For those who haven’t seen the latest incident, here’s Jomboy Media on the series of fouls and retaliations involving Caitlin Clark, Sophie Cunningham, Jacy Sheldon, and Marina Mabrey:
IMO, the officiating in this sequence is horrible. It’s not just that Mabrey didn’t get called for a flagrant foul. She didn’t get called for foul at all. If the refs had done their jobs properly, the retaliation by Cunningham probably wouldn’t have happened at all.
So there are several issues here and I’m not sure it’s clear what people are addressing sometimes.
Is Caitlin Clark actually on the receiving end of dirty play / targeting by her opponents, or is it just an effect of media attention / confirmation bias, etc?
If she is, is it just because she’s talented or is there some reason people in the league are targeting her? I remember seeing a headline once from another player that said something to the effect of “I’m always going to hate girls like her” but I don’t care enough about the NBA to have looked into it, but now that it’s a thread here I am indeed a little curious.
Are the refs failing to protect her? Does the league have some reason not to protect its biggest star? Isn’t this basically like if the NFL let defensive players get away with dirty hits on Tom Brady all the time? That would never ever happen. It’s bizarre that the WNBA seems to be fine with people trying to injure their most popular player.
And I guess do right wingers rush to support her because they’ve decided for the above reasons that she’s the target of anti-white racism, ie a white girl in what’s perceived to be a non-white league is being allowed to come to harm as some sort of discouragement/retribution?
And, as I noted upthread, she’s a white straight woman in a league which is perceived by them to be full of Blacks and lesbians.
[quote=“SenorBeef, post:42, topic:1019942”]
Is Caitlin Clark actually on the receiving end of dirty play / targeting by her opponents, or is it just an effect of media attention / confirmation bias, etc?[/quote]
She absolutely is. As noted upthread there is some statistical support for this, but it’s visibly obvious
Thjere are several factors here. I’ll deal with the LESSER ones first:
The most significant issue though absolutely is her fame. Clark is the most famous woman basketball player of all time, despite the fact that she isn’t the best. Maybe she someday will be but she ain’t even close now. The best player in the world right now is A’Ja Wilson, a player ludicrously superior to Clark, whose litany of career accomplishments is stacked with MVP awards, All-Star selections, and championships, but I’d hazard a guess that while any WBNA fan knew who she was pre-Clark, now Clark is known to ten times as many people.
Clark has amazing skills and may someday be the WNBA’s best player but as it stands right now she’s not, and yet her fame is greater than the shared fame of the entire roster of last year’s WNBA champs. She probably makes more in personal endorsements than the rest of the LEAGUE. Imagine if an NHL player came along who had more popularity and fame instantly handed to him than anyone else in the history of the NHL, but instead of being the next Gretzky, he was just a pretty good, talented but erratic, left winger for a team that just scratched its way to a first-round playoff exit. Ya think that guy might be targeted for a lot of hits? He’d have to wear two helmets.
The issues of Clark being white and straight in a league that’s a little more gay than the general population and a lot more Black are, IMHO, bullshit. At the risk of pointing out the amazingly obvious, there are lots of white and straight WNBA players. We’ve discussed one of them IN THIS THREAD, Sophie Cunningham, but Cunningham has never been wildly fouled the way Clark has. This part of it is at least 98 percent right wing horseshit.
The WNBA refs and the league have done an absolute shit job, of that there is no doubt. I realize they cannot be seen as favouring Clark, but the fact a player deliberately clawed at Clark’s eyes and was not suspended is genuinely amazing.
Basketball refereeing struggles with fouls. It’s nearly impossible to get that right under most circumstances; whether a player committed a shooting foul is hard to get right in the moment. The NBA refs get it wrong all the time, and the WNBA isn’t getting refs of the same calibre. But the WNBA is failing in terms of followup discipline. And that’s why Indiana went and got themselves a goon.
Yes. Pretend victimization is very important to Trumpists.
