Caitlin Clark played the 10th game of her WNBA career on Saturday, which ended with her Indiana Fever barely holding onto a 71-70 win over the Chicago Sky. Clark scored 11 points on 4-of-11 shooting, and the fact that those numbers do not represent the worst performance of her professional career tells you just about all you need to know about how Clark’s rookie year has started.
Clark’s averaging 17 points, five rebounds, and six assists through her first 10 games, but quite a bit of the shine comes off those numbers when you put them next to these: 37 percent from the field, 31 percent from three-point range, and 5.6 turnovers per game. Clark’s looked more like she did at Iowa recently, scoring 30 against the Sparks and 20 against the Storm in consecutive games, and for a moment it looked like Saturday’s game would continue the trend. Clark hit her first two shots of the game—signature threes from 28 and 30 feet—but then proceeded to go 2-of-9 the rest of the way.
It’s hard to say anything about Clark’s first 10 games without talking about exhaustion. Clark played her final game as a Hawkeye on April 7 and her first game as a member of the Fever on May 14, kicking off a hellish run of games that almost seems specifically designed to break a rookie. When the Fever tip off against the Liberty tonight, they will be playing their 11th game in 20 days. It will be their third game against the Liberty, after having also played the Sun twice and the Aces once. Under these circumstances, the Fever’s 2-8 record and Clark’s mildly gruesome statistics look less like a disaster and more like a young team making the best of a particularly difficult situation.
The exhaustion hasn’t been confined to the court. Clark’s profile is such that it’s impossible not to be routinely confronted by people who choose to talk about her by saying some of the stupidest shit you’ve ever heard. Charles Barkley lolling his head towards the Inside The NBA cameras in order to deliver a sour, drowsy PSA to all the “petty girls” who should be “thanking that girl for getting y’all ass private charters” was a low point, but he was just following LeBron James’s lead. The identities of these petty haters and the specifics of what they should or shouldn’t be doing are never spelled out in this ongoing conversation, but that doesn’t really matter. Even the most rickety of assertions, if delivered often enough and with enough fervor, can start speaking things into existence.
On Saturday, Chicago Sky guard Chennedy Carter eagerly stepped into the reality that others have been busy creating. After hitting a jumper late in the third quarter to cut the Fever’s lead to four, Carter shouted “You a bitch!” at Clark and then shoulder-checked her while the ball was being inbounded.
