Watching Caitlin Clark Is the Only Basketball Thing I Really Care About This Summer

Free agency can wait (for once).

It was an awesome finish to that Mavs-Timberwolves Game Two the other night. After dominating the first half, the Wolves let the Mavs back into it, and then Luke Doncic capped both the Mavs' comeback and his own 30-point triple-double with a go-ahead stepback three in the final seconds, right in the face of a lunging Rudy Gobert. The come-from behind victory put a stop to all that Next Jordan hype in this series for an underwhelming-so-far Anthony Edwards, put the Wolves on the brink of absolute disaster in this series (going down 2-0 to the Mavs and now headed to Dallas for Game Three) and confirmed Doncic as the No. 1 guy left in these playoffs. It was an incredible signature moment of this NBA postseason. 

I'm assuming, anyway. I only know about all of this from post-game recaps and Twitter videos. I actually missed the entirety of that second half, including the Doncic game-winner. I was busy watching Caitlin Clark get her first W as a member of the Indiana Fever. 

Somewhat to my surprise, watching Caitlin Clark has become my No. 1 sports priority this spring. (Yes, even before playing Sign-Trade-Kill with the Sixers' rumored offseason targets for the 150th time.) Last night, I came back from spending the day with friends to a DV-R full of Saturday sports -- but before I queued the T.J. McConnell-Jrue Holiday showdown in Game Three of the ECFs (fuck you forever Horf) and even before I caught up with the now 38-15 Phillies (it was a Nola start, to be fair), I kicked off my catch-up with the now 1-6 Fever visiting the champion Aces in Las Vegas. Even with a pretty good conference finals going on and the Phils getting off to the best start to the summer of my lifetime, following Clark's rookie season in the WNBA is the thing I'm most drawn to, the most fascinated by. 

It's not a totally new thing for me. I remember first being intrigued by clips of Clark in her sophomore and junior seasons at Iowa -- shoutout to Michael McGee, who's been referring to Clark as his "daughter" on Twitter since at least January 2022 -- and then, like the rest of America, I got swept up in her March Madness run to the finals in 2023. I watched just about every game of hers I could during her final season at Iowa, often having to discover new corners of my deluxe cable package or streaming services I'd never used for sports before just to continue tracking her. And I of course watched the entirety of her second journey to the NCAA finals, the first time I'd really cared about any college basketball team since Joel Embiid was at Kansas. 

I don't necessarily want to be waxing too rhapsodic about the Caitlin Clark experience here, because it's been pretty well covered the past year or two. Suffice to say, I just couldn't remember watching anyone like her on the college level -- Stephen Curry making his Elite 8 run at Davidson and Doug McDermott in his final year at Creighton probably came closest -- but she was not just a talent you could see translating to the pro level down the line, but who was already absolutely electric, absolutely transfixing. Her superlative play did not need require any level of analysis or context to be properly understood; I would pause games just to show my girlfriend (who could not give less of a fuck about basketball on any level) some of the shots she was hitting. Watching her just felt special. 

But it wasn't just her greatness that I was pulled in by. It was also her arrogance, her frustration, the bloodiness that went into every one of her performances. Basketball legends whose greatness makes the game look easy have not usually done a ton for me; I prefer the ones who actually make everything they do look incredibly difficult and personally taxing, but who still get it done most of the time anyway. That was why, for better or worse, I was such a Kobe-over-LeBron guy when they were the two consensus best players in basketball. Kobe was an extremely imperfect basketball player -- and of course worth mentioning, especially in an article about women's basketball, that he was an extremely problematic figure off the court -- but I couldn't help being drawn to the burning-forehead intensity that he played with, the symphonic way he composed half-court possessions, the way he got so lost in the dance of the game that you could often see him forgetting the larger contexts of the matchups he was playing in. LeBron was clearly better -- I never questioned that -- but watching his dispassionate, coldly intellectual, physically overwhelming brilliance didn't make me love basketball. Watching Kobe sweat for buckets made me love basketball. 

Like Kobe, you can see Caitlin Clark frantically scribbling the sheet music in her head for how a play is supposed to go, and you can (often literally) see her chewing through her jersey when it doesn't. Like Kobe, her go-to shots are so tough that sometimes they seem to be actively seeking out the difficulty, both as a sort of market inefficiency and as a way to continue pushing themselves in-game (and probably also as a way to just stunt a little). And like Kobe, her passes are so high-risk / high-reward that they often feel like shots in themselves, in that they almost always seem to result in either a made basket or the opposition taking the ball the other way. These aren't always necessarily the safest, easiest players to build your winning team around -- if you really want to win a championship, get a LeBron or an A'ja Wilson before a Kobe or a Caitlin Clark -- but they're the players who, on an individual level, I will always most want to watch.

