INDIANAPOLIS — To walk so much as half a block in Indianapolis, host of the WNBA’s All-Star weekend, is to run into the likeness of Caitlin Clark. Her face is on shirts, on billboards, on posters covering store windows. Her name appears in drink specials and in snippets of passing conversation. Towering over the entire scene is an enormous Nike advertisement, 34 stories high on the JW Marriott, showing her shot mid-release and her ponytail mid-swish. FROM DOWNTOWN IN MY TOWN, it reads, at once a declaration of skill and a promise of an upcoming show.
It all means that Clark is everywhere other than where she would most like to be. The one place she is missing this weekend is the court: The Fever star announced earlier this week that an injury would keep her from both Friday’s three-point contest and Saturday’s All-Star Game. This weekend had originally been intended as something of a showcase for how she has changed her team and her city. That dynamic makes it impossible to ignore her absence from the competition. Yet it feels just as impossible to ignore just how much her presence has changed the league.
