Packed houses and superstars have made this a WNBA season unlike any other | WNBA

As the NFL’s Colts clashed with the Packers in Wisconsin last Sunday, downtown Indianapolis was alive – but not because of football. Half a mile up the road from the Colts’ empty stadium, Gainbridge Fieldhouse was filled to near capacity for the WNBA matinee between the Dallas Wings and Caitlin Clark’s Indiana Fever. The game did not disappoint.

Clark, this year’s No 1 draft pick, scored a career-high 35 points to set the single-season rookie scoring record, and her free throws down the stretch helped preserve a 110-109 victory that locked Indiana into the playoff’s sixth seed. The prospect of basketball turning out the masses on a football Sunday isn’t a new concept in the Hoosier state, where the local NBA and men’s college programs reigned before the Colts rocked up from Baltimore under cover of darkness. But the WNBA’s hold on this crowd is new, and a testament to what has been a regular season unlike any other – with new faces and dominant figures pushing the league to new heights.

At every turn, it seems, the league shows that women’s professional basketball has hit the big time. The TV ratings have gone gangbusters. ION, which only began broadcasting WNBA games last year, saw viewership for its 43-game season slate more than double to 23m viewers – and those figures don’t include Thursday night’s games, before the postseason tips off on Sunday. Half that audience was women aged 18 through 49, the demographic most coveted by advertisers. Meanwhile, individual teams set attendance records. “EVERYONE WATCHES WOMEN’S SPORTS,” the gymnast Simone Biles tweeted while taking in a Fever game with track star Gabby Thomas after their gilded runs through the Olympics. “My first of many WNBA games.”

Of course, much of this explosive interest in the league comes down to one woman – Clark, the most consequential player women’s basketball has yet known. After a rocky start to the season that saw her become a sympathy cause for casual fans who were desperate for her to succeed, the Fever guard came roaring back after the WNBA’s Olympic break, smashing a haul of offensive records on the way to lifting Indiana to the team’s first playoff berth in eight years – the game last Sunday underscoring the end of the league’s second-longest ever playoff drought. All the while, she effectively tipped the W into sanctioning chartered flights, made the market for a $2.2bn media rights deal and brought untold additional value to the three new teams joining the league over the next two years. Not since Biles has one woman figured so prominently in a single sport’s run of good fortune.

Even though Clark remains the main attraction in women’s pro basketball, she is hardly a one-woman show. Minnesota’s Napheesa Collier has been on a tear, averaging over 21 points over the past 14 games to lift the Lynx into the second seed. In year 15, Connecticut’s DeWanna Bonner is still going strong, pacing the 2023 semi-finalists in scoring alongside sharpshooter Marina Mabrey, who arrived via a mid-season trade with Chicago for Connecticut’s playoff push this year. Sangfroid slashers Kahleah Copper and Natasha Cloud have kept Phoenix in the hunt, while scoring dynamo Jewell Loyd and former league MVP Nneka Ogwumike powered Seattle back into the playoffs after the Storm missed the cut last year. What’s more, the show could well end with Breanna Stewart winning her first title with the New York Liberty, the league’s best team in the regular season.

For most of this season, it was fair to wonder if Clark might wind up sharing top rookie honors with Angel Reese, her college rival picked six spots later by the Chicago Sky. Like Clark, Reese shouldered her team’s playoff hopes while also setting the league record for rebounding. When Reese wasn’t furthering her Bird-Magic rivalry with Clark and stoking black-and-white debates on social media, she was making an equally strong impression off the court as a brand ambassador and fashion icon – a double dip few have pulled off effectively since Lisa Leslie’s mainstream crossover at the turn of the century.

After both rookies were overlooked for the US women’s Olympic team, Clark and Reese teamed up for an All-Star showcase against the Paris-bound squad and beat the golden girls, 117-109. That game – the first ever to feature Clark and Reese on the same side, and include two WNBA rookies – had nearly 4m viewers tuned into ABC; that audience was three times larger than the one that tuned in for the benchmark-setting WNBA All-Star game in 2003. If Reese didn’t suffer a season-ending wrist injury earlier this month, she probably would have held on to the league rebounding record, which included a streak of 15 straight double-doubles. “All I have ever wanted was to come into the W and make an impact,” she wrote in a celebratory post. “I can confidently say I have done that and will strive to keep doing so.”

In the end she was topped by the Las Vegas Aces’ A’ja Wilson, the player after whom Reese patterned herself – down to the one-legged sleeve she wears on court. “These rookies have put on quite a season,” WNBA commissioner Cathy Engelbert said in a recent CNBC appearance that was quickly overshadowed by her failure to condemn the abusive online rhetoric that the players have faced in light of the league’s popularity surge. “People have been calling [the WNBA] a growth stock. We have a lot of upside.”

The league’s MVP favorite over Clark, who only played herself into contention over the second half of the season, Wilson leapfrogged Reese in the rebound column earlier this week, stoking talk of bad blood when she marked the moment by saying she doesn’t ”hunt for rebounds” – an accusation that Reese has faced all year. What’s more, Wilson upstaged Reese days after becoming the first WNBA player to crack 1,000 points in a single season; that was enough to guarantee Wilson history’s highest single-season scoring average as well.

Altogether, Wilson has been a force on the court, almost single-handedly willing Team USA to gold in a taut Olympic final against France. Before that, she kept the Aces’ three-peat title hopes alive as the team muddled through the first half of the season without All-Star guard Chelsea Gray. Because of that rough start, the defending champions will be seeded lower than usual for the playoffs. And no underdog in the bracket looks meaner than sixth-seeded Indiana, even though Las Vegas swept their four-game series.

Lying in wait for all comers are top-seeded Liberty, keen to avenge their loss to Las Vegas in last year’s championship. Stewart was a force once again and could have repeated as league MVP this year if she hadn’t dialed her game back to make space for teammates like Sabrina Ionescu, who neared a career high in scoring average even as her shooting percentages fell. The adjustment netted a second straight 30-win season for a Liberty team that has become a New York scene unto itself – with single tri-staters crossing rivers to mingle at the Barclays Center and watch Ellie the Elephant, the best mascot in the business, do her thing.

Historically, the WNBA playoffs competing with the NFL has been a worry for supporters of women’s basketball. But after the year the W just had, there’s no doubt that fans will be watching in droves – especially if Clark hangs around to keep things interesting.