Caitlin Clark’s olympic basketball snub, defined

Caitlin Clark, like 99.99 p.c of Individuals this summer time, won’t be a part of the 2024 US girls’s Olympic basketball workforce. Formally, the workforce will likely be introduced on Sunday, however based on experiences and Clark herself, she didn’t make the 12-woman roster. 

In contrast to the remainder of us watching, nevertheless, Clark possesses world-class taking pictures vary, beautiful passing imaginative and prescient, and a record-setting scoring capacity. These attributes have made her the No. 1 decide on this 12 months’s WNBA draft and the most-watched girls’s basketball participant on the planet. Her video games have set viewership and ticket gross sales data. 

With all of the expertise, hype, and a spotlight, Clark staying residence this summer time is a shock to many. Thousands and thousands of individuals have been instructed that Clark is arguably one of the best girls’s participant on the earth and inarguably its greatest star, and now she will not be a 2024 Olympian. Some critics are even saying that is the worst basketball resolution the US has ever made. 

Clark herself congratulated the Olympic squad, mentioned it’s essentially the most troublesome workforce to make, and that she hopes to be in Los Angeles in 2028. “I am excited for the women which can be on the workforce,” Clark mentioned this weekend after an Indiana Fever follow. “I used to be a child that grew up watching the Olympics. It’s going to be enjoyable to look at them.”

In contrast to roster picks previously, Clark not making the reduce has triggered an inflammatory response, with some calling into query the integrity of the girls who made it as an alternative of her and even the integrity of america. These excessive reactions stem from a harmful and more and more fashionable subtext about Caitlin Clark’s greatness, one which paints Clark as a transcendent star and her friends as terminally jealous people. The wild gist: Clark must be protected against her fellow gamers. 

It’s grow to be clear that these Caitlin Clark followers aren’t all that eager about girls’s basketball and even Clark herself however, moderately, look like deeply invested in pulling the intense younger basketball star right into a tradition warfare that she doesn’t appear all that eager about being part of. 

Over the previous couple of years, the rise of Caitlin Clark has been one of many greatest tales in sports activities. Clark’s sport  — prolific scoring, deep taking pictures vary, full-court passes — is thrilling to look at. Sports activities media has even created the time period “the Caitlin Clark impact” to check with the ticket gross sales and tens of millions in TV viewership that Clark is answerable for. In all places Clark performs, whether or not it’s the College of Iowa, her alma mater, or the Indiana Fever, her present WNBA workforce, folks need to see her sport. 

For girls’s basketball, a sport that’s been missed and overshadowed by its male counterpart, the eye paid to Clark has been an achievement. Her video games draw the type of viewership that the NBA does, and identical goes for identify recognition. I’d wager that extra folks would be capable to identify Caitlin Clark than final 12 months’s NBA rookie of the 12 months (Victor Wembanyama). 

Whereas that focus has raised girls’s basketball’s profile, it’s additionally delivered to gentle some extraordinarily bizarre, unsavory habits from her followers and the media. 

Final 12 months, within the 2023 Nationwide Championship, Angel Reese was the topic of a nationwide dialog about her conduct after she taunted Clark within the last minutes — one thing Clark had accomplished to her opponents all through her event run. As a substitute of being seen as enjoyable or assured (as Clark’s antics had been portrayed by media and basketball followers) Reese’s chaff was dubbed “classless” or, as Keith Olbermann, a former ESPN anchor tweeted, “a fucking fool.” Because the pile-on grew and Reese discovered herself in the midst of a nationwide dialog about her character, Clark went to bat for her, reminding the fan base: “I get to play this sport and have emotion and put on it on my sleeves, and so does everybody else … I don’t assume Angel needs to be criticized in any respect.”

Clark is getting at just a few issues right here. For one, there’s the double normal of how she was handled by followers versus how her Black friends are handled, but additionally the deeply associated concept that she warrants some type of added benevolence that different gamers don’t. As Clark has moved to the WNBA, this narrative that Clark wants safety has solely grown. 

Clark’s fellow WNBA gamers are being portrayed within the media as petty and jealous of her accomplishments. Aliyah Boston, Clark’s teammate and reigning WNBA rookie of the 12 months, has restricted her social media after receiving hate from followers on-line for underperforming. Earlier this month, Chicago Sky participant Chennedy Carter fouled Clark with a shoulder test that the WNBA later upgraded to a extra critical foul. Clark mentioned that the foul was within the warmth of the second and that there’s no want for an apology. 

Nonetheless, the foul spurred an editorial from the Chicago Tribune and a WNBA inquiry from a sitting member of Congress. Extra alarming is that Carter and her Sky teammates mentioned they have been stalked and harassed by a person exterior a workforce lodge in Washington, DC, and wanted safety to deal with the scenario. Clearly, not all of Clark’s followers are of the stalker selection, however it’s not precisely a shock that somebody would harass the Sky workforce so long as distinguished folks hold pushing the false narrative that Clark wants safety from jealous gamers — even when Clark herself has quashed that concept a number of instances. 

