectual wastelands of Twitter, you can find versions of each of these claims all over the place:

People love Caitlin Clark because she is white.
People love Angel Reese because she is black.
People hate Caitlin Clark because she is white.
People hate Angel Reese because she is black.

Depending on which of these claims a person finds most appealing, they will gobble up anything and everything that reinforces that belief and disregard anything that doesn’t, until the discourse has devolved into a bunch of 8-year-olds saying “Nuh uh, I’m not racist, you’re racist!” So divorced from basketball are these claims that both sides of the culture-war crowd regularly weigh-in on the supposed injustices experienced by Clark and Reese, with results that tickle their engagement-loving fancy. Instead of basketball players, Clark and Reese have become ciphers for race relations in America.

It of course goes without saying that there are oodles of actual racists and other deranged lunatics on the internet. (On this front, I don’t doubt that Angel Reese gets a lot more vitriol directed at her.) Generally-speaking, applying the racist label isn’t conducive to much of anything save the gratification of the person that applied it. But more importantly, none of this is fair to either Clark or Reese. In terms of media interactions, Caitlin Clark is aggressively boring. You could, I suppose, criticize Clark for not being overtly political, but I’m not sure who Clark being more political genuinely helps. Angel Reese is less boring, but her only “sin” is that she tried to block Clark’s shot once but missed and hit Clark’s head instead. And if it’s true that Angel Reese has been jealous of the coverage Clark gets at times, so what? I’m jealous of both Clark and Reese, and I’m a schluby, unathletic middle-aged white dude. It would really irritate me to be as good at basketball as Reese is and having people constantly down-playing my skills because I am forever linked to Caitlin Clark.

All of this is……a bit much. I can emphasize with all the WNBA hipsters out there in the ether, grappling with this change. For most of its existence, the WNBA has been a cute little bistro in a quiet part of town. They had incredible scones. The prices were great, and everybody there was very nice. It was all extremely pleasant.

Now the tourists have found out about the place. A lot of them are loud, obnoxious and inconsiderate or worse. The price of those scones went up. It got a lot harder to get a table. It is decidedly less pleasant than it used to be. The vibes are OFF.

But the flip-side is that that the little bistro no longer has to run at a loss. They are remodeling and the workers are all heading towards higher wages. And scones? They are even better now and more people get to enjoy them.

All this nonsense is the price for hitting the big-time. You simply can’t scale-up a sports league without attracting grifters, assholes, trolls and weirdos, like mosquitoes at a bloodbank. Not a game is played in the NFL that doesn’t result in wingnuts bemoaning the obvious conspiracy against their favorite team by Roger Goodell. And centering your personality around defending your favorite basketball player online has been a thing since at least as long as Twitter has existed.

As annoying as it is, intractable, unrelenting conversations are a feature of big-time sports, not a bug. Maybe if Caitlin Clark never came along, the WNBA would have continued its steady and modest growth, sans all the screeching. But that isn’t the way things went. I for one am pumped every time I hear the screams of the crowds at WNBA games, even if I’m not a fan of some of the people doing the screaming.

-B.S. Lewis

If you like something I wrote and want to send some cheddar my way:

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/bensewardlX

(It is appreciated but absolutely not expected.)

Following me on Twitter is not necessary but appreciated too: https://twitter.com/BenSewardLewis

And if you just want to tell me I’m awful or wrong, I’m cool with that too.