It took about 20 hours for the WNBA to acknowledge its officials completely botched the adjudication of Chennedy Carter’s blatant cheap-shot against rookie guard Caitlin Clark. It’s possible to play 10 basketball games in that time frame, and the only surprise in any of this is the league didn’t force the Fever to do exactly that.
The WNBA has struggled throughout its existence to gain the degree of attention from spectators and the media that followed Clark from her transcendent college career into the league, but far too many of its principals – players, game officials, the league office – are responding as if they would prefer still to be ignored by all but the league’s ardent and enduring (but minuscule) fan base.
Who could have predicted this?
Oh, yeah, that’s right: We did.
What we did not see coming is how horrifically the league would handle her entrance and how obtuse the referees would be at various times. The WNBA scheduled the Fever for 11 games in the season’s first 20 days, including a three-game road trip to Seattle, Los Angeles and Las Vegas that covered 4,650 air miles and 120 minutes of basketball in the space of four days.
The Fever’s hyperintensive schedule would be plausible if, say, the majority of the league were rushing to stuff games into the season’s early weeks because there’s an Olympic Games looming to bite a chunk from the season in late July and early August. But the reigning champion Las Vegas Aces, who figure to be significantly represented on the U.S. team, have played only six times, and 75 percent of the league has played eight games or fewer.
No, this is more along the lines of the league dashing into a doughnut shop and wolfing down as many chocolate frosteds as possible, never mind the inevitable bellyache.
The refs who allowed Saturday’s Fever victory over the Chicago Sky into a referendum on their ability to control a game would seem to have no vested interest in allowing Clark to become a tackling dummy for the league’s other players. But they misdiagnosed the blindside shove Carter leveled upon Clark during the third quarter, calling it a common foul.
Chennedy Carter bumped Caitlin Clark for an away from the play foul 😳
— The Sporting News (@sportingnews) June 1, 2024
"That's not a basketball play," Clark told ESPN on the broadcast. pic.twitter.com/udTMmWFVyn
How could they have seen it – removed from the play, unprovoked, forceful – and deemed it to be common? How could they not a least reviewed the play to be certain?
It was not the only such blunder. There was a less severe, though still unnecessary, shove by the Sky’s Angel Reese on a boxout that ought to have been called a foul. It was an obvious offense, made more so by Clark’s dramatic emphasis. The officials’ indifference to such plays led to Fever general manager Lin Dunn declaring on Twitter, “There’s a difference between tough defense and unnecessary— targeting actions! It needs to stop! The league needs to ‘cleanup’ the crap! That’s NOT who this league is!!”
There’s a difference between tough defense and unnecessary— targeting actions! It needs to stop! The league needs to “ cleanup” the crap! That’s NOT who this league is!! https://t.co/jI0xgTPfrC
— Chalk Talk (@LD_ChalkTalk) June 1, 2024
Dunn has been involved in many more WNBA games than any of us, but it’s fair to wonder if she’s right about that. Because that’s pretty much what the league has shown itself to be since Clark arrived as the No. 1 overall draft pick.
The prevailing attitude of those whom Clark will make significantly wealthier over time is the same as what she faced while breaking nearly every NCAA scoring record in sight and carrying Iowa to consecutive Final Fours: Why her?
Clark’s popularity can be explained in a variety of ways: the audacious passes, the comically deep 3-pointers, the success her excellence produced for her team. But others have done these things without igniting the public’s fascination. Clark is wildly popular because she was the right player at the right moment.
If that’s too abstract, well, sorry.
MORE: Draymond Green says Fever need enforcer to protect Clark
Taylor Swift and Sarah McLachlan are both musical geniuses, but one of them sells out football stadiums on back-to-back nights in every city she visits and the other plays to packed 5,000-seat arenas. Public tastes and contagion can't really be explained. One can't even expect excellence always to be involved, or "Survivor" would have been canceled years ago.
The jealousy of Clark’s popularity manifested itself mostly in snide comments before she took the floor, but now that players can get their bows on her, they can try raise their profiles by lowering her to the hardwood.
I mean, how many knew Carter’s name before Saturday, let alone how to pronounce it? She refused to respond to questions about her actions in a postgame interview, but afterward Carter wrote on the social site Threads, “Beside three point shooting, what does she bring to the table man.”
We could point out that in NCAA basketball, one could remove every three from Clark’s career stats and she still scored 324 more points than Kennedy did from anywhere. But that’s college, and this is the WNBA, so we’ll stick with pointing out Clark already is No. 4 in the league in assists per game while playing with a group of teammates shooting a collective .428 from the field.
All of the garbage being thrown Clark’s way, literally and figuratively, certainly is keeping her in the public sports conversation even as the Fever have won just two of those 11 games, with only one team in the WNBA posting a poorer record. But no pro sports league ever ascended by working to diminish its brightest star.
