The politically correct line from liberal sports pundits used to be that basketball fans needed to support the WNBA. Now, the line seems to be that we’re supporting it for the wrong reason: namely, because of former University of Iowa star Caitlin Clark, who is playing for the Indiana Fever.
Take Jemele Hill of The Atlantic, always reliable for the worst take on pretty much any sports issue. Speaking to the Los Angeles Times last month, she said fans “would all be very naive if we didn’t say race and her sexuality played a role in [Clark’s] popularity.”
“While so many people are happy for Caitlin’s success — including the players; this has had such an enormous impact on the game — there is a part of it that is a little problematic because of what it says about the worth and the marketability of the players who are already there,” she said.
Right. In other completely unrelated news, The Associated Press’ own WNBA writers apparently don’t even know about the WNBA, making a glaring mistake in an article regarding two players who are only in wider cultural conversation this week because of their semi-proximity to Clark.
On Tuesday, the Chicago Sky lost to the New York Liberty 88-75. The game was the Sky’s first since a 71-70 loss to Clark’s Indiana Fever in which the Sky’s Chennedy Carter went viral for a hard off-the-ball flagrant foul on Clark and rookie forward Angel Reese — a rival of Clark’s during their college years and fellow member of the 2024 WNBA Draft class — appeared to celebrate on the sidelines.
Look how hyped Angel Reese is on the bench after Caitlin Clark takes a cheap shot 😭 pic.twitter.com/GyeG1Q6OhZ
— Emo Jimmy (@WheelerJaylen) June 1, 2024
Wonderful. The foul started the usual prattling about race and our troglodytic failure to embrace the WNBA before Caitlin Clark came along, because clearly we should have been paying attention to Carter and Reese.
Do you watch the WNBA?
For the record, Carter racked up 16 points and was the Sky’s top scorer on 7-18 shooting, and Reese scored 13 on a woeful 3-12 shooting performance, according to the ESPN box score. Reese also managed to make headlines because she got kicked out for a double technical:
Angel Reese was ejected from tonight’s game after being given a double technical on this exchange with the ref
(via @SkyMarquee)pic.twitter.com/cCmfEZZU11
— Bleacher Report (@BleacherReport) June 5, 2024
Good work. If you needed another reason as to why you didn’t need to jump right into non-Caitlin Clark WNBA games, consider that the AP’s own writer doesn’t seem to really watch the league that much either.
Consider this graf, still up on ESPN’s website as of early Wednesday morning: “Rookie Chennedy Carter scored 16 points and Reese had 13 points and 10 rebounds for Chicago (3-5).” [Emphasis ours.]
Little problem there: Carter has not been a rookie since 2020. That’s four years as a professional. Whoops.
Just to be clear, pretty much any conversation about the WNBA these past few days has mostly revolved around three players: Clark, Carter and Reese. Clark and Reese we both know are rookies, having met in a heavily hyped game between Iowa and LSU during this year’s NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament.
As for Carter, who initially committed the foul on Reese, she was initially drafted in 2020 by the Atlanta Dream. Atlanta suspended her and shipped her to the Los Angeles Sparks after what the Dream called “conduct detrimental to the team.” (This conduct allegedly included not coming out of the locker room for the second half of a game and then trying to pick a fight with another teammate over playing time, according to Just Women’s Sports. )
After a 2022 trade to the Los Angeles Sparks, she was “benched for poor conduct during the season,” according to the Los Angeles Times. She played in Turkey for a year before joining the Sky.
If you’re at all familiar with WNBA discussion on social media, too, you’ve probably seen this handy graphic explaining Carter’s history:
Almost as if she’s got issues. pic.twitter.com/YOl7E8aX0D
— ruben_theiowan (@IAcitynative) June 4, 2024
Now, did the AP writer here mean “Rookie Angel Reese” instead of “Rookie Chennedy Carter”? Maybe. However, mistakes happen for a reason.
If you’re with the English-speaking world’s premier wire service as an NBA writer and you file a story that has the graf “New York Knicks legend Michael Jordan and Chicago Bulls great Patrick Ewing were in attendance,” well, I hope you have contacts at Reuters, and I hope you have a specialty that isn’t sports, because you’re not going to be doing the NBA beat at the AP for long.
I don’t have to explain to you why that’s so wrong. Meanwhile, Carter and Reese are probably the two most famous non-Caitlin Clark WNBA players for the moment — if just for negative reasons that have to do with Caitlin Clark — and the AP writer covering the story gets them mixed up. And you know what? Nobody’s probably going to blame them for it.
If you needed a lesson about what Jemele Hill called “the worth and the marketability of the players who are already” in the WNBA, you couldn’t get one much better than this.
