Are we asking the right questions about Caitlin Clark?
By Mike Bass
mbass@mikebasscoaching.com
Let’s play 40 Questions on Caitlin Clark:
1) Should Clark have made the Olympic team to attract a bigger audience for women’s basketball?
2) Could Clark have done for women’s basketball what the Dream Team did for men’s basketball?
3) Would she have been an attraction or distraction?
4) Did she deserve to make the team on merit, compared to the 12 players selected?
5) Would she have fit into the team after missing training camp to play in the Final Four, and lacking experience internationally and in coach Cheryl Reeve’s system?
6) Would her teammates have welcomed her?
7) If she were excluded out of jealousy, how would we know?
8) How would her fans have reacted if Clark received limited playing time?
9) What makes Clark so popular?
10) Why was she able to lift women’s basketball into the national consciousness when others could not?
11) How much of her popularity comes from her play and her personality?
12) How much of her popularity comes from being white, straight and from Iowa?
13) If Clark were Black, would she still be the face of women’s basketball?
14) Did we expect her to enter the league like the WNBA’s Michael Jordan?
15) Was it harder to enter like she did (a quasi-Pied Piper for women’s basketball) or like Jordan did (the No. 3 pick of a league already booming behind Magic Johnson and Larry Bird)?
16) Is Clark getting a version of what Jordan felt during his first NBA All-Star Game, when Isaiah Thomas, Magic and George Gervin reportedly froze him out?
17) Is Clark being targeted physically on the court because of all the attention?
18) How do we know if that is what precipitated the Chicago Sky’s Chennedy Carter hip-checking Clark?
19) Is Clark the only rookie, or only player, treated roughly at times, or are we just fixated on what happens to her?
20) Are we drawing conclusions from what we see and filling in the details to match our narrative?
21) Are we talking about the physicality of women’s basketball because we are relatively new to the WNBA?
22) Are we addressing the physicality of women’s basketball players differently because they are women?
23) Is this a chance for us to grow, too?
24) Does every player see a benefit from the exposure and discourse?
25) Do players individually look at Clark and the situation uniquely?
26) Do some see just another rookie needing hard fouls and a welcome-to-the-league indoctrination?
27) Are some jealous or envious of the attention?
28) Do some see racism in the attention to her and the inattention to others?
29) Could there be a combination of factors?
30) What if we are curious and not judgmental?
31) What if we imagine what is possible with Caitlin Clark?
32) What if she doesn’t have to elevate the WNBA alone?
33) What if Clark and Sky rookie Angel Reese can continue their college rivalry and become the Larry Bird-Magic Johnson of the WNBA?
34) Will it help that Reese plans to continue taking on the “bad-guy role” for her teammates, as she termed it after standing up for Chennedy Carter?
35) Why was Clark lauded in the 2023 Elite Eight for waiving a hand in front of her own face (John Cena’s “You can’t see me” gesture), but Reese was ostracized for using it toward Clark in the championship game?
36) What if Reese had a point in her reaction after winning that title ( “I don’t fit in the box that y’all want me to be in. I'm too hood, I'm too ghetto, y’all told me that all year. But when other people do it, y'all don't say nothing. So this was for the girls that look like me, that’s gonna speak up for what they believe in. It’s unapologetically you.”)?
37) What if color blindness is not an ideal, but a blindness to why our differences make us special?
38) Could expanded coverage of the WNBA attract new fans to different players for different reasons?
39) What if players past and present needed to do what they did to position the WNBA for this explosion?
40) What if Caitlin Clark was the right player at the right time to attract the masses and raise the right questions?