After a year of broken records, singular play, unforgiving spotlights, sold-out arenas, occasional growing pains and fierce, unending national discourse, Caitlin Clark is left with the one thing she had been unable to buy over the last year. She finally has some real time off.
The 22-year-old phenom was declared WNBA Rookie of the Year on Thursday. The announcement was somewhat anticlimactic both in that it had been leaked—seemingly first by the WNBA Players’ Association and then by media—and in that it had seemed obvious for weeks. Who else but Clark? Her season came to an end last week after her Indiana Fever were swept out of the first round of the playoffs by the Connecticut Sun. It ended a stretch not quite like anything the sport has seen before.
Clark has been playing basketball for almost the entirety of the last year, developing a remarkable, inescapable gravitational pull around what had already been tremendous star power. Her final college season at Iowa began last October with the best-attended game in the history of women’s basketball—an exhibition played before 55,646 people at Kinnick Stadium—and rolled through a slew of broken records before ending with a trip to the national championship in April. (Iowa’s loss to South Carolina drew 18.9 million viewers, more than any other basketball game in five years, men or women, college or professional.) The WNBA draft was a week later, the beginning of training camp less than two weeks after that and her first preseason game only days after that. It led directly into a rookie professional season that broke still more records and captured attention like no other, up to and including that final playoff game on Wednesday, which earned the highest rating on cable television in the history of the WNBA. There were just 347 days between record-breaking college exhibition and record-breaking playoff contest. It was an interval that helped reshape the sense of possibility in women’s basketball.
This calendar transition has always been unforgiving for rookie players in the WNBA. They generally cannot attend their own college graduations—they’re already weeks into their pro careers by then. But no player has ever needed to navigate it carrying such heavy expectations under so many eyes as Clark.
When she sat in front of the cameras in Uncasville, Conn., last Wednesday night, her season finally over, she was asked how she had processed the last year of her life. (How could anyone have?) She admitted that she did not have a firm answer there just yet.
“I feel like basketball has really consumed my life for a year,” Clark said. “It’ll be good for me to kind of reflect back on everything that’s happened. Like, I feel like I didn't even have time to really reflect on my college career, because it ended so fast, and then I came here and was trying to give everything I could to this team and kind of move on and put all that behind me.”
There is one statistic from her year that feels especially striking. Put aside viewership, attendance, jersey sales, points scored, assists recorded, social media impressions, panel conversations on cable television generated. Clark has started every single game her teams have played since November. That meant 39 games for Iowa, averaging 34.8 minutes, and all 42 regular season and playoff games for the Fever, averaging 35.4. (It likely goes without saying that she is heavily involved whenever she is on the floor: Her usage rate was in the top 10 this year both in the NCAA and the WNBA.) It can feel like a small miracle that she was never compromised by injury or serious fatigue. The closest she’s had to a night off was the last game of the WNBA regular season, with a playoff spot already clinched, when she rested most of the second half. She did so on the road in Washington, D.C., in front of a record crowd of 20,711, the largest in the history of the league. It was hard to ask for a better representation of the dynamics at play here: Even in a game not expected to be particularly competitive, between one team with a postseason berth already secured and one whose playoff fate was out of its hands, more people were in the stands than ever before. There was still an expectation for a show.
And throughout the year—under the pressure of a historic college season and through some difficult adjustments to a new professional league—Clark delivered.
If much of the discussion around her this year centered on the potential that she brought to the league economically and culturally, it bears repeating that she carries a special kind of potential on the court, too. To watch Clark at her best is to feel the logic of basketball start to lose its shape. Throw out whatever ideas you have about what constitutes a reasonable pass or a high-percentage shot. Chances are, Clark will have a different idea, and she can often execute it. (Even when she can’t, the show is usually still a thrill.) It took some time for that style to manifest in the WNBA. But it did. Clark’s final stat line this season was unlike any before. No one had ever scored this much while assisting this much. No rookie had ever posted a triple-double. No player had recorded so many assists or, yes, so many turnovers. But the sense of potential was not in the numbers. It was in the way she played.
Asked for her offseason plans following her final game—the ESPN broadcast had said she would not participate in another league this winter as many WNBA players do—Clark deflected with a joke.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do tomorrow,” she said. “I don’t know what I’m going to do the next day. Maybe play some golf. I guess that’s what I’ll do until it gets too cold in Indiana. I’ll become a professional golfer.”
(She is, of course, pretty good at golf, too.)
But she circled back later: She will keep working out and playing, obviously, because what else? After all: A sophomore season is coming. This was only the first act.
“It'll definitely be probably a little weird for me over the course of the first couple weeks,” she said. “And then I'm sure I'll get bored and pick up a basketball.”
This article was originally published on www.si.com as It’s Been a Hell of a Year for Caitlin Clark.