So, if it isn’t because she’s the best, and it isn’t (entirely) because she’s white and straight, why does Clark get all the media attention? I mean, at some point, it becomes self-perpetuating, but how did it start?
AFAICT, it started in the spring of last year, when she was playing college ball, at Iowa. Late in her senior year, she became the all-time points leader in college basketball (for both women and men), surpassing Pete Maravich. I follow sports generally, but don’t follow basketball closely; it seems to me that that was the moment at which she really became nationally well-known, beyond basketball fandom.
Shortly thereafter, she was the #1 overall pick in the WNBA Draft, which was also surrounded with far more hoopla than that draft would usually garner. And, around that same time, she was not selected to be on the USA Women’s team for the 2024 Olympics, which also created a lot of media attention.
She also does things nobody else does on the court. She shoots from further away than anyone else in the game, the 3 point line is 22+ feet, and if she’s 5-10 feet behind the line, she’ll take the shot, and make it. A few games ago she made 7 three pointers from an average distance of 28 feet.
It’s the sort of shot that looks like what you’d do with 1 second left on the clock, but she does it all the time.
She also does a decent amount of fancy passing to go with the long range bombs. It’s fun to see.
FWIW, the WNBA is probably more than “a little more gay” than the general population.
There are 156 players on active rosters of WNBA teams (13 teams, 12 players on a team’s active roster). This LGBT website lists 42 openly lesbian players currently on WNBA rosters – that’s 27% of the total. Assuming that there are a few players on injured lists, but also that there are likely some players who are closeted, it’s probably safe to assume that more than a quarter of the league’s players are lesbians, or at least “non-straight.”
That said, it being an “issue” is, as you say, bullshit, except among homophobic conservative trolls.
I saw a video of her playing a high school boy. She would dribble, grab the ball with both hands, dribble, and repeat. She traveled on almost every drive. None of this was ever called. Then she lowered her shoulder and drove directly into his chest and they called a foul on him.
Clark is the most prolific scorer in NCAA basketball history, man or woman (the record she broke belonged to Pistol Pete Maravich, as a trivia aside) and was dominating it to an extraordinary degree, so she was super famous before being drafted into the WNBA. And as kenobi points out, she does what she does in eye popping fashion. Players who are fun to watch, who are different, are often famous out of proportion to their skills.
People still talk about Bo Jackson as a baseball player and the amazing physical feats he did. Thing is, Bo was a good major league player for a few years but he really wasn’t a great player, and would never have been one even had he not gotten hurt. He wasn’t even close to being the third bast player ever named “Jackson.” But he was different and fun to watch.
While I think SenorBeef did an excellent job of breaking down some of the reasons that Clark gets targeted so much. I do think he was a little harsh in calling her just a pretty good player. She broke the WNBA records for assists in a single game and an entire season as a rookie and came within 3 of breaking the record for 3 pointers in a season. She also broke the rookie records for points, assists, 3 pointers, and tripple doubles. She also finished in the top 5 of MVP. He is absolutely right that she wasn’t the best player but she was in the conversation for among the best players.
As for answering your question, I would say it depends on if you mean the general populous or basketball\sports fans. If general I agree with Kenobi that it was her senior year of college. If you mean sports fans I would go further. She was the best female basketball player from her Sophomore year on. But her Junior year is where I would place it as that year the crowds attending her games started getting significantly larger than those attending any other game. Both when playing at home and when playing on the road.
She is an extremely fun player to watch as she combines incredible shooting range of Stephan Curry with the passing of a Magic Johnson.
Actually, that was Cheesesteak. 
One thing that hasn’t been mentioned is jealousy.
The (generally deserved) hype around Clark in college massively boosted interest in college women’s basketball. Previously an utterly nothing sport with zero fans, all of a sudden people were so interested that you’d see SportsCenter covering it in the top of the A block. All (and only!) because of Clark.
