Indiana Fever all-star Caitlin Clark — one of the most celebrated women’s basketball players in the history of the sport — has been carrying the WNBA on her back since her rookie season in 2024.
Yesterday, however, during the Fever’s match against the New York Liberty, Clark sustained a quad injury that will sideline her for at least two weeks, marking the first time in her collegiate and professional career that she will miss games.
The impact Clark’s absence will have on the WNBA will be fascinating to watch, says Jason Whitlock, who unpacked his predictions on the latest episode of “Fearless.”
In the wake of Clark’s injury, “a lot of eyeballs are going to disappear from the WNBA, and I think a lot of the WNBA players are going to be happy they got whatever’s left of the spotlight all to themselves,” he says. “This is a return to normalcy and sanity for the WNBA. They’re going to celebrate that they get to go perform in front of an audience that they’re comfortable with.”
It’s Clark’s fans, not Clark herself, who are at the receiving end of the WNBA’s hatred, he argues.
“The WNBA hates … anybody else with a Christian worldview or a traditional worldview or an American patriotic worldview. … They would even tolerate her being the most exciting player in the WNBA, maybe even the most valuable player in the WNBA, if she brought a different fan base with her,” says Jason. “There is no Cait hate; there’s Cait fan hate.”
It’s Clark fans, he says, who raised a ruckus when Minnesota Lynx’s Napheesa Collier gave a pregame speech honoring George Floyd, for example.
Before Clark entered the league, the WNBA “existed in a bubble where everybody that came to their games and everybody that paid attention to their games thought exactly like them, and so there would be virtually no pushback. Napheesa Collier could go out and say the most insane things, and no one would care. No one would bat an eye because they all virtually agreed,” Jason explains.
But that ended when Clark showed up with her massive fan base.
“Napheesa Collier, A’ja Wilson, DiJonai Carrington, all the rest — they want me to disappear, they want you to disappear, and they know the way to get us to disappear is by disappearing Caitlin Clark,” says Jason.
For the next two weeks, “they can go back to complaining about their pay, complaining about the patriarchy, complaining about white people. They can go back to doing what they do without any pushback from us.”
To hear more of Jason’s analysis, watch the episode above.
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