The 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 glimpses of why she turned women’s basketball into appointment television during her record-breaking run at the University of Iowa.
The 6ft point guard was all over the court against the New York Liberty, scoring 10 of her team’s 19 first points with a flurry of pull-up threes and slashing lay-ups, whipping one-handed passes to create opportunities for her teammates and prompting deafening roars from a packed crowd, drowning out the scattered boobirds. She was cooled off after leading all scorers with 15 points at half-time by a platoon of defenders led by Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, a wily veteran eight years Clark’s senior, but not before depositing one of her signature 30-footers.
“Just playing with an aggressive mindset,” said Clark, who finished with 22 points on 9-for-17 shooting, 4-for-10 from three, with eight assists and six rebounds. “That’s going to be my biggest focus going forward, just coming out and 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 at Connecticut, a glaring 10 turnovers (she gave the ball away eight times on Saturday) offset 20 hard-won points as the Fever lost by 21. Then on Friday in a 36-point defeat to New York at home, she’d managed just nine points on 2-for-8 shooting, the first time since January 2021 in her first season at Iowa that she’d been held to single digits.
But Saturday’s nationally televised breakout also saw Indiana beaten soundly for the third time in three games, showing just how far the Fever and their 22-year-old wunderkind 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-flecked crowd of 17,735 spectators marked a Liberty franchise record, while the Associated Press reported the home team raked in more than $2m in ticket revenue for the contest, the biggest live gate in the WNBA’s 28-year history. So dense was the fervent mass of humanity outside the arena’s main entrance at Atlantic and Flatbush that many late-arriving fans didn’t get inside until half-time.
22 PTS FOR #22 🙌
— WNBA (@WNBA) May 18, 2024
2024 No. 1 pick Caitlin Clark had herself a game vs the Liberty, dropping 22 PTS, 6 REB, 8 AST, 4 3PM#WelcometotheW | WNBA Tip-Off presented by @carmax pic.twitter.com/LIFW7yZNQC
The intense media glare that Clark has inhabited over the past few months was only magnified in New York, which made her graceful handling of the attention all the more impressive. She spent 10 minutes after warm-ups signing autographs for throngs of young fans, while her responses across multiple media availabilities were polished and thoughtful.
It’s hard to believe that Saturday’s game came fewer than six weeks after Clark made her final college appearance with Iowa in the NCAA championship game, the finale of a rigorous 39-game season where Clark led the country in scoring and assists while playing nearly every minute of every contest.
Since then, she was drafted first overall by the Fever, signed a record $28m contract with Nike, taken a walk-on part on Saturday Night Live in between filming commercials for a mounting portfolio of corporate sponsors. The surge in popularity has prompted the WNBA to commit $50m to provide full-time charter flight service for its teams, resolving a years-old sticking point involving player safety concerns. It’s also led several teams to relocate their games against Indiana to larger venues to accommodate increased demand.
In terms of rest, the 38 days between her Iowa swansong and WNBA debut were pretty much the opposite of a trip to Cabo. And that was before the games started. It’s true the Fever have had the misfortune of opening with three of the toughest fixtures on their schedule, but the reality is every team has elite talent in a league with only 12 teams and a maximum of 144 roster spots. “Everybody’s all over me, they’re hounding me 94 feet,” Clark said Saturday. “I’m being trapped on every ball screen, getting blocked on every stagger screen.”
After making everything look so effortless at Iowa, even the simplest basketball tasks have become heavy lifting. “The physicality, I think the way teams are guarding,” she said. “You go back and watch the film, and I’m stepped way away from the play and I’m still getting face guards.”
All of it gives rise to questions of sustainability. Should Clark suit up for the entirety of Indiana’s regular-season slate, she will have played 79 games in less than an 11-month span. If the Fever reach the playoffs – and she’s named to the US Olympic team for Paris – that number could creep past 90. Asked what she’s doing for herself to prevent a burnout that would seem inevitable, Clark shared a healthy outlook and awareness of the big picture.
“I think just taking care of your body, taking care of your mind [is important],” Clark said. “But also I’m just trying to remind myself, like, I know this is my job now, but I have fun playing this game, and I think that needs to be my focus through the course of this year: just to have fun. That’s when I’m at my best, too, and that’s when I was at my best in college.”
In a way Indiana’s early struggles and Clark’s learning curve are positives for the WNBA, showing its massive influx of new fans just how competitive the league is. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the Liberty, a superteam returning all five starters from a group that came within two wins of the title last October, are picking their teeth with Indiana, a franchise led by first-, second- and third-year players that hasn’t reached the playoffs since 2016.
They won’t go far if Clark doesn’t make sure to take care of herself, both physically and mentally. But the even keel of the point guard appears to ready her for the long haul.
“It’s the same situation for every rookie coming in here,” Clark said. “You can make whatever excuse you want, but there are no excuses. Players that are in this league were rookies once before. They dealt with the same thing, so everybody goes through it. It’s obviously not ideal for your body, but I think it just makes you kind of grow up a little bit. It makes you mature a little bit, makes you become a real professional athlete and finding ways to take care of your mind, take care of your 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.”
