Indiana Fever superstar guard Caitlin Clark was involved in multiple scuffles during the Tuesday night game against the Connecticut Sun. While the team ultimately qualified to play in the final game of the WNBA Commissioner’s Cup, there was tension and emotion evident throughout the contest that led to three players being ejected from the proceedings in the fourth quarter. Ken Carman broke down the situation in morning drive on 92.3 The Fan this past Wednesday, during which Carman referred to what transpired as a “watershed moment” for the league.
“You want to take that next step as a pro sport, you got that,” Carman said. “Scrums and fights and things like that, that’s part of it. Now I don’t want to see Malice in the Palace in the WNBA. I don’t want people going into the stands, but you know it. Any major sport, people are playing for high stakes, there’s jealousy involved, there’s paychecks are involved here. There’s the survival instinct, there’s going to be a fight.”
Lima opined that the broadcasters missed half of what happened and deciphered what took place for those on the airwaves. Carman added that the crowd was into the game and reacting to Clark but accentuated how her own league has yet to accept her holding this status per se. In fact, he drew the comparison to when LeBron James first entered the NBA and there were people who took liberties with him on the floor. Carman credited former Cleveland Cavaliers center Zydrunas Ilgauskas for having his back and causing opponents to back off.
“I think the league started to call it a little bit different, like, ‘Hey, this is a star,’” Carman said. “The WNBA has not done that with Caitlin Clark, and then she was out for two weeks with the injury and people were thinking, ‘Okay, now you’ve got your biggest star injured.’”
This was Clark’s second game back after missing time with a left quad injury, during which the ratings for the WNBA began to fall off. A recent article from Jeff Zillgitt of USA TODAY cites Nielsen Media Research data conveying that national television ratings were down 55% since Clark had been injured.
“The ratings immediately tanked and the league was irrelevant for two weeks without her,” Lima said.
Clark returned over the weekend with a standout performance to lead the team to victory over the New York Liberty. The matchup, which aired on ABC, averaged 2.2 million viewers and finished as the third most-watched ESPN WNBA game to ever air on the network. ESPN televised the Tuesday night matchup between the Fever and Sun, and Lima recognized that it is Clark who is selling the tickets and bringing more viewership to the league. During her rookie campaign last season, the WNBA registered 22 regular-season games that averaged at least 1 million viewers, which took place after no league contest had eclipsed the threshold since 2008.
“I understand that any time we talk about women’s basketball, there’s going to be guys, I’m sure there’s tweets out there to tell us to stop talking about women’s basketball. ‘Okay, Shedeur, Shedeur, Shedeur, Shedeur, Shedeur, Shedeur. Women’s basketball. Okay, we’ll get back to it,’” Carman said. “I think that that’s what’s frustrating to anybody who likes basketball and has watched her over the last two years in the WNBA is that everybody in the world wants to say she’s a star except for the league she plays for, except for the people who are calling the fouls. Nobody at [the] WNBA seems to want to admit that she’s the star, she’s their version of Michael Jordan, nobody.”
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