The Maestro: Caitlin Clark's Rookie Season was Both Unprecedented and Oddly Familiar
Caitlin Clark’s art lies in improbability. She isn’t physically overwhelming, high-flying, or a darting blur. She doesn’t lop off knees with tween-hesi-tween combos or profiteer at the free throw line. Her superpowers are shooting from deep and clairvoyant passing, both of which require a level of trust in the vagaries of time and space. Clark creates slivers of opportunity from afar and then sets the ball free, an act of faith repeated over and over.
Despite the precarity of her approach, Clark entered her first professional season as the most lauded women’s basketball player of the modern era. At the University of Iowa, she set all-time NCAA career records for the most points, most assists, most 3-pointers made, and most points produced ever. Clark’s Hawkeyes went to two consecutive title games during her junior and senior seasons, but lost both times.
Scooped up as the top pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft by the Indiana Fever—a team with a cumulative 24-84 record over the last three seasons—Clark was the savior a doormat franchise prays for on the cold locker room tiles after every loss. She was wholesome but snarling, genuine but self-aware, a product of the heartland who earned the attention of coastal elites.
In Clark’s first season, Indiana played .500 ball, enough of an improvement to earn the sixth seed in the WNBA Playoffs. Clark was awarded Rookie of the Year and her statistical feats were vast enough to be used as Matrix-esque digital rain for celebratory marketing campaigns. She finished 7th in the WNBA in scoring (19.2 a game), 1st in assists (8.4), 13th in defensive rebounds, and 15th in steals (1.3). Clark set all-time league records for assists, 3-pointers attempted, and turnovers in a single season, with the important caveat that the WNBA expanded to a 40-game schedule in 2023. She even received the ultimate honor: a Cookies Hoops tee.
Eight of the WNBA’s dozen franchises make the playoffs, and the lukewarm Fever were quickly dispatched by the Connecticut Sun, a bruising, 28-12 contender who fell one game shy of reaching the Finals. Clark shot 20% from beyond the arc in the two-game series, dooming the outclassed Indiana squad. The Finals tip off tomorrow between the Liberty and the Lynx—and she is nowhere near it.
Somehow, Clark is still in the news. An unknown voter prevented her from winning Rookie of the Year unanimously. A USA Today columnist was rebuked by the WNBA Players Association after implying that Sun guard DiJonai Carrington intentionally poked Clark in the eye. Gabby Williams of the Seattle Storm cited Clark’s $70,000 annual salary when criticizing the WNBA’s current pay structure. People who attended playoff games at Mohegan Sun with throngs of visiting Fever fans described an environment festering with racial animosity. “Last night felt like a MAGA rally in Connecticut,” said one season ticket-holder. “It felt rabid.”
Dating back to the 2023 NCAA Women’s Championship Game, Clark has been a conduit for grievance. She is a straight Caucasian woman in a sport that has traditionally been Black and queer, and there is the perception that her stardom buoyed the rising popularity of the WNBA and necessitates gratitude from other players. When veterans welcomed the hotshot rookie to the league with a few chippy fouls, her fans—including a scandalized Indiana Congressman—sobbed about “excessive physically” as if it warranted assault charges. While the media fawns over Clark to the point of uncomfortability, the league has been sensitive about embracing her marketability: she was left off the Olympic team and a social media ad for a Fever playoff game highlighted her excellent-but-obscure teammate.
This binary racial dynamic is mostly absent from the current NBA. With the rise of European and African imports, nepo babies boosted by access and genetics, and New Whites from Maine raised on Lil Uzi Vert and Ballislife YouTube mixtapes, cultural battlelines are far more blurred in the men’s game. One commonality worth keeping in mind: old heads hating on young superstars is clearly a sign that you’re doing something right.
For viewers creeping over from the world of men’s professional basketball, there is an inclination to frame Clark through the prism of established male archetypes. Her ability to hoist up shots from logo-depth evoked collegiate comparisons to Stephen Curry. When she struggled early in the season with scattershot accuracy and slobby turnovers, there was the specter of Trae Young’s gaudy numbers and middling results. As she rose to the top of the WNBA’s assist leaderboard while scoring in the mid-teens, there were glimpses of Steve Nash.