The talk during the draft was would she bring the eyeballs to the WNBA like she did college? The answer turned out to be yes. Yes she did. The first clue of the Caitlin Clark effect is that there was talk during the draft at all. Nobody talked about the WNBA draft before Clark was in the draft pool.
I kind of don’t have the energy to link cites, but the AI slop at the top of a Google search along the lines of “did Caitlin Clark increase WNBA ratings” gives a bunch of stats about how the ratings of her draft, broadcasts of her team’s games and the league in general are way up.
Additionally, Clark’s college days coincided with NCAA allowing athletes to cash in on endorsements. People were saying she should stay in college just to make money, as she was making $900k per year in NIL money. (Name/Image/Likeness.) The average WNBA salary at the time was a little over $100k. (Clark’s rookie contract pays her 78k this year.)
So imagine you’re a long time veteran of the WNBA. Your skills are vastly superior to Clark’s, who is still very green. (Sort of like The Brian Scalabrine challenge, or “Scallenge”.) In your mind she’s basically riding a wave of white savior hype while earning in college more than everyone on your entire professional team combined. She joins your league, and while she far from dominates in terms of play, she is the only reason anybody tunes in. The urge to “put her in her place” is probably pretty strong.
I mean, I get it. It reminds me of the Chris Rock line about OJ: “I’m not saying he should have done it, but I understand.”
EDIT: Also working against her is that she’s a point guard. Point guards aren’t usually top of the conversation during “who’s the greatest of all time” debates. It’s more of a supporting role.
There are maybe 5 or 10 people in the WNBA who’s skills are vastly superior to Clark’s…but leaving that aside, I think this is a large portion of what has people annoyed with the WNBA and it’s players. Because the jealousy is understandable, but the behavior is rock-stupid. Sure, be jealous… and keep it to yourself while you enjoy the league being dragged to relevance, every attendance record being broken, every viewership record being broken, and your salary on the cusp of exponential increase. Oh, and if your thinking about committing some hard fouls, remember that if Clark gets hurt, league viewership goes down 50%.
After decades of unprofitability and general disinterest from the public, the WNBA finally has interest and a true household name. They need to woo Clark fans into becoming WNBA fans, and fans of other WNBA players, and attacking Clark and her fans does not do that.
That sounds like something I might have done as a little kid in the driveway shooting hoops with my older siblings. I can’t beat your defense so I’ll just shoot from way far out, before a reasonable defense would engage.
This tendency probably contributes to her low 3-point percentage. Let’s just say her 3-point shooting % isn’t exactly top 10 in the league. Or even top 25.
This part was pounced on in rightwing media. My dad, who couldn’t give a shit about women’s sports but watches Fox 24/7, was irate. The claim was that the woke WNBA hates straight white women (or wants to appease their fanbase that hates straight white women) and that’s why she was left off. Just a part of the larger culture war.
This is 99% of it. I feel bad for Caitlin because she’s a great talent, but she will forever be part of a wedge being driven by the conservative media.
Why do you feel compelled to insult fans of women’s basketball? Nearly five million people watched the last NCAA Final without Clark in it, and WNBA Finals ratings have increased in each of the last five years. 350,000 people attended NCAA women’s tournament games last year, and those numbers weren’t significantly up from the pre-Clark era. In the three years before Clark, the women’s Final Four drew more TV viewers on average than the Stanley Cup Finals. Would you describe the NHL as a “nothing sport with zero fans”?
Angel Reese isn’t the best player in the WNBA, but she is the best rebounder, and it’s not even close. She also has the league record for consecutive double-doubles. Aside from all of that, she’s not a terrible shooter, with a FG% rate of 40.6 for this season. Clark, in comparison, is only 39%.
This sounds made up. Got any cites? A quick google of just 2019 is giving 2.475 million viewers for the NCAA Women’s Final Four compared to 5.34 million for the 2019 Stanley Cup finals.