🏀What will Caitlin Clark’s WNBA transition from Iowa look like?🏀
0What will Caitlin Clark’s WNBA transition from Iowa look like?
In the words of Diana Taurasi, as spoken to Scott Van Pelt on SportsCenter, Caitlin Clark is due for a reckoning when she gets to the WNBA. After four years of dominating the college game, Clark is starting the next chapter of her career at the bottom as one of the youngest players in the most talented league in the world. Regardless of what the overall arc of Clark’s career ends up being, it is unlikely that she hits the ground running as the best player on the court every night, as she did at Iowa.
Hype won’t be an issue for Clark; she is accustomed to feeling pressure and meeting the moment. She was a top-five recruit coming out of high school who ended up as the leading scorer in college basketball history. She proclaimed her goal as a freshman to get Iowa back to the Final Four for the first time since 1993, and she did it – twice. As the eyes of the public lasered in on her during every successive game of the Hawkeyes’ 2024 NCAA Tournament, Clark kept winning, shattering viewership records in the process.
She has been the center of attention before. The only difference now, as Clark is prepared to be the No. 1 pick by the Indiana Fever, is that the players she suits up against will be able to do something about it.
“It’s a different game, there’s an adjustment period, there’s a period of grace that you have to give rookies when they get to the league,” Taurasi said at USA Basketball training camp in Cleveland. “We’ve had some of the greats to ever play basketball, and it takes two or three years to get used to a different game (against) the best players in the world.”
The most significant change Clark will encounter in the WNBA is the physicality and strength of her opposition. We saw Clark struggle with aggressive ball pressure from West Virginia in the NCAA Tournament, causing her to post her worst assist-to-turnover ratio (3 to 6) of the season. UConn’s Nika Mühl had her in a straitjacket during the Final Four, picking Clark up full-court and limiting Clark to her lowest scoring total (21 points) of 2023-24. And the trees of South Carolina made it challenging for Clark to finish inside, as she missed 10 2-pointers.