Playoffs begin Sunday, and no, I'm not talking about Major League Baseball. The postseason I'm focusing on is the WNBA, which in my half-century of covering sports represents the first sport my wife and I enjoy together.
Now, the W has not had an easy time of it, as many of you have no doubt noticed. Something is always going awry, often involving the Indiana Fever's Caitlin Clark to one degree or another, and frequently ropes in embattled league commissioner Cathy Engelbert, a 1986 Lehigh University graduate who will not be the commissioner next year. Engelbert has not been an exemplary czar, but much of what has happened during her tenure, particularly since Caitlin came into the league three seasons ago, has been out of her control.
No one was able to envision the cataclysmic consequences of this generational player who seemed to arrive from some foreign planet. We wanted a fairy tale. A superhero flies in to transform the league into a harmonic we're all in this together, and instead we got an arena full of problems.
First, the league failed to realize how physically every opponent would play against Clark. Virtually every time she brought the ball up court, defenses blitzed her, and the Fever countered by trying to free her with a high screen. The repeated result being violent collisions 30 feet from the basket. It spread around the league. Sure, the NBA is physical, but this was ridiculous.
Compounding the problem, the league did not anticipate the degree to which it would need to upgrade its refereeing, whistleblowers who could get control of the game. The zebra population in the WNBA is deeply flawed. Clark herself did not anticipate how she would have to change her game. She handled the ball, still does, like she's back in college when she had free reign to roam. This leads to sloppy ball handling and a criticism that she is careless with the ball and still seems utterly stupefied when she turns it over and the refs don't call a foul.
Clark's teammates were similarly unprepared for how hard opponents were gonna go at her, and they failed numerous times to protect her. Your teammate gets knocked down, your job is to pick her up and maybe, just maybe, find a way to retaliate. That has begun to happen lately with Clark's teammate, Sophie Cunningham, an unlikely enforcer, but an enforcer nevertheless.
Speaking of Cunningham, some players vastly underestimated the degree to which their comments on social issues would be used in the never-ending cultural wars. Cunningham makes a comment about transgender athletes, topic A in a league with a high concentration of LGBTQ women, and then she seems surprised when it's used by opportunists.
Many long-standing fans of the league were surprised that veterans did not welcome Clark into the league with open arms. "Hey, you brought more money and attention to the league. Here's an open lane for a layup." Oh, please. Of course they're gonna be rough on Clark. Michael Jordan ushered in the golden age of the NBA, and he was frozen out of his first All-Star Game.
In general, we were unprepared, and in many cases, unwilling, to view a women's sports league in the same manner that we view a men's sports league. At Clark's first press conference, a male reporter asked her a question and then shaped his fingers into a heart, the juvenile gesture that Clark used throughout her college career. Too many see the WNBA as some kind of fantasy performance through which to present partisan issues. Well, it's first and foremost a professional sports league. We know this because they keep score, and they pound the hell out of each other. We need to stop viewing it as some kind of social drama and start paying attention to the way the women play the game. I've seen a lot of basketball, and I promise that's how I watch it.