Clark’s prominence and the dialog surrounding her have lately caught the eye of right-wing personalities, like former Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley. Haley tweeted about Clark’s Olympic omission, implying that the ladies on the US workforce weren’t one of the best US gamers and that Clark had been shortchanged: “I feel the Olympic choice committee needs to be requested: Do we would like one of the best workforce to symbolize our nation or not?” 

The notion that the US isn’t pretty much as good because it was and the folks representing the US — the workforce is predominantly Black and contains LGBTQ gamers — aren’t its greatest aligns with political messages that Haley used on the marketing campaign path to enchantment to voters. It appears Haley is extra eager about positioning Clark’s basketball profession as a tradition warfare and interesting her base than she is invested in Clark as a participant. Six months in the past, throughout a marketing campaign cease that doubled as a Hawkeyes tailgate in Coralville, Iowa, Haley referred to Clark as Kaitlan Collins, who is definitely a CNN anchor. 

Opposite to Haley’s opinion, Clark thinks the Olympic workforce is America’s greatest. “It’s essentially the most aggressive workforce on the earth … I’m going to be rooting for them to win gold,” Clark mentioned in a huddle with reporters on June 9.

The plain query surrounding Clark’s omission from the workforce is whether or not or not she was adequate to make it. However that doesn’t include a transparent reply, primarily as a result of the standards for making Crew USA has lengthy been subjective and typically relentlessly opaque. 

The choice committee has, in recent times, made some head-scratching choices. 

Again in 2016, Candace Parker — a future Corridor-of-Famer and one of many sport’s biggest gamers — was left off the workforce. Parker, who was 30 in 2016, was one one of the best gamers on the earth and helped the US win gold in 2008 and 2012.  She has mentioned that she thinks UConn’s Geno Auriemma, who was teaching the nationwide workforce on the time, didn’t need her on the workforce. Breanna Stewart, a latest graduate who Auriemma had coached at UConn, was the one participant beneath the age of 25 taken. 

Then in 2021 (the Olympics have been delayed due to the pandemic), Nneka Ogwumike was left off. Ogwumike, a perennial all-star and MVP (like Parker), was additionally 30 on the time. Daybreak Staley, the present coach at South Carolina and nationwide coach on the time, cited uncertainty over a knee harm as the rationale Ogwumike was not chosen. 

The teachings from these previous two Olympic snubs is that it’s fairly clear that Crew USA isn’t the 12 “greatest” gamers and that there’s priority for taking a youthful participant over a confirmed participant of their prime. Crew USA may even err on the aspect of warning on the subject of accidents. 

These arguments might need labored in Clark’s favor. She’s younger (like Stewart was in 2016) and is popping in a superb rookie season. Clark is averaging 16.8 factors per sport, 5.3 rebounds per sport, and 6.3 assists per sport within the WNBA. She ranks fourth on the subject of the league’s leaders in assists per sport and performs level guard, a place that the US isn’t terribly deep in — Angel Reese and Cameron Brink, Clark’s fellow rookies, are additionally having good seasons however play front-court positions the place the US is loaded. Brink made the 3×3 Olympic basketball workforce. 

Chelsea Grey, a 2020 Olympic gold medalist and level guard for the Las Vegas Aces, is on the 2024 workforce. She hasn’t performed within the WNBA this 12 months after a foot harm stored her out of the WNBA finals final 12 months. Grey and Clark play the identical place. Additional, Diana Taurasi — a five-time girls’s basketball gold medalist — may even be going to Paris regardless of averaging fewer factors, rebounds, and assists than Clark this season. 

The issue is, whilst you might make an argument that Grey and Taurasi ought to have been left off instead of Clark, there are additionally a few gamers — 2020 Olympic gold medalist Skylar Diggins Smith and WNBA scoring extraordinaire Arike Ogunbowale — who’re having higher seasons than Clark on this second who additionally aren’t going. Clark’s sport, whereas good, is marred by her 5.6 turnovers per sport and lack of toughness on protection. 

Maybe essentially the most fascinating argument in all of that is that this whole kerfuffle is over a minuscule quantity of minutes on the top of the bench. 

Whether or not it’s Taurasi, Grey, or Clark, the backup level guard will probably be the final spot known as to play. That theoretical lack of minutes was really an element, based on two nameless USA Basketball sources who spoke to USA Right now. They instructed the paper that the “concern over how Clark’s tens of millions of followers would react to what would probably be restricted enjoying time on a stacked roster was an element within the resolution making.”

If that reporting is to be believed, then there’s some merciless symmetry that Clark’s followers — particularly the poisonous ones — could have been a part of the choice course of in maintaining her off the roster. Leaving Clark off the workforce due to an anticipated backlash to meager minutes looks like a type of head-scratching, less-than-transparent causes. 

In the end, the one particular person immediately affected by Caitlin Clark’s Olympic omission is Clark, and he or she isn’t letting 2024’s disappointment have an effect on her future. “It is a dream. I feel it is just a bit extra motivation,” she instructed reporters this weekend. “You keep in mind that. Hopefully, when 4 years comes round, I might be there.”