How the Fever Star Shifted the WNBA Landscape

This excerpt from Becoming Caitlin Clark: The Unknown Origin Story of a Modern Basketball Superstar by Howard Megdal is reprinted with the permission of Triumph Books. For more information and to order a copy, please visit TriumphBooks.com/BecomingCaitlinClark.

Caitlin Clark broke women’s basketball. In the best possible way here. But also, in ways that are deeply confounding to Clark and those around here. Because Sheila Johnson, co-owner of the WNBA’s Washington Mystics, appeared on CNN and slammed Time Magazine for featuring Caitlin Clark as its athlete of the year. No, really. That happened. 

“We read Time Magazine where Caitlin Clark was named Athlete of the Year,” Johnson said on Dec. 13. “Why couldn’t they have put the whole WNBA on that cover and said the WNBA is the League of the Year because of all the talent that we have? Because when you just keep singling out one player, it creates hard feelings.” 

Where to start? This is, of course, sports. There are winners and losers every year, every day, in individual awards, in team accolades. The concept of fairness dictating any man in sports history being honored as Athlete of the Year simply would not be a matter of even basic debate. But this is part of the calibration problem — there have been, as Johnson correctly noted, “so many talented players who have been unrecognized.” There have been, as Risa Isard and Nicole Melton documented in their landmark September 2021 study of race in WNBA coverage by ESPN, CBS Sports, Sports Illustrated and as exhibited in WNBA team and league press releases, a disproportionate number of stories about white players compared to the majority Black makeup of the league during the 2020 season. 

That study did not, however, include Caitlin Clark, nor does it even study the time period in which Clark has been playing college basketball or in the WNBA. It speaks to a truth that is absolutely accepted by a broad base of experts on the subject — that the WNBA’s best players have been undercovered historically, and that overwhelmingly the WNBA’s best players, just as a majority of all its players, have been Black. 

Simple reasoning has been assigned in so many of the loudest, least-illuminating conversations about exactly why Caitlin Clark is so prominent in the larger American sports culture now, and what it means about both what came before her and the future of women’s basketball. The more singular the explanation, the less useful it is. Even worse are the simple motivations assigned to those on both sides of this discussion — for reference, a significant number of people, particularly those with the most invested in the space, such as players, coaches and executives, don’t even view this discussion as one with “opposing sides.” 

But for many of the harshest critics of Clark, it was easy to hear the undercurrent of fear, that the full appreciation for the women’s game had come too late for them, the money which follows such fandom simply not trickling down into the sport’s remarkable and compelling past. The WNBA has existed as a safe space for marginalized people for nearly three decades because broader American culture so often ignored it. That tradeoff is felt in ways, large and small, that fill the league’s players, coaches, executives and long-tenured fans with ambivalence. Everyone with a stake in the league’s success is living in that gray area, and not only is the money too good to approach it any other way, with it the chance to finally see what a fully-vested WNBA looks like, but the momentum is so overwhelming the league and its stakeholders couldn’t stop this train if they wished to do so. 

And for the countless, often anonymous newcomers to the women’s basketball space who saw Clark being tested like all rookies but only clocked it through the race of the players in the majority Black league doing it, discounting all the incredible stories and women who created the scaffolding of possibility for Caitlin Clark engendered bitterness, fear and anger. And everyone involved in this oversimplification suffered from a failure not just of understanding the racial, gender, historical and competitive context, but so often a failure to understanding that when Caitlin Clark had opened these doors to the broader audience, it represented a chance for others to follow. Caitlin Clark did it first, but is doing it in a way that is precisely designed for the opposite of Clark existing as a one-off phenomenon. She is a beginning, not a culmination. And none of this means that Caitlin Clark is being overcovered now. If it is true that Sue Bird, for instance, received disparate media coverage relative to her greatness, or compared to, say, Sylvia Fowles — the former I’d argue is debatable, the latter is not, with the final seasons of the league’s best-ever point guard in Bird and best-ever center in Fowles receiving deeply unequal treatment across television broadcasts and column inches alike — it did not lead to, in the case of Fowles or Bird, the kind of dramatic leaps in audience we have seen from Caitlin Clark in 2024. 

Clark is different. And there is no counterfactual in the current game: we cannot know what would have happened if Caitlin Clark, but Black, had built her fan base and audience at Iowa, then taken her precision passing and 30-footers to the WNBA. 

But we do have a historical comp. 

