It’s another Saturday in the WNBA season, and once again the collective discourse has been swallowed up by Caitlin Clark and things that mostly have nothing to do with actual basketball being played.
News broke early Saturday morning that Clark was left off Team USA’s women’s basketball squad for the Olympics this summer in Paris. Debate ensued on social media and the commentary will surely carry into Monday when the talking heads at ESPN get back in their chairs to embrace debate. All we can hope for is that the rhetoric isn’t as exhausting as it was a week ago, when highly-paid men with big platforms lost their collective minds over Clark being fouled hard.
This is far from the most outrageous snub in the history of USA women’s basketball. Look up what happened to Candace Parker in 2016.
There are arguments good and bad to be made for whether Clark should or shouldn’t be on the Olympic team. Ultimately, all of them come down to what you believe is the purpose of Team USA.
Is it for the Americans to show off their dominance in an arena of competition and win every game by as many points possible?
Or is it to grow the game of women’s basketball?
If the goal of Team USA is to bulldoze their way to an eighth consecutive gold medal and obliterate every opponent in their path, then no, Clark should not be on this roster for the Paris Olympics.
With all due respect to the Indiana Fever rookie phenom, she is not currently one of the 12 best Americans playing in the WNBA.
Is it close? Sure. If Team USA carried a roster of 20 players, if this was all just based on skill, stats and merit, Clark would be going to the Olympics. She’s 13th in the league in scoring, fourth in assists and fourth in 3-pointers made per game.
Alas, Olympic rosters for women’s basketball are limited to 12 players. And so, Clark is out.
However, if Team USA set out to assemble the best basketball-playing roster to take to France, there’s a bigger snub that fans should be upset about.
Somehow, Arike Ogunbowale isn’t on this roster.
The Notre Dame product is now in her sixth season in the WNBA. In all five of those previous seasons, she’s finished the year ranked in the top five of scoring average. This year is no different, as Ogunbowale is scoring a career-high 26.6 points per game, second in the WNBA to only MVP-frontrunner A’ja Wilson. The Dallas Wings guard is also first in the league in free throws made per game (6.6), third in free throw percentage (95.2), first in steals (3.1), and 10th in assists with five dimes per game. It’s easy to make the case that Ogunbowale is playing her best basketball right now at this very moment.
Ogunbowale is certainly – right now, in the year of 2024 – a better player than Diana Taurasi, who turns 42 years old on Tuesday. And yet, Taurasi is on the Olympics team for the sixth straight time. And, objectively, Taurasi is simply no longer one of the 12 best Americans playing in the WNBA.
This is the conundrum that Team USA finds itself in. Because clearly, the selection committee was not thinking about just pure basketball when assembling this team. If they were, they would have thanked Taurasi for her time served and given one of those coveted guard spots to a player at the top of their game like Ogunbowale.
What is Taurasi on this team for? Surely not her passing as she’s averaging a career-low 1.1 assists per game this season. There are certainly better shooters in the WNBA than her – Ogunbowale chief among them. So, is she there for leadership? For chemistry? For camaraderie? Is she the team ambassador? It’s unclear.
Either the Team USA selection committee didn’t have the Jurgen Klinsmann-like guts required to cut a beloved, yet aging face of the game like Taurasi, or they are admitting that this about much more than the scoring margin as they try to capture another gold medal.
Which brings us to the second viewpoint: If you believe the purpose of Team USA is to be evangelical for the sport of women’s basketball on the world stage, then shouldn’t Caitlin Clark be on this roster?
There’s no denying that women’s basketball has experienced, and is experiencing, a tremendous amount of growth over the past year and Clark is a big reason why. The past two Final Fours and national championship games, as well as the 2024 WNBA Draft, all shattered previous viewership records. The commonality between all of them? Clark was there. Just Friday night, when Clark’s Fever played in Washington, D.C., a record-setting crowd of 20,333 fans showed up, making it the highest-attended WNBA regular-season game since 2007.
Does Clark deserve all of the credit for all of the new fans and attention that women’s basketball has garnered? No, of course not. She – along with Angel Reese, Juju Watkins, Paige Bueckers and Kamilla Cardoso – stands on the shoulders of A’Ja Wilson and Breanna Stewart, who came through doors broken down by Maya Moore and Candace Parker, who had a path paved for them by the likes of Sheryl Swoopes and Cheryl Miller, and on and on and on.
But there’s no denying the impact that Clark has had on women’s basketball. More people tuned in for her pro debut than an NHL playoff game on the same night. By mid-May, the sales of Clark’s Fever jersey trailed only three NBA players. Simply put, Clark continues to reset the expectations for the audience that women’s basketball can draw.
That the decision-makers with Team USA don’t see that is a real shame. And that they aren’t going to put this generational talent on a world stage because they are reportedly concerned about the reaction Clark’s fans might have when they see her sitting on the bench is cowardice.
Team USA should be wanting to garner new fans – not coddling the ones they already have. Leaving Clark in Indiana while this squad goes to Paris accomplishes neither.
