Former WFAN personality Craig Carton declared on The Craig Carton Show that “nobody cares about women’s basketball,” a remark that quickly spread across sports media circles just as the WNBA Finals posted some of its strongest numbers in decades.
During Tuesday’s episode, Carton argued that public interest in women’s basketball revolves almost entirely around individual stars such as Caitlin Clark rather than the sport itself.
“We cared about Caitlin Clark and maybe you care about Paige [Bueckers],” Carton said. “There’s a small segment of the woke American community that wants to guilt you into feeling like you have to acknowledge or pay attention to women playing basketball… We’re trying to fool ourselves into thinking the American sports public enjoys or wants to see professional women’s basketball. We don’t. We never have and we never will.”
Carton insisted his take was not an attack on the athletes themselves.
“They’re great at what they do, but no one cares about what they do,” he continued. “We fell in love with one person, Caitlin Clark, and the WNBA and most of its players have gone out of their way to trash her and make her unlikable. Which makes no sense to me, but we’re never going to care about professional women’s sports in this country.”
His comments arrived the same week Nielsen data showed that this year’s WNBA Finals averaged 1.5 million viewers across ESPN and ABC — the second-highest Finals audience since 2000. Though down slightly from last year’s series, this year’s four-game Aces-Mercury sweep marked the ninth straight Finals game to top one million viewers, an unprecedented streak for the league.
The WNBA Playoffs overall averaged 1.2 million viewers, a modest 5% rise that industry analysts partly attribute to Nielsen’s expanded methodology and sustained interest from Clark’s arrival in the league.
For all the controversy, Carton’s remarks underscore the long-running divide in sports media over how women’s leagues are covered — and how their progress is measured.
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