As a sports fan, a one-time amateur athlete, and as someone who has played and coached several sports, I have to ask a question that I’m surprised it’s taken me this long to ask.
What in blazes is going on in women’s basketball, and in particular, the WNBA, or Women’s National Basketball Association?
There was once a time, in a less than perfect life, when a boring Saturday afternoon at home might be enlivened by a google search along the lines of “women fighting,” or some other absurd search that would yield a YouTube video of a bunch of girls fighting after school, in school, at the bar, at the beach, at the concert, hell even at the hairdresser. I’ll freely admit that watching such videos says as much about the individual doing the searching as it does about the girls scrapping in the cafeteria at lunch. It’s not a good look for any of us.
I don’t know where all the fighting girls ended up, maybe working in daycares and church rectories for all I know, but I can tell you that I’ve definitely moved on to other things, hopefully signalling some degree of maturity that had delayed itself until my fourth decade. Whatever the reason, the results speak for themselves, and I no longer have to embarrass myself by watching really sleazy versions of reality television. I’ve moved on, grown up some, and no longer need to debase myself. Because it’s just not necessary.
That’s because I’ve found the WNBA.
This league has been around for awhile now — since 1997 — and, rather than maturing in its own right, seems to have struck out on a course to emulate the sleaziest aspects of a Jerry Springer Show from the 1980s, or even Morton Downey Jr., that absolutely pathetic caricature of a carnival snake oil salesman that only America can produce.
The league has gone decidedly Sideshow Bob, almost as if the owners and the commissioner got together to decide what direction to take the sport in next and opted for a return of Women’s Roller Derby, or Women’s Arena Football.
It’s not the sport anymore, it’s the spectacle.
All you need to do is scroll through YouTube for any longer than fifteen minutes and you’ll get something scandalous coming out of the WNBA, mostly concerning one of the league’s best players, Caitlin Clark.
Clark, who dominated women’s basketball at the NCAA level, joined the league recently as a high draft pick of the Indiana Fever, the WNBA franchise for which she plays. Absolutely no fluke, Clark has merely entered the professional league and dominated it as completely as she did when she was a college standout. Because of this, she’s going to get some attention, both on and off the court.
Clark is good, very good, and it’s almost to the point where she’s unstoppable. Play her long and she’ll beat you short. Play her short and she’ll beat you long. Take away the shot and she’ll kill you with a pass. Take away the pass and she’ll light you up with her shot.
Whenever you get a player of this calibre entering any league, of either gender, trying to stop her becomes almost paramount for the opposing team and the opposing coach. You’re willing to entertain just about any plan, any gimmick, as an attempt to shut her down, or at least keep her point totals down to something more manageable. Also, if there’s a player lighting up the league with impunity, then that player would be considered one of the best, if not the best, player in the league. By definition, then, any other player who can limit the success of that first player is also a valuable player. I would suggest that any player capable of holding Caitlin Clark in check is an extremely valuable player in her own right.
So I get it.
As a basketball coach, I’ve encountered situations where an opposing player is just miles ahead of anyone else on the floor. And rather than just sitting back and watching that player destroy your season, you do whatever you can to come up with a way to stop her. Like any sport, basketball represents a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, practices everyday, planning, teaching, and motivating. You win some, you lose some, and sometimes you do well enough that you make it to the playoffs, maybe even win a couple of rounds. But then you run into Caitlin Clark, and into the dust heap goes all that practice time, planning, and all that hard work and competition.
You can play her man-to-man, dedicating a player to “stick” with her on the court, to become inseparable, to become a complete nuisance, and hope that puts her off her game. You can double-team her, this time having two players draped all over her, but then you leave yourself under-manned elsewhere on the court, giving up a 4-3 personnel advantage to the other team just so you can shut her down. But then the other four beat you with the numbers advantage your own plan has created. You could go with a hybrid defence, like a triangle and two, or a box and one, both combinations of man-to-man and zone defences. But at the end of the day, with a really good player, or even a superstar like Caitlin Clark, you’e just really delaying the inevitable, as there’s just no way to keep them in check without the use of a firearm of some sort, and there are rules against that, even in America.
And so today’s WNBA has turned into this whole “how are we gonna stop Caitlin” league, with more than unsavoury results.
And you can cue the trash talk.
Clark’s main nemesis seems to be another gifted player, Angel Reese, owner of the most impressive false eyelashes in any sport. Reese is the anti-Clark, the foil upon which Clark s compared. Reese feels she’s the top dog of the WNBA, and she may well could have been had Clark not been born. The trash talk between the two is absolutely brutal, and anyone thinking Caitlin Clark is the Shirley Temple of women’s baseball has another thing coming. As talented as Clark is, she’s not exempt from her own childish and rude outbursts, mostly directed with vituperative zeal towards her opponents. An unfortunate element to all of this is the fact that Reese is Black, while Clark is white. Another Black superstar, the Atlanta Dream’s Brittney Griner, called Clark a “f**cking little white girl” after fouling out against her back in January.
So there’s that.
Recently, more fireworks erupted in a game between Clark’s Indiana Fever and the Connecticut Suns. Sun’s guard Jacy Sheldon, a former Clark rival back in the NCAA with the Ohio State Buckeyes, was in action against Clark when Clark stopped-up looking to take a three-point shot at the Sun’s basket. Sheldon was guarding aggressively, about the only way there is to guard someone like Clark. She took a swat at the ball and “missed,” smacking Clark full in the face and poking a finger in her eye. Clark, enraged, shoved her back before Connecticut player Marina Mabrey arrived on the scene and shoved Clark to the floor. Sheldon was awarded a flagrant foul, while Clark and Mabrey received technical fouls.
But it wasn’t over.
Late in the game, with the Fever up by 17 points, Sheldon corralled the ball and headed up court on a fast break, with nobody between her and the Fever basket other than Indiana’s Sophie Cunningham. As Sheldon started her footwork for a layup, she leaned into Cunningham, almost a charging foul, and probably a charging foul under any other circumstances. It didn’t matter.
Cunningham absolutely smothered Sheldon by draping herself totally over the Connecticut guard, providing full value by getting Sheldon in a headlock and dragging her to the floor, all in a single burst of athletic action. As you could imagine, Sheldon bounced up off the floor spitting mad, and her teammates felt the same way, a scuffle ensuing again between the two teams under the Indiana basket. This led to some trash talking theatrics between the two teams, with nobody flapping their gums more than Clark, directing her verbal abuse towards the Sun’s bench and skipping around the court whipping the fans into a “Let’s go!” frenzy, that being the cool thing athletes scream these days, replacing the out-dated “F**cking A” of their father’s time.
Afterwards, at the post-game press conference, the players were asked for comment, and not one of them decided that this would be a good time to make their grandmother’s proud.
But the worst was Cunningham, a wannabe fashion model trapped in a basketball player’s body, or maybe the other way around.
I don’t need to offer any commentary, since I’ll provide the interview clip for you to form your own opinions. All I know is that, if this were any other sport, Cunningham would have been suspended for bringing the league into disrepute. And the really sad thing is that she’s not alone in this type of smack-down talk. If we’re going to sit back and think that Cunningham, Griner, Reese, and Clark are the worst of it, we may just have to settle back into a chair and think some more.
This is the state of women’s professional basketball.
And it’s a joke.
NEWSMAGRENFREW 