By Dan McLaughlin
Thursday, July 02, 2026
The unfair and often physically abusive treatment of
Caitlin Clark by the WNBA is reaching a boiling point. The problem is not
limited to Clark’s on-court rivals: The league itself is increasingly complicit
in ways that look deliberate. The league’s behavior tells us a lot about what
the WNBA really is — which is neither a sports league nor a business.
A Substack essay by Alexander Muse, dubbing Clark “The Outsider the
WNBA Cannot Forgive,” lays out the case in detail. If the WNBA was primarily a
business, Clark should be seen by the league as its most valuable asset.
As Muse explains:
Ryan Brewer, a finance professor
at Indiana University Columbus who specializes in valuation, calculated that
Clark alone accounted for more than 26.5% of all WNBA economic activity in the
2024 season, a figure spanning attendance, television, and merchandise. Of the
24 WNBA broadcasts that drew at least 1 million viewers that year, 21 featured
Clark. Her games averaged roughly 1.2 million viewers, about 200% more than
games she did not play. Indiana set a single-season league attendance record,
opponents relocated home games into larger NBA arenas to hold the crowds she
summoned, and league merchandise sales surged above 600%, with Clark atop the
jersey rankings. In the summer of 2024 the league signed an eleven-year
media-rights agreement worth roughly $2.2 billion, more than triple its prior
deal of about $50 million per year, a windfall that arrived on the growth she
ignited. The independent economist Victor Matheson of Holy Cross estimated that
roughly 1 in every 6 tickets sold leaguewide, home and away, owed to the Clark
effect. . . . In 2025 Clark drew 1,293,536 All-Star fan votes, a single-season
record.
By some estimates, Clark and her teammate Sophie Cunningham
currently account for 71 percent of WNBA jersey sales between them. Even
Michael Jordan at his peak didn’t represent such a predominating share of
monetizable fan interest in his league.
This is not just hype, either. Clark was already a major
national star by the time she reached the WNBA. She led the Iowa Hawkeyes
women’s basketball team to consecutive national championship games in 2023-24,
making her a folk hero in Iowa, where the men’s and women’s teams between them
had made a total of one national title game before then (the men’s team, in
1956). When I visited the Iowa State Fair in 2023, alongside the iconic
“Butter Cow” (a life-size sculpture of a cow made entirely of butter, which
appears annually at the fair) was a life-size Butter Caitlin Clark. You can’t
get more Iowa than that.
Since arriving in the WNBA in 2024, Clark has averaged 19.2 points, 8.4 assists, 5.1 rebounds, and 1.2
steals per game. If you follow the NBA, those may not sound like spectacular
numbers, but they are unprecedented in the women’s game, which has never before
seen this combination of scorer and playmaker. There have only
been three seasons in WNBA history of at least 16 points and seven assists
per game: Clark in 2024, Clark in 2025 (until her season-ending injury), and
Clark in 2026 (so far, through 17 games). She’s the all-time WNBA career
assists per game leader. She led the league in three-point shots made in 2024.
At this writing, at age 24, she’s averaging a career-high 21.2 points per game.
Those who are hostile to Clark’s popularity may feel that she’s only a fan
favorite because she’s white, straight, and aw-shucks Middle American, but the
reality is that she’s a generational offensive talent who is already building a
case that she might end up being the best player the league has ever seen — if
she stays healthy.
That’s always a big if in sports, but it is a much bigger
if in a contact sport when opponents go out of their way to injure you. If the
WNBA was primarily a sport, the league would do everything in its power to
ensure that a talent this groundbreaking would get every opportunity to live up
to her full potential, because that is what sports is about.
The NBA has always understood this. Everybody knows that
the stars get special treatment from the refs. There’s a famous clip of
Magic Johnson and Larry Bird doing a 1992 photoshoot with Michael Jordan for
the U.S. Olympic “Dream Team” in which Magic quips, “You can’t get too close to
Michael or it’s a foul.” Everyone was in on the joke, which is even funnier
because the league protected and promoted Magic and Larry Legend just as it did
to His Airness, because the NBA is both a business and a sport, and it knows
what makes championships, legends, and sales of tickets and merchandise.
Everybody also understands that the stars sometimes need that protection to
sustain physical strategies like “Hack-a-Shaq” or the Detroit Pistons’ “Jordan
Rules” that sought to physically grind them down, even when those strategies
were aimed solely for the legitimate purpose of winning games.
