Caitlin Clark is changing the WNBA before she even plays in it

Loading player

The WNBA season, the US women’s basketball championship, will begin on the Italian night between Tuesday and Wednesday. It is a highly anticipated event, above all because it will be the debut of Caitlin Clark, the 22-year-old American who was selected as first choice in the draft (the mechanism by which teams, in turn, choose new players arriving in the league) and above all that has significantly changed the perception of women’s basketball. In the last two years the NCAA college championship, in particular the women’s one, has become very popular mainly thanks to Clark, and this influence of hers is already being seen also on the WNBA, even before Clark starts playing it and even before the start of the season.

More than 2.4 million people watched the WNBA draft on television, nearly five times as many as the 2023 draft. As he wrote Bloomberg, this year, more than a selection of talent by the 12 teams, the draft was a celebration of a season that many expect will transform the league. During the ceremony, Commissioner Catherine Engelbert (the one who heads the league) welcomed all those who “will become fans of the WNBA from today on”, aware of the fact that many people will begin to follow the championship thanks to Caitlin Clark, as has already happened in college basketball.

– Read also: Everyone wants to see Caitlin Clark play

In the NBA, the men’s basketball championship, there was a large increase in spectators in the 1980s, after the arrival of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, both Americans. Their rivalry had generated a lot of attention since their college days, when they played for Michigan State University and Indiana State University. The two faced each other for years in the NBA with two of the most successful and supported teams in the league, the Los Angeles Lakers and the Boston Celtics, and college basketball spectators continued to follow them, starting to transform the NBA into a very rich championship with a large following which is today.

After Johnson and Bird came Michael Jordan, then Kobe Bryant and Shaquille O’Neal and more recently LeBron James and Steph Curry. Commissioner Engelbert said she truly believes this is what could happen to the WNBA now: that Clark’s popularity could drive that of new players and the league in general.

In the meantime, those who will begin to benefit will be the Indiana Fever, the team in which Clark will play, both on a sporting level, because Clark’s talent will almost certainly have a notable impact on the game and the results, and as regards the public. Last season the Indiana Fever were the second-to-last team in the league in attendance, with an average of 4,067 in attendance at the Gainbridge Fieldhouse. This year, always second Bloombergthey expect to fill the 17,254 seats at each of the 20 home games.

Caitlin Clark here during her time with the Iowa Hawkeyes, the university team with which she reached two NCAA finals (Matthew Holst/Getty Images)

Il Wall Street Journal wrote that Clark’s effect on audience growth surpassed that of other outstanding U.S. sportspeople of the past such as basketball player Michael Jordan, golfer Tiger Woods and tennis player Serena Williams. Between 2022 and 2024, the number of people who watched the women’s NCAA final (to which Clark greatly contributed to bringing her college team, the Iowa Hawkeyes, to two consecutive years) quadrupled, reaching a record 18.9 million of viewers of the last final. Clark has not only increased the audience for her games, but for all of women’s college basketball: the audience for other teams’ games has increased by 76 percent in the last year, which was also the one in which Clark became the player with the most points scored in college basketball history (women’s or men’s).

Aided by the fact that women’s basketball had greater room for growth than other sports (including men’s basketball), Clark earned the sport many new fans with her exceptional play. The founder of the site Sports Media Watch Jon Lewis told the Wall Street Journal that Clark «is not only a great attraction, but he has changed him the status quo of what women’s basketball can attract” and that there are no similar precedents. In the coming months the WNBA will have to renegotiate the rights to broadcast the games on television: if Clark keeps what she promises, and the public continues to follow her, there could soon be very big changes for US women’s basketball.

2024-05-14 08:00:19
#Caitlin #Clark #changing #WNBA #plays