Frequently, the comparison is made between Clark and her rivalry with Angel Reese and the elevation of the NBA during Magic Johnson and Larry Bird’s ascension from college basketball to the pros. After all, more than 35 million people watched the Michigan State-Indiana State national championship game in 1979 featuring the two stars, and the NBA reached a dramatic new level of popularity by the end of their careers. 

The problem is that, unlike with Clark, it didn’t happen anything like right away. (There are other problems with this comparison, too: Magic and Bird were both immediate stars of contending teams, Bird’s Celtics winning 61 games, Magic’s Lakers winning it all, while Reese’s stardom did not translate into a playoff appearance for the Chicago Sky.) 

The NBA Finals remained on tape-delay broadcast several seasons into both of their pro careers — the clinching win by Johnson’s Lakers in the 1980 NBA Finals was preempted by many CBS Network affiliates in favor of The Incredible Hulk, The Dukes of Hazzard and Dallas. By 1984, CBS showed just ten NBA games, nationally, all regular season long. But the actual comp here for Clark also entered the league in 1984, coinciding with TBS purchasing the rights to a national TV cable package: Michael Jordan. 

Within two years, a dramatic expansion of games, even the slam dunk contest — biggest attraction, Michael Jordan — helped a rising tide of NBA ratings, Jordan’s Bulls helping to lead the way, not quite by as much of a lead over the Celtics, Lakers and other teams as Clark just experienced, but notable just the same. To this day, the four most-watched NBA Finals of all time took place in the 1990s, and all featured Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. Those ratings fell after Jordan retired, only starting to approach them once more when LeBron James reached the apex of his rivalry with Steph Curry in 2016 and 2017. James was honored with the Time 2020 Athlete of the Year. The apex of these viewership trends correlate not to a generic rising tide. It is when deeply compelling stars make games must-watch. That is the company Clark finds herself in after a single season. The audience tells us so.

Time has only been naming an Athlete of the Year since 2019, but Sports Illustrated has honored someone in this way since 1954. In 1991? It was Michael Jordan. If there are any contemporaneous accounts of anyone suggesting the entire NBA should have received the award instead of Jordan in 1991 or James in 2020, I was unable to find them. I’d further note that when Sheila Johnson’s Mystics won the WNBA title in 2019, playing home games in a sold-out but entirely-too-small 4,200-seat Entertainment and Sports Arena, she celebrated her team with, among other things, a massive championship ring. Only the Mystics, the team that won the title, received this ring. Not the entire WNBA. And in 2024, the Mystics moved four home games from ESA to Capital One Arena, where the NBA’s Washington Wizards play. One of those games, with Angel Reese’s Chicago Sky, drew 10,000 fans. Another, with Diana Taurasi and Brittney Griner’s Phoenix Mercury, drew 12,586. The other two, against Caitlin Clark and the Fever, drew 20,333 and 20,711. Put another way: Clark’s two visits to play the Mystics in 2024 drew 41,044 fans, almost half of what Washington’s entire 2023 home slate drew: 87,813 fans. 

“There were so many times where it felt like if a call was made against the other team, people were cheering, which typically in an away environment, you’re not getting positive feedback from the crowd,” Clark’s Fever teammate, Lexie Hull, told me. “But this year, that happened several places, so feel very fortunate about that.” 

But how does one reconcile it all? It’s complicated, and evaluating the ways in which race has held the league back and acting and appreciating the progress that has followed through that prism is not the same thing as pretending it isn’t happening at all or that the league as a whole is not benefiting from Caitlin Clark’s ability to maximize this moment made possible by pioneers in her home state and trailblazers in the WNBA alike. Knowing bad-faith actors have entered the WNBA space intent on using Caitlin Clark’s presence to attack Black women of the league while at the same time embracing how many new fans have arrived to love and appreciate her and so many others in the WNBA. And the extra pressure on her opponents, who are forced to simultaneously answer a disproportionate amount of questions about a player who isn’t even on their own team in most cases, who are competing at the demanding level asked of anyone in the WNBA, but if that effort leads to a foul deemed unnecessary by Clark’s vociferous fan base — with the ugliest manifestations of that passion curdled by racism — players were subjected to cruel, inhuman taunts, even death threats. 

Every bit of that discordant mix is something Caitlin Clark is hyper-aware of, the calm in this sea of madness, able to hold two disparate ideas in her head at the same time in ways that so many who are paid to analyze failed at verbalizing all year long, each of these failures from someone with a megaphone only further complicating the degree of difficulty for Clark, her teammates and her opponents alike, ratcheting up the tension further.