The “W” Is an L Without the Indiana Fever Superstar

The Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) must be the most self-destructive or dumbest sports league ever.

Considering how shambolic the NFL, NBA, and MLB have become, that’s saying a lot.

Without a subsidy from the NBA, the “W” as it is called, would have folded, if not gone bankrupt a long time ago.

Outside of a niche audience, the W is (or was) an L.

Despite the players’ complaints otherwise, W athletes are probably overpaid considering the the league’s return on investment or lack thereof.

With the emergence of superstar point guard Caitlin Clark, the former University of Iowa national player of the year now with the Indian Fever, women’s professional basketball has gone mainstream, however, with a chance for profitability and prosperity.

For an NBA analog, the floor visionary is a combination of Steph Curry and insert your favorite iconic backcourt player such as Magic Johnson or Pistol Pete Maravich from back in the day.

According Bobby Burack of Outkick, “Clark is a generational talent whose stardom is transcendent. According to recent estimates, she could raise the value of the WNBA by more than $1 billion.”

So what is the league’s response to this massive meal ticket?

It has demonized Fever fans (who buy lots of tickets for home and away games and cause TV rating to skyrocket) and has done nothing while CC is bulled on and off the court.

The W often moves Fever away games to larger arenas because Clark has such an enormous national following.

Perhaps out of petty jealousy, opposing teams guard CC like it’s a WWE match.

And the game “officials” stand there like mannequins when this happens..

Sports leagues usually got out of their way to protect their star players during games, sometimes infuriatingly or unfairly so. Not the W.

Perhaps the only reasonable explanation is a self-defeating obsession with identity politics and related pandering along the lines of Caitlin Clark Derangement Syndrome — a term coined by journalist/podcaster Jason Whitlock.

Clark, the 2024 WNBA Rookie of the Year, is no victim per se, however.

At age 23, she is a multimillionaire with multiple endorsement deals (such as the new Wilson signature basketball line) who can look forward to enjoying cushy celebrity status for the rest of her life, including front-row seats and access to luxury suites at concerts and sporting events, among other perks.

Given all the attention, whether she stays connected to reality or becomes just another arrogant, pampered luminary remains to be seen.

But in the meantime, the WNBA seems to be pretending that other players under their banner are in any way equally relevant. They’re not. No one comes close.

While typically poised and relatable, CC herself made a big mistake (and perhaps lost fans) in a Time magazine interview by seemingly groveling to the bullies.

Unfortunately for her (and her management/PR team that may have ill-advised her), this kind of capitulation only emboldens mean girls to be even meaner and to prompt more make-believe controversy.

As seen in politics, including office politics, the irony is that bullies typically claim to be victims.

Clark could have simply said “I have great respect for the players that have come before me, but I’ve worked very hard to get here, and it’s a honor to be here.”

[Excluding CC from the 2024 Olympic Team was another Mean Girl Moment, but she probably benefited from the time off having gone from college directly into the pros with no significant rest.]

It must be said that WNBA games are a tough watch, especially with all the layups clanging off the rim, air balls, and rampant turnovers.

As the Fever’s floor general, Clark brings up the ball up court on virtually every position, so you never know what you might see, such as a miraculous assist (assuming her teammates can handle a pass, which is not always the case) or a semi-miraculous three -point shot.

Clark is currently injured but is expected back soon. Is anybody watching WNBA games while she’s on the bench?

According to USA Today, the answer gives credence to Clark’s vital importance to the W:

Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark’s absence due to a strained left quad has had a significant impact on WNBA TV ratings…Nationally televised WNBA viewership is down 55% since her injury, according to Nielsen.
Fever national TV games are down 53% since Clark’s injury…

CC can be petulant on the court, but her mannerism are often highly entertaining, which perhaps is the essence of charisma.

From the outside anyway, the chemistry among Fever players — who come from all backgrounds — is inspiring, if not heart-warming.

In a rare moment of lucidity (which Burack highlighted in a recent column), erratic sports pundit Skip Bayless made these comments about CC and the W as part of a larger monologue mainly about a controversy surrounding WNBA player Brittney Griner of the Atlanta Dream:

“…I’ve said many times that Caitlin Clark got roughed up repeatedly by defenders throughout her rookie year last year. It was attempted bullying, trying to break her spirit, intimidate her, put her in her place, get even with her, for all the attention she was getting. But this season, it appears Caitlin is more committed to pushing back, even initiating some of the pushing as she did when she was correctly hit with a technical foul, while forgiving Angel Reese, her arch rival, a little shove at the end of a hard foul…

I believe many WNBA players remain extremely resentful of Caitlin Clark’s rise, in part, maybe large part, because of her skin color and her appeal to white America, especially, conservative white America. I still say Caitlin Clark is a solution, a godsend of a gift, that has launched WNBA ratings into a stratosphere this league would never have known without her...”

