The WNBA playoffs, a flagship event for the league, began on Sunday. Just that there’s this one significant factor missing in the narrative. Caitlin Clark, the biggest star in women’s basketball, is relegated to the bench, ruled out for the rest of the season with a groin injury.
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Clark’s Indiana Fever managed to make the playoffs without her, but they went down 80-68 in the first game to the Atlanta Dream. Now they’re just a game away from the end of their season, unless they can find a way to win two straight without their franchise player.
Olden Polynice, who appeared on the most recent episode of Byron Scott’s Fast Break, mostly discussed WNBA players demanding more pay. But he also took a slight detour to say that the WNBA needs to recognize what they have with Clark, and that the league needs to do a better job of protecting her.
“You don’t even take care of your own,” Polynice said. “You had the golden egg, and you still do, but yet you clown. Caitlin Clark is your golden egg.”
Polynice pointed out that in her rookie season in 2024, the schedule-makers sent Clark to face the two toughest defenses in the league to begin her career. That denied her a chance to start her WNBA career on a high note.
Clark scored 20 points in her debut game, but she turned it over 10 times in a 21-point loss to the Connecticut Sun. Her next two games were against the New York Liberty, the team that went on to win the title later that year. Predictably, both of those games were also lopsided Fever losses, especially the second one, which the Liberty won 102-66.
Polynice used an NBA comparison to demonstrate what the WNBA should be doing for Clark. “You gotta use that to your advantage,” he said of having such a popular superstar like Clark in the league.
“People clowned and talked about, ‘Well, they had the Jordan rules, and the league changed.’ Yeah, because they knew what was going on. We need to protect our cash cow,” continued Polynice. “We need to make sure that [Michael Jordan] brings in the revenue.”
Polynice, however, lost track of his argument. While at first he seemed to come at the WNBA for not doing a better job of protecting Clark, his stance eventually morphed into what sounded like more of an attack on the players. He criticized them for demanding higher pay while not protecting Clark, the one who could help them get there.
The ‘Jordan Rules’ were pioneered by the Bad Boy Detroit Pistons, and they boiled down to one thing: If Jordan went to the basket, make him pay for it. Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn clobbered MJ whenever he went airborne. Isiah Thomas and Joe Dumars hacked and held whenever Jordan drove. They beat Jordan up, basically.
Clark has faced something similar, subjected to physical play that has been over the top at times. Other teams have hit her with hard fouls, some of which have resulted in flagrants and even ejections.
It’s a fine line for the league and the players to walk, because although Clark is the poster child of women’s basketball, that status breeds jealousy in other players. Everyone has something to prove when they go against Clark, and sometimes that feeling boils over and ends with a slap or a shove or a non-basketball play.
Like the Pistons back in the day, these women are competitors, and they’re not about to roll over so that the golden goose can look good. Just as Jordan once did, Clark is going to have to fight through it and earn everything she gets. The truth, after all, is that outside of deterring hard fouls against her by enacting more severe punishments for transgressors, there isn’t much the league can do to help.
Clark missed most of this season with myriad injuries, playing in only 13 out of a possible 44 games. That’s bad for the league’s image, bad for ratings, and bad for keeping the WNBA at or near the top of the daily sports conversation.
There’s no easy fix, but Clark needs to be on the floor if the league is going to reach its full potential.
