According to Basketball Reference, Clark last year wasn’t even close to being one of the ten best players in the league by any measure of overall value. So I guess it depends what you mean by “skills.”
Her quickness, passing vision and shooting ability are generational, yes. She also set a record for turnovers that blew the old record away by miles and miles, she is an inefficient shooter, and she’s not a strong defensive player yet. She is not yet one of the league’s best players.
Unquestionably yes. This point can’t even be seriously debated. It is not confirmation bias.
It’s maybe 25% the talent, 75% everything else. She’s not getting roughed up as a Jordan Rules kind of thing, many of the fouls are happening when the games are already decided. Most of these fouls aren’t “body blows” hoping to wear her down or change her play style. This is not gamesmanship, it’s animosity. If you told me there was some secret bounty program happening between players on Signal or something I’d 100% believe it.
Egregiously, yes. I don’t seriously believe that it’s incompetence. I think the league is complict. I think they fear that being perceived as “helping” Clark would create cripling blowback from the rest of the league. If they called all the fouls they should - she’d be scoring 20-25 points a game just from the line. While they definitly have a desire to protect their star, they have to cater to the players too. And let’s face it, with Clark becoming a MAGA totem, the league may not be eager to throw themselves into that mess by protecting her.
Why try to reason why MAGA does anything? Trump tweets some shit and they react. It’s not sophisticated. Do we think any of the mouthbreathers in the comments are actually watching WNBA games? No. This is just an opportunity to race bait. And let’s be frank, the attacks on her probably ARE racist as hell, so MAGA can actually spout their shit from a perceived moral high ground. It sucks when terrible people happen to be right about something. But at the end of the day, they aren’t there to defend their own, they are there solely to pick a fight and make a lot of noise.
Blacks and non-gender conforming women is probably more to the point. I don’t think the average MAGA cares about the lesbians so much, but a woman in a suit triggers the hell out of them.
I disagree. In no other context would we argue that a person’s actions aren’t racist becase they were inflicted on one person in a group and not agaisnt every person in that group they encountered. Make that spurious argument in another race thread on the Dope and you’ll almost certainly get dragged to the Pit.
I don’t think her sexuality is at play at all here - at least on the court; in MAGA circles, different story - but this looks very much like racially charged bullying. It’s not universally one thing or another, nothing really is. She’s been flagrantly fouled by white players - setting aside the fact that people can be racist against their own people - some of the fouls are colored by jealousy, some by insecurity, whatever. But I think you’d have to be wilfully blind to claim that there’s minimal racism in this. You can be jealous and racist; you can be angry and racist.
Clark is the figurehead. And MAGA adopting her makes it worse. If you’re a black player who feels like you’re getting the short end, you’re not going to lash out at some random player. You’re going after the big star with all the money, the big star who’s smaller than almost everyone else, the big star who can’t really afford to fight back, and the big star who’s white and from middle America and hasn’t had any of your adversity. And after you do it, you’re going to get dapped up by your team. You’re going to get memed. You’re going to be on ESPN. And the assholes on the right will get all pissed off and the assholes on the left will sing your praises. The point is, everyone will have their reasons, but if you think her color combined with the current state of politics in this country aren’t a super common one…c’mon.
I think it started a while before that. There wasn’t a single light switch moment, she was a regular feature on late night Sportscenter during her Sophomore year for making Steph Curry-like shots from the Logo on the regular. She carried Iowa to the NCAA title game and was a monster in that tournament. While her name recognition has grown steadily, she was very well known long before the record.
I think a lot of the blowback is because she’s been getting non-stop hype since she was a Frehsman and largely oversahdowed UConn, South Carolina and LSU’s championships. You can bet those coaches, especially Geno, had been talking shit about her in the locker room every week. The alumni in the league are hearing that too. Women’s basketball is a small circle.
No, it probably depends on what you mean by “vastly.”
This was more or less the reasoning my 9th-grade gym teacher used: “If I called every foul, this would be nothing but a free-throw competition”. And it was bull when he said it, too. If the refs called all of the fouls they should, then there would be fewer fouls.
I just eyeballed it, but here are the figures. It’s true that the raw number of viewers was always higher for the Stanley Cup Finals, but that’s comparing 5-7 games to only 3. Looking at the averages:
2022, NCAA ratings averaged 1.6, final was 2.7. SCF average was 2.3, highest 2.9.
2021, NCAA average 1.5, final 4.1. SCF average 1.3, highest 1.9.
2019, NCAA average 1.5, final 3.7. SCF average 3.0, highest 4.9.
(Not counting 2020 because the NCAA was cancelled*, FTR SCF average 1.1, highest 1.7.)
