Day 1143 – Women’s Basketball

Sunday, June 16, 2024

How many players can you name in the WNBA?

If you watch sports at all I’ll bet you can name two – by name, and maybe a few others by description:

Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. The rest are “pigtail girl,” the big woman from South Carolina who entered the WNBA the year before Caitlin and has long hair down her back, and a few with wacky apostrophized names. Oh, and what’s her name that was held by the Russians. Maybe, three names.

Caitlin has been getting knocked down and beat up. Some say it’s welcome to the pros and that she’ll have to get stronger and or her team needs an enforcer, or that Clark needs to start throwing some elbows. The other comments ask if the refs are blind. I mean a player comes over after a basket is scored and hip checks Clark to the floor and nothing is called?

We say Clark play in person when Iowas took on Virginia Tech. Clark seemed a bit of a bully and whiney in that game. Later, I read that she said sometimes her game is like that. When it is she says she needs to refocus on playing. Okay, fair enough. She has off games. She admits it, and she says what she does to correct it.

the only reason people know Angel Reese’s name is that she taunted Clark when LSU beat Iowa in the final. Did Clark get upset? No. She said it was part of the game. She supported Reese. Have any of the players in the WNBA supported Clark? I haven’t heard of it. I’ve heard about people saying there are players who are better, They point to stats, which are maybe marginally better. But no one can deny that Clark brings in the crowd, roughly 10,000 more people show up per game to watch Clark play, and the ratings are through the roof.

Did she make the Olympic team? No. The coach of that team says she picked the 12 best players and Clark wasn’t one of them. Maybe, she did pick the best twelve, but she missed a huge opportunity. If the USA women’s team does not win the gold there will be the questioning of that decision. If Clark was on the team the same question would be asked. There was some snipping about this isn’t a marketing decision, blah blah blah. Yeah, I mean why have the most exciting player in the sport on your team just for marketing? Remember what the LSU coach said about Clark? Old sparkly jacket what’s her name said Clark was “a generational player,” as in “once in a generation. When pigtail girl was guarding Clark and Caitlin drained a three from the logo Miss pigtail looked at sparkly jacket to ask “What do you want me to do?” and Sparkly just shrugged. There’s nothing you can do.

Remember when Caitlin was in grade school she wanted to play basketball. there was no girl’s team so her dad put her on the boy’s team. The league laughed at the idea of a girl plying with the boys. The next year they wanted to ban her because she was MVP. Who wants a girl showing up the boys?

I find it hard to believe that the US Olympic team is better off without Clark. I also find it crazy to not protect the star player of the league and the woman who has the ability to elevate the league to a height they’ve never known. 

Maybe, there are better players. Maybe, not. That’s not the point. The point is this young woman can transform the game of women’s basketball be it at the Olympics or in the pros, and anyone who wants to say, “Well, … blah blah blah” has totally missed the point.