Jason Whitlock (who can jump to debatable conclusions about issues from time to time) is a big Indiana Fever fan and talks about them a lot on his show.

On roughly the same order of magnitude of Tiger Woods at the time, he has reasonably argued that a case could be made that Caitlin Clark is “the biggest star in American sports.”

If only the WNBA also felt that way.

Jason Whitlock channel, YouTube
Screengrab: Jason Whitlock/YouTube

In a recent monologue that among other things reacted to CC’s injury, the traditional-values champion and matriarchy foe alluded to the infamous Time interview:

“…Caitlin Clark bent the knee and…it upset us, but we find so much enjoyment in Caitlin Clark, we’ve gritted our teeth, and stayed with the process and hope that Caitlin Clark doesn’t further sell us out. But the WNBA is a political tool to destroy the patriarchy… and they don’t want Cathy Engelbert, the commissioner of the WNBA, they don’t want the NBA in pursuit of economic viability, in pursuit of financial profit. They don’t want the WNBA in any way changing the culture and environment inside the arenas or anywhere that show any respect for our values. So Caitlin Clark must be destroyed. And Caitlin Clark is being officiated, and played against, in a way that probably contributed to her quadriceps strain and probably will make it very, very difficult for her to go through these WNBA seasons unharmed, uninjured. Caitlin Clark had never missed a game at Iowa. I think they said she never missed a game in high school.

Whitlock continued:

“She’s two weeks into her second WNBA season, and she’s out for two weeks. Coincidence? Not if you’ve watched her play, not if you’ve watched how rough she’s allowed to be defended while the referees do nothing about it. And I’m not talking about just a bunch of dirty cheap shots like there were last year. I’m just talking about an overall 94-foot level of rough play that’s allowed to be played against her. She can’t say it. She can’t complain about it. She just has to endure it. But other people should speak against it. Again, they’re willing to destroy Caitlin Clark and the Golden Goose to keep their little Utopian bubble and their little political tool. They don’t want this league to be profitable. Not if it means, ‘hey, we’ve got to cater to, in any way, traditional sports fans…”

Whitlock separately discussed Engelbert’s idiotic, self-congratulatory article (possibly ghostwritten by some PR nerd as is standard in corporate America) in the Hartford Business Review.

As an aside, recent events have demonstrated that Harvard is hardly what it once was, which is an understatement.

Anyway, Whitlock provided this assessment of Englebert’s essay.

Spoiler alert: He didn’t love it because he maintains that the author is laboring under a delusion narrative.

“…Caitlin Clark has come along and blessed the WNBA, a league that has been in free fall for 28 years, 29 years, living off the t*t and the welfare of men. They get blessed with Caitlin Clark and the commissioner of the league, the commissioner, Cathy Engelbert, she pins a 2600-word column in the Harvard Business Review, giving herself credit for the rise of the WNBA in the last 12 months. A 2,600-word story that she wrote about the rise of the WNBA. She mentions Caitlin Clark twice in passing in a 2,600-word explanation of why the WNBA has risen. This is women. This is delusion. This is a false narrative being written by the commissioner of the WNBA that ignores that Caitlin Clark is 98.9% of the reason the league has elevated in the past year, if not 100%.

“You can’t tell the story of growth of the WNBA without spending an inordinate amount of time and energy and words and explanation all centered around Caitlin Clark. The commissioner of the WNBA, a woman, figured out a way to do it in the Harvard Business Review, no less. This is Caitlin Clark derangement. The commissioner of the league has it. Everybody else in the league has it. They get gifted the greatest thing in sports, Caitlin Clark, and they’d rather destroy it, not acknowledge it, diminish it, take credit for themselves, rather than celebrate and explain this gift, and ask themselves ‘how can we get more’?…from word go, this article was delusional…The commissioner of the league is writing a 2,600-word story glorifying herself and diminishing the obvious fact that Caitlin Clark has temporarily changed the WNBA…”

Similarly, in an article about Engelbert’s piece, Substacker Ethan Strauss quipped that “You might think it was Caitlin Clark who gave the WNBA a massive revitalization in 2024. Turns out it was Engelbert and she’s here to tell us all about it.”

The WNBA and its media sycophants continue to pretend that mediocre Chicago Sky player Angel Reese somehow contributed significantly to the league’s resurgence — or more accurately surgence (if that’s a word).

The sports media and/or entertainment media are in some ways actually worse then the discredited equally leftist corporate news media.

A few days ago, KC who runs the Behind the Line YouTube channel summed up the ramifications of Clark’s absence from action:

“…the last two weeks should be a wake-up call for every player in the WNBA. It should damn sure be a wake-up call for…Engelbert, who, for reasons unknown, continues to protect players who can’t generate revenue and ostracize the fan base of the one player who’s generating all the interest…”

If in the history of sports, if you know if any prior instance of a league giving what amounts to the cold shoulder to its primary superstar and the vast number of fans of that superstar, please sound off below.

[This post may be updated.]