So my statement has to be narrowed to “in all three immediate pre-Clark years in which both competitions were held, the women’s Final drew more viewers than the average Stanley Cup finals match”. In only one of those three years did the NCAA have higher ratings for both the average game and the most-watched game. However, for the three-year period as a whole, the women’s Final drew more viewers than the highest-rated SCF game of each year.
We would certainly argue that the evidence they WERE racist was rather lacking, if you couldn’t actually produce any evidence beyond “that’s just how things are in America nowadays.”
So your contention is that we can’t presume racism for any bad activity unless the offender openly announces their reasoning? That’ll definitely fly.
It’s more like… If someone never says a bad thing about any Black person except Mike Tyson, and seems fine with every other Black person they interact with or talk about, while that doesn’t disprove that they’re racist, it seems like there’s insufficient evidence to establish it.
That seems reasonable to say. And similarly, if Caitlin Clark is being singled out unlike other white players in the WNBA, it seems like it’s spurious to claim it’s due to racism because she happens to be white.
There are ways to determine a person is racist aside from (1) they were mean to one person of a specific race and (2) they openly declare it. I think narrowing it down to those two potential criteria is unnecessarily limiting.
(bolding mine)
Why include 2021 and 2022? Those were two of the four Clark years. She scored the most points in D1 all four years she played, which were from the 2020-2021 season to the 2023-2024 season, according to her stats here:
Because Clark’s team wasn’t IN the Final Four in her first two years, of course. I’m not going to redo the math, but the ratings for 2018 and 2017 were in the same general neighborhood.
The whole point of the hype surrounding her is that she is the tide that raises all boats. Her presence in college increased interest in the sport in general, which led to increased viewership even when her team didn’t make the final four.
Of course you won’t bother. Because then you’d have to include the Stanley Cup Finals ratings for those years, which were much higher.
Here’s the viewership in millions of viewers for the three years before Caitlin Clark:
| Year | WF4 Avg | High | SCF Avg | High |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 2.438 | 3.689 | 5.333 | 8.723 |
| 2018 | 2.442 | 3.536 | 4.786 | 6.588 |
| 2017 | 2.722 | 3.827 | 4.668 | 6.985 |
This is why your original claim struck me as absurd on its face:
But then again, if “more TV viewers” means “barely over half the viewers”, then sure.
Wow, there really is no limit to the amount of nits you’ll pick to avoid having to admit that what you said was stupid, misogynistic, and wrong, is there?
If your point is that nobody cared about women’s basketball before Clark came along, then you need to compare the ratings for the tournaments before she came along to the ratings while she was playing, but not in the Final Four. And I have demonstrated that there was no dramatic increase during those two years; the dramatic increase only came once Clark was actually playing in the Final Four.
All your last post did is demonstrate that the NHL was apparently more popular in the last decade than it is now. I don’t know or care anything about hockey, so I don’t know why their ratings have crashed in the last few years. Maybe everyone is watching women’s basketball instead.
never mind
Clearly. Maybe don’t march in with pronouncements involving comparisons to hockey, then.
Your pathetic goalpost moving only makes you look like even more of an idiot, dude. First, yoy said that women’s basketball was “a nothing sport with zero fans”. I proved that wasn’t true, and then you said “oh, what I really meant is that it wasn’t popular before Caitlin Clark”. I proved that wasn’t true, and then you decided that, although I’d proved that women’s college basketball is actually as popular as the NHL, what was REALLY important is that that wasn’t true eight years ago! Maybe you should just learn to STFU when grown-ups are talking, rather than going so far out of your way to embarrass yourself.
I’m out.
[Moderating]
This is a personal attack, and therefore, this is a Warning.
It was obviously what I really meant because I clearly stated exactly that. Let’s go to the videotape:
I submit that there’s no way any reasonable person could read that and interpret it any other way. Obviously I was talking about previous to Clark. You can tell because of how I explicitly stated it.
During a carefully cherry-picked sampling when NHL ratings happened to be at all-time, historic lows. Not to mention the fact that even in good times, NHL ratings don’t really qualify it to be considered one of the “big four” sports in the US. But that’s another topic.
But sure, in your mind, before Caitlin Clark NCAA women’s basketball was a very popular sport. That’s why there’s always been so many threads here in the game room devoted to the topic.
Go peddle your white knight accusations of misogyny somewhere else. Reality does not agree with your take.
\You can presume anything, but there is a lack of evidence to support this specific presumption.
As an example of how ridiculous some of the outrage around Caitlin Clark has gotten, I saw a short on YouTube about how a bunch of people are angry that some less-qualified player was chosen over Clark for the WNBA All Star Game. Clark is captain of the Eastern Conference team. Not only was no one chosen over her, but she’s been given a place of honor.