TThe Caitlin Clark Experience did not disappoint when it came through Brooklyn on Saturday afternoon. After a rocky start to her professional career, the Indiana Fever rookie showed a glimpse of why she turned women’s basketball into appointment television during her record-breaking run at the University of Iowa.
She was all over the court against the New York Liberty, scoring 10 of her team’s first 19 points with a series of pull-up threes and cutting layups, making one-handed passes to create chances for her teammates and deafening roar. an overflowing crowd, drowning out the scattered boobirds. She was cooled after leading all scorers by 15 points at halftime by a platoon of defenders led by Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, a wily veteran eight years Clark’s senior, but not before making a deposit. one of her signature 30-footers.
“Just playing with an aggressive attitude,” said Clark, who finished with 22 points on 9-for-17 shooting, 4-for-10 from three, with eight assists and six rebounds. “That will be my biggest focus going forward, just coming out, competing and playing hard. I thought our whole group did that.”
It was the best performance of Clark’s week-long WNBA tenure. In her professional debut on Tuesday night in Connecticut, a whopping 10 goals (she gave the ball away eight times on Saturday) offset 20 hard-fought points as the Fever lost by 21. Then on Friday in a 36-point loss to New York. At home, she had scored just nine points on 2-for-8 shooting, the first time since January 2021, in her first season at Iowa, that she was held to single digits.
But in Saturday’s breakthrough nationally televised game, Indiana was soundly defeated for the third time in three games, showing just how far the Fever and their 22-year-old prodigy have to go.
Clark had never played a game in New York City before Saturday afternoon — not in four years with Iowa, nor with her high school or AAU teams — and the sense of occasion in America’s largest media market was palpable. The sold-out, celebrity-studded crowd of 17,735 spectators marked a Liberty franchise record, while the Associated Press reported the home team raked in more than $2 million in ticket revenue for the game, the largest live gate in the WNBA’s 28-year history. The fiery crowd outside the arena’s main entrance at Atlantic and Flatbush was so dense that many late-arriving fans didn’t get inside until halftime.
The intense media attention Clark has received in recent months has only been magnified in New York, making her graceful handling of the attention all the more impressive. After the warm-up, she spent ten minutes signing autographs for crowds of young fans, while her responses in the various media were polished and thoughtful.
It’s hard to believe that Saturday’s game came less than six weeks after Clark made her final collegiate appearance with Iowa in the NCAA championship game, the finale of a tough 39-game season in which Clark led the nation in scoring and assists while she played almost every minute. of every match.
Since then, she was drafted first overall by the Fever, signed a record $28 million contract with Nike and received a walk-on segment on Saturday Night Live in between filming commercials for a growing portfolio of corporate sponsors. The surge in popularity has prompted the WNBA to commit $50 million to providing full-time charter flights for its teams, solving a years-long bottleneck over player safety. It has also led to several teams moving their games against Indiana to larger venues to accommodate increased demand.
In terms of rest, the 38 days between her swan song in Iowa and her WNBA debut were pretty much the opposite of a trip to Cabo. And that was before the games started. It’s true that the Fever have been unlucky to start with three of the toughest games on their schedule, but the reality is that every team has top talent in a league with just twelve teams and a maximum of 144 roster spots. “Everyone is all over me, chasing me for 30 yards,” Clark said Saturday. “I’m stuck on every ball screen and blocked on every stagger screen.”
After everything looked so effortless at Iowa, even the simplest basketball tasks have become arduous. “The physicality, I think, the way teams guard,” she said. “You go back and watch the film, and I’m far from the play and I’m still getting face shields.”
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All this raises questions about sustainability. Should Clark last Indiana’s entire regular season, she will have played 79 games in less than 11 months. If the Fever reach the playoffs — and are named to the U.S. Olympic team for Paris — that number could creep past 90. When asked what she does for herself to prevent burnout that seems inevitable, Clark shared a healthy perspective and awareness of the big picture.
“I think you just have to take care of your body and take care of your mind [is important]” said Clark. “But I also try to remind myself, I know this is my job now, but I’m having fun playing this game, and I think that should be my focus over the course of this year: just to have fun to have . That’s when I’m at my best, and that’s when I was at my best at university.”
In some ways, Indiana’s early struggles and Clark’s learning curve are positive for the WNBA, with the huge influx of new fans showing just how competitive the league is. It should come as no surprise that the New York Liberty, a superteam that returns all five starters from a group that came within two wins of the title last October, is picking teeth with Indiana, a franchise led by first-, second- and third-year players who haven’t reached the playoffs since 2016.
They won’t get far if Clark doesn’t make sure she takes care of herself, both physically and mentally. But the point guard’s even keel seems to be setting her up for the long haul.
“It’s the same situation for every rookie that comes in here,” Clark said. “You can make any excuse you want, but there are no excuses. Players from this league have been rookies before. They’ve dealt with the same thing, so everyone goes through it. It’s obviously not ideal for your body, but I think it just makes you a little more mature. It makes you grow up a bit, makes you become a real professional athlete and find ways to take care of your mind and body.
“But at the same time, it shouldn’t be hard for you to wake up and play a basketball game if you get to do that for a living.”