The abuse of Clark has been something else much more
personal, and Muse details how the league has consistently failed to follow its
own disciplinary standards in restraining it — while at the same time imposing
disproportionate punishments on Clark herself for comparatively trivial
offenses — to the point where her team has had to speak out: “Her own coach,
Stephanie White, watching a fist pressed into Clark’s neck, abandoned the usual
diplomacy and said only that it was crazy, that it was dangerous, that the
cheap shots were unacceptable. When the people nearest the team are reduced to
narrating their own star’s peril to reporters because the officials will not
act, the institution has stopped pretending.” At the same time, Clark has been
repeatedly snubbed in honors and promotions by the league, such as players
voting her far lower than the fan vote in the All-Star balloting, or a league
celebration of its 30th anniversary that pointedly left her out of a collage of
its stars. The conclusion Muse and others have drawn:
We should be candid about the
shape that resentment appears to take. The WNBA is a predominantly black league
in which openly lesbian players are represented far above their share of the
general population, and into it walked a straight white woman from Iowa who
became, within weeks, its biggest draw and the face of an audience that had
never before belonged to it. . . . A newcomer who made everyone wealthier is
resented precisely for arriving from outside the tribe, and . . . the
resentment surfaces in the elbows that go uncalled, the ninth-place ballots,
and the poster that found no room for her face.
He then draws a parallel that seems damning, “One that
cannot be unseen once named,” but in fact is even worse than he thinks:
When black athletes integrated
white professional baseball in the 1940s, they were spiked, thrown at, and
abused, while officials and league offices looked studiously away, and they
were expected to absorb every blow in silence as the toll exacted for their
presence.
Caitlin Clark is not on the receiving end of a societal
backlash of the sort that faced Jackie Robinson and other early black players
in Major League Baseball. And if you add up what Robinson had to endure just
from his fellow players, you can make a pretty solid case that it’s still a
good deal worse than this. But her treatment by her league is even
worse. Robinson mostly suffered from the laissez-faire officiating attitude of
the umpires and league officials of his day in the face of an unusual amount of
hostility from some (by no means all) of his fellow players. But in baseball in
the 1940s, almost nobody got suspended or disciplined just for beaning and
spiking opponents. Carl Mays didn’t even have to leave the game in 1920 when he
literally killed a guy with a pitch. The league in 1947 was especially rough
because so many of the players (Robinson included) had just come back from the
war. Also, while it’s true that Branch Rickey instructed Robinson to hold his
temper at things the white players could retaliate for freely, his concern was
more for ensuring public acceptance of Jackie; he and other black players of
that era didn’t face, at least in the majors (as opposed to some of the more
hostile minor leagues) a disciplinary campaign like what Clark has faced.
Nor did baseball fail to celebrate a player much beloved
by its fans. Unlike Clark, Jackie Robinson was signed by Rickey more as a moral
and baseball decision than a commercial one. The owners were genuinely fearful,
and in some cases not entirely without reason, that fans would not warm to
black ballplayers. At best, the owners and the commissioner made a long-term
bet that an integrated league would deliver better baseball, that this would
ultimately matter more to fans than the color of the men, and that they could
also steal the black audience that went to Negro League games, which was small
in some cities but meaningful in others. As it turned out, they were right:
Baseball enjoyed a golden age in commercial popularity in the 1950s and 1960s.
But the point for these purposes is that the owners (at least in Rickey’s case
and at the league level) got ahead of the fans, rather than being compelled by
a popular groundswell to accept a player they didn’t want.
And Jackie Robinson, who was a very good player as a rookie and
soon became a great one in spite of playing almost no organized baseball before
his mid-1945 discharge from the Army, was adequately honored by the league from
the get-go. He was awarded the Rookie of the Year in 1947, an honor that was
newly created that season, and finished fifth in the NL MVP voting, which is
arguably higher than he deserved that year. By his third season in the league,
he was voted the MVP and began a six-year run as an All-Star. He was elected to
the Hall of Fame in his first year of eligibility.
Larry Doby, the first black player in the American
League, began a run of seven straight All-Star appearances in his second full
season. Roy Campanella won three MVP awards in five years between 1951-55. Don
Newcombe won the Rookie of the Year in 1949 and the MVP as well as the
first-ever Cy Young Award in 1956 (like Robinson’s Rookie of the Year award,
this was initially awarded as one MLB-wide award but subsequently split into an
award for each league). Between 1947 and 1953, six of the first twelve Rookie
of the Year awards went to black ballplayers. Baseball’s treatment of the black
pioneers was certainly not always honorable, but they were nonetheless given
the honors they fairly earned.
As I’ve written before, the progressive capture of major
institutions is nearly always a product of bundling: Progressive politics is
not demanded by voters or customers or other constituents, but is at best
tolerated by them because the politics attaches itself to some product people
otherwise want for other reasons, such as Disney or Harvard. When there’s an
interchangeable substitute that can be purchased without the politics, the
bundling strategy collapses — as Bud Light found out the hard way. If the WNBA was a
business that needed to pay its own bills with the money it makes, its
incentives to protect and celebrate Caitlin Clark would override everything
else. That’s how the NBA works, and it’s how MLB worked when it was integrating
its sport. Money talks, and it talks loudly. But instead, the WNBA from the
outset has been an ideological project bundled with the NBA: People pay for the
NBA because they want its product, and they tolerate the fact that the dollars
they spend on it go to cross-subsidize the bundled project that has a tiny
niche audience. So, the league can act out its resentments at Clark because it
doesn’t need the money she makes — and worse, Clark’s popularity threatens the
whole justification for continuing to treat the WNBA as a bundled welfare case
rather than spinning it off to profit from its new audience.
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