Will the Phillies Ever Feel Like the Sixers?

And the really fascinating thing about watching Clark as a pro is seeing her, just months after having climbed to the basketball mountaintop, having to start again from the very bottomest of bottoms. Not only does her Fever team stink -- they're just 1-6 now through seven games, though they've played a schedule about as tough as the Phillies' has been cream cheese -- but she's struggling more than a little to dominate in the same way. Through seven games she's averaging 17-6-7, good numbers for a WNBA rookie, though hardly headline-news stats. She's also averaging six turnovers a game, though, and shooting just 37% from the field. Saturday night against the Aces, she scored in single digits for the second time already this season; she only failed to reach double digits one time total across her entire four-year college career. Her problems as a pro are very real; she's pretty undersized for the league and not fast enough to just burn by anyone. She can't even really get her shot off a lot of the time, and many of the riskier passes she could get away with in college get easily tipped away or outright intercepted against WNBA length. 

But she'll figure it out. You can already feel her starting to, re-calibrating her shot diet and her passing rhythm to adjust for the greater level of difficulty, scripting and stage-directing out where she and her new teammates need to be in this current configuration to get the desired results. And you can feel those teammates starting to adjust to her too, running the floor quicker to be in stride for her hit-ahead passes, readying themselves to attack 4-on-3s after she passes out of a double-team trap, looking for her drifting open in transition so they can find her with the ball before defenses can get to her. She's putting it together, and the team is putting it together around her -- and already, it's producing early flashbulb moments for her career, like the back-to-back jaw-dropping triples she hit late against the Sparks on Friday to secure the Fever's first win of the year. Like Victor Wembanyama in his rookie Spurs season, it probably won't all happen in time for them to actually become a postseason threat, but it should make them the team none of the actual playoff teams want to play by season's end, at the very least. It's a beautiful phase in a basketball great's career, and certainly one Process-era Sixers fans will be very familiar with and likely downright sentimental about.

 Plus, it kinda rules how we've gotten to see this all unfolding so soon, only months after Clark officially became a national phenomenon this spring. I had an argument with my friends early in her latest March Madness run about whether she'd end up elevating the level of interest and exposure (and attendance) for the entire WNBA upon joining the league this year -- and part of the reason I felt so confident she would is because no one really would have had the time to forget about her in between. It's just something we don't have in the NBA: Not only is there half a year between the college and pro seasons, but virtually none of the guys who become top picks are ones we've built actual relationships with in college. In the W, it's not just Caitlin Clark, it's Angel Reese, it's Cameron Brink, it's Kamilla Cardoso (when she gets healthy), it's even Clark's Iowa teammate Kate Martin -- all the players we just spent time getting to know on the college level who are now making a pro impact barely six weeks later. It's probably exhausting for all those players, but it's real good fun for those of us watching at home, and an incredible marketing advantage for the league. 

And of course, I'll say it -- I fucking love having a basketball player to root for who has absolutely zero to do with the Philadelphia 76ers. Caitlin Clark is not.a former Sixer or even a former future Sixer, there is no chance of us landing her in trade or free agency, we didn't miss the opportunity to grab her in the draft, she's never beaten one of our guys in an awards race or mixed it up with one of them on the court. I don't have to worry about her becoming rivals with Tyrese Maxey, I don't have to worry about her pulling ahead of Joel Embiid in the real-time or all-time league rankings, and I definitely don't have to worry about her beating us in the playoffs. I get to watch her be great at basketball without 11 years of Process fandom weighing down my ability to actually enjoy it. That's a very rare and precious thing for me in 2024, and one I have not had in prior summers this decade, as I've gritted my teeth through the rest of the NBA playoffs following the Sixers' inevitable second-round eliminations. 

I don't know if Caitlin Clark will ever become the player in the pros she was in college -- part of me thinks she's too much at a physical disadvantage to ever dominate the same way, part of me thinks she's insane enough to somehow solve the whole thing by the end of her second season. But getting to be there for the whole story of her pro career has been a joy that I legitimately wasn't sure I was ever going to get from non-Sixers basketball again -- and she (along with Ranger Suárez and Bryson Stott) might actually make the next couple months of waiting on Paul George to check yes or no to Daryl Morey's contractual mash note more tolerable than a Sixers summer has been in a long time. 

---

Andrew Unterberger writes for The Rights To Ricky Sanchez, as part of the 'If Not, Pick Will Convey as Two Second-Rounders' section of the site. You can follow Andrew on Twitter @AUGetoffmygold and can also read him at Billboard. 

Andrew's writing is brought to you by Kinetic Skateboarding! Not only the Ricky's approved skate shop, but the best place to get Chucks, Vans, any apparel. Use code "DAVESILVER" for 9.1% off your order.