The WNBA Celebrates its 30th Anniversary by Doing What it Does Best: Abusing Caitlin Clark
I have to confess I had no idea the WNBA has been in existence for 30 years. If the league had asked me how old it was, I'd go right to my default setting of trying to guess way younger than its actual age. Let it feel all flattered, blush, and coyly admit, "No, silly! I just turned 30." While I act impressed and reply, "My goodness! You take good care of yourself, because you don't look a day over 22" and offer to buy it a birthday drink.
In fairness to those of us who didn't know the league is turning 30 though, for a good 27 of those years its been completely irrelevant. In fact, its irrelevance was a national punchline everywhere except ESPN who worked full time to promote it when no one was interested, and the NBA which was keeping it afloat as a some kind of a business deduction. But all that changed when an exciting, compelling, and supremely talented young star entered the league and took it by storm.
Caitlin Clark took the WNBA from irrelevance to hyper-revelance by the sheer force of her fiery, competitive will and a shooting game the likes of which had never been seen in the league. She began selling out arenas at home and on the road. TV ratings skyrocketed. And the jokes (Bill Burr's about how the stands are so empty it was the only sport where no one got Covid) no longer applied. Revenues went up. The players all began making more money. A rising Clark lifted all boats.
And the WNBA, for its part, has always seemed to resent her for it. Despise her, even. A point which has been drilled home countless times, from all the non-calls when she's blatantly fouled to the technicals she's accumlating. And now confirmed by this poster, which is currently getting ratio'ed on X, which less than 700 likes and over 2.7K comments.
Because anyone who's not bizarrely invested in seeing the biggest superstar in the women's game just go away and stop being so awesome and fun to watch, looked at this poster and immediately noticed her conspicuous absence. With replies that in a lot of cases are getting more likes than the original post:
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That last one is a perfect segue into how else the women's league celebrated its birthday. By adding a ton of actual aggression to the poster's passive/aggressiveness.
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And the Fever's head coach was understandably furious:
But when you're Caitlin Clark or the coaches and teammates who work with her, it's just the cost of doing business. The snub on the poster proves this abuse isn't an accident. It's corporate policy. A feature, not a bug. It's coming from the top. There won't be a league-wide memo sent out declaring every season is Open Season on the league's most popular player. Because why put it in writing when you can see it in their social media posts and literally on the court? The one she's lying on with a fist jammed into her windpipe without a foul call. Or flat on her back after getting injured on a jumper. Because there's no rule against those things. The 22 on her back is a target. That much is painfully clear.
The good news though, is that Caitlin seems to be embracing it. If her back can hold out, she can have a long, successful career as the wrestling heel they've cast her as. It's not for everyone. But it fits her well. And as she goes on to break every record in the books, watching it get harder and harder to ignore her is going to be more fun by itself than the first 30 years of this joke of a league.