WNBA thread… 28.5 ain’t your pay cut

Clark is a dynamic and awesome player, but if the NCAA kept track of individual turnovers, she’d have the record by a huge margin. Averaged 4.6 per game in college.
Her positives clearly outweigh the negatives, but that’s a big number.

 

I'll try to make my point better.

Clark was fun to watch and she won. But she would have struggled, on some level, to fit into a UConn culture because, at UConn, it's kind of a super team - launching 30 footers, even when they go in 35% of the time, doesn't necessarily track with his vision of a good offense - and also a team that has to adhere to the kind of on-court behavior Geno prefers. When you have what amounts to all-star team, you can impose those kinds of standards. Geno gave a presser a few years ago where he talked about body language of players.

Well, Clark had terrible body language all the time. She openly worked the refs, played to the crowd, argued with her coaches and talked her share of trash - and it worked. It really worked. For her and for the team. And I think the thing that irked some of the sport's royalty - not the rank and file fans, but the royalty - was that Clark could act like an on-court brat, get away with it, score 35 and get a triple-double, and the team won.

And nobody put the coach on a pedestal for it - they put Clark up there. The fans did. And I'm not sure, if I'm honest, any of these top coaches were ever really doing any of what they did for the fans - maybe Staley does, but most coaches don't - but Clark, ginormous ego as she may have, did. She'd play 36-40 minutes every night regardless of the lead because of the fans were there to see her play, not manage her load. And she'd sign autographs for 30-40 minutes.

And she'd do it again 3 nights later because, ultimately, the coach had virtually no leverage in the situation - no Clark, no 30-win team - and, on some level, that's kind of threatening to the apparatus of the sport. What smart, 5-star high school girl shouldn't go to the state school and do her own thing?

 

I doubt it, too. I don't he'd have been able to stand her for very long. There's an old story about Sue Bird being just steel for four years under Geno and, late in her career, she finally broke down at a practice or something, finally tired of it. Bird is Geno's kind of player. Clark is not.

But it is no surprise why the fans love Clark. And no surprise why other players may chafe at her notoriety. She got to be unabashedly herself for four years, and most of them (not Ionescu) had to be some version of whatever their coach wanted.

 

Ionescu was every bit the diva, but nobody outside of those at the games saw it because she didn't get the national exposure Clark did.

 

Not much Clark can do. The WNBA might.

Caitlin Clark Says Deliberate Shove By Opposing Player “Not A Basketball Play”

 

The Indiana coach seems to stand there with her thumb up her ass as Clark is pounded into the floorboards.

 

The Fever need to add a Dave Semenko-type for Clark.

 

Fine. If I'm covering the game, I walk out.

 

That'll show her.

 

Chennedy Carter needs all the coverage she can get.

 

These ladies are good and determined to go back to riding the Bolt bus and staying at Days Inn on the road.