Over the second half of the season, we learned the truth. In her last 20 games, Clark averaged 22.3 points per game (second only to MVP A'Ja Wilson of the Aces) on 59% True Shooting (first among the highest usage players) with 10 dimes a night (first in the WNBA). For some context, the difference between Clark's scoring efficiency during that stretch and WNBA league average is about the same as the gulf between Shai Gilgeous-Alexander or Kevin Durant and the NBA baseline. In that span, the Fever had the league's best offensive rating.
Those specific vectors of scoring, efficiency, facilitation, and team success put Clark in exceptionally rare company: LeBron James, Nikola Jokić, Luka Dončić, James Harden, and Magic Johnson (toss in pre-knee injury Chris Paul if you’re feeling sassy). Critics may nitpick facets of their game—free throw shooting, defense, clutchness, conditioning, honeybun and nacho addictions—but the astronomical level of their output is undeniable. They are the Mount Rushmore of the basketball genius scorer/facilitator model and, sooner rather than later, Clark’s mug will join them on the craggy edifice.
It’s preposterous to stamp a player with the “GOATed” label one season into their professional career, before they’ve even won a playoff game. It’s lazy and dumb. But like an election night pundit calling a race before the votes have officially been tallied, we’ve seen enough. More accurately, we’ve seen this before.
Men’s and women’s professional basketball are not identical. There are nuances—such as the size of the ball and its synthetic surface or the shorter heights of the players—that impact the statistical profile of each respective league. But, broadly speaking, the current WNBA resembles the NBA of a decade ago. Average numbers from the current season in categories like Field Goal Percentage, Effective Field Goal Percentage, 3-Point Percentage, and True Shooting Percentage almost perfectly mirror those from the NBA in 2015.
In the men’s game, 2015 was the final moment before optimization sent league-wide offensive numbers bubbling up towards current highwater marks. Back then, the list of top scorers included both analytic darlings (like Curry and Harden) and wanton midrange chuckers (Russell Westbrook, LeMarcus Aldridge, and elderly Kobe Bryant). There were still teams taking less than 20% of their shots from beyond the arc. All of those elements exist in the contemporary WNBA, at least for now.
Clark is a great shooter and a brilliant passer, but those have existed in the WNBA too. The difference is that she possesses the exact qualities that are rewarded by the weighted levers of today’s basketball. Her presence warps the architecture of defenses, her dedication to pushing the tempo makes Indiana lethal in transition, and her ability to thread dimes to teammates has helped the Fever lead the league in restricted area points and 3s from above the break over the last 15 games. Just as Harden personified the NBA’s swivel towards pace-and-space homogeneity a decade ago, Clark possesses first to market advantage in the WNBA. She doesn't have the beard or unbreakable friendship with Lil Baby, but they are one and the same.
Clark may feel like an invasive species devouring her way through a pristine ecosystem, but we know the Yautja from earlier Predator movies. Barring injury, she is going to generate an avalanche of points while annually challenging single-season records for scoring, assists, and 3-pointers made. The Fever will have wildfire offenses and win tons of games. She will be crowned MVP, likely a few times. Pundits will ogle at her staggering production and declare that she’s the best offensive player ever. Former WNBA stars will indignantly argue against irrefutable numbers and they’ll halfway be right. Evolution isn’t fair.
The rest is murky. WNBA Playoffs are compact and cruel, and Clark’s ability to take the Fever on deep postseason runs will soon define her as a player. Staggering numbers quickly tilt toward being viewed as hollow, no matter how deftly earned. Only six months younger than Anthony Edwards, now entering his fifth season with the Timberwolves, Clark has a steeper runway than her male contemporaries. And just as she is a product of the philosophical and schematic advancements of the modern game, younger opponents will use the same institutional cheat-codes—including her own source data—to build upon. Whether seen as a cautionary tale or not, Harden's story has been told.
After one season, we know what Caitlin Clark is but not who she is. The art lies in the uncertainty.
If you enjoyed this essay and the artwork, you will surely be interested in The Joy of Basketball, by Ben Detrick and Andrew Kuo. Find it where you buy books, even if you hate reading like we do.