Caitlin Clark is Teaching us About Mass Phenomena (and Economics)
Anyone Who's Willing to See and Hear It, That is
I noticed an IndyStar headline earlier this week that both stunned and didn’t really surprise me at all: “In 5 games, Indiana Fever surpass last year's total attendance mark.” It is not because last summer’s last-place team in the Eastern Conference is exactly off to a good start: they’ve won two and lost nine. Several of those first losses were close, but lately the point differential even seems to be growing. But the Fever do have the WNBA’s Rookie of the month, maybe you’ve heard of her.
It should go without saying that increasing attendance is good for the Fever and for the WNBA at large. And you don’t get to private charter planes and increased player salaries without people in the seats and watching on television. It’s a launching point for the future of the league, though nothing about the current moment guarantees that all of this will be sustained. The noise and controversy, in other words, can be productive, if the powers that be can seize the momentum and take proper advantage of it. Because if you’re going to have and grow a business—and that’s what the WNBA is, is a business—the financials have to work. You need customers. Repeat customers.
If the various forces will stop feasting on each other, that is. Everyone seems to have a Caitlin Clark take these days, about whether or not her WNBA play has even been all that good, about whether such an adjustment period is normal for a rookie, whether it’s fair that she’s receiving so much attention while her team loses, about the supposed hard fouls that have come her way, about whether that physicality is simply good ol’ fashioned initiation, about whether her teammates are doing enough to protect her, about whether veteran WNBA players are being too hard on Clark publicly, about why Clark and why now in terms of the attention the sport is suddenly getting. Amid all the noise, I can’t help but notice that many of the people who purport to be the most concerned about, say, gender equality seem also to be the folks who are most offended by the attention Clark is getting and the way people are paying top dollar to see her play.
There is a logic to this, even if it’s subtle. In a certain, contemporary progressive imagination, never mind harder work or natural/talent advantages or different values structures, if there is a gap in outcome or result between groups, there is a problem and probably discriminatory factors at play. Unless, of course, we are talking about which gender is graduating from college or which race dominates the NBA—those differentials are ones we’re not supposed to notice or care very much about. For the record, my best guess is that the gender difference between who is succeeding in college is more indicative of problems we’re producing in those institutions rather than racial differences in the NBA, which are likely some combination of a cultural preference and/or maybe a biological advantage. Oh, and we’re often told that X Group’s suicide rates are a big concern, but hardly a word is uttered about the fact that boys and men commit suicide at a rate that’s four times higher than their female counterparts. Caring about and trying to improve both (and all) is, of course, an option, in spite of the many ways we’re discouraged to do so.
And yet, according to the logic I am talking about, when it comes to the salary of NBA players versus WNBA ones, obviously this meets the criteria of something we ought to be very concerned about, and if Americans have a preference for NBA over WNBA basketball, which shows up in market outcomes, this must be an indication of malice. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the league itself.
Then someone like Clark comes along who’s filling the seats, and so we’ve got to invent new indignation and fury (‘It must be because she’s white! How dare she not be a lesbian anyway!’ Also, the attention is bad because, well, it wasn’t there a few years ago). If we pay especially close attention, we might just notice that a moral system has been created whereby nothing is ever good enough and shame is ever-present. I mean, ‘of course we want more gender equality in sports, but we want it in right relationship to racial and sexual orientation equality’ (intersectionality, duh). We want it all to be so nice and egalitarian and virtuous and theoretical, rather than, you know, messy and human and actually happening. Oh, and never mind that if all women’s basketball has ever needed was a white star, then there have been plenty of options that preceded Clark: Rebecca Lobo, Ruth Riley, Sue Bird, Breanna Stewart, Sabrina Ionescu, and even now UConn’s Paige Bueckers (who Geno Auriemma chose to prioritize in recruitment instead of Clark).
Just like Coach Auriemma’s early preference for Beuckers instead of Clark, human preferences aren’t perfect. Sometimes they’re even prejudicial or subject to media influence and the piling on of trends. There’s a psychology in that: we want to fit in. In that sense, some of the annoyance of all the new bandwagon fans and gushing talking heads probably is warranted, and yet let us not miss that a market is going to work right in front of us, telling us what fans want, should we have the ears to hear and eyes to see it.
Angel Reese may very well be correct that it’s not just one player that has led to the WNBA’s momentum, but Clark’s first month in the WNBA was better than people think it was, especially with as much attention as other teams are having to give her. The fact remains that Clark brings something to her game that her predecessors didn’t, and it has little to do with skin color. She shoots (successfully) from deeper and can create her own shot whenever she wants. She relishes the ball in the big moments. She’s one of the best passers I’ve ever seen, though that part of her game often gets overlooked. Oh, and she has a Taylor Swift-like ability to make space for fans, not to mention hardly ever saying a negative thing while talking to the press, even when everyone else is freaking out.
Clark is at least the women’s Stephen Curry in the sense that her brand of basketball is very entertaining, and she keeps extending the distance from which you have to pressure her defensively. What many of us want to see is if she will also become the women’s Michael Jordan, both in terms of her legacy and impact on her league and profession, and also in becoming the so-called GOAT. Neither of those two names, by the way, had trouble drawing an audience because of their skin color.
And if Clark does become the greatest there ever was on the women’s side, it is likely that that tag will only last for a decade or two, until one of these little girls who catches a picture with Clark at one of her games then spends much of her young life putting up step-back threes in a gym by herself in order to grow up and eclipse her own hero. That’s what’s at stake in all this.
In the meantime, what if we, you know, enjoyed the ride?