Opinion: Will Caitlin Clark Be The GOAT Of Women’s Basketball?
posted by Westley Reaves Jr. | March 12, 2024 | In SportsCaitlyn Clark has had a dominant collegiate career at the University of Iowa to say the least. Now she is the all-time leading scorer in women’s college basketball and has surpassed Pete Maravich’s men’s basketball points record as well, which has been held for decades now.
She also was the first player in women’s basketball to lead the country in scoring and assists in the same season and led Iowa to their first ever NCAA National Championship game as well. She’s won pretty much everything an individual player can win in college basketball.
But will this dominance carry over to the WNBA?
Just recently Clark declared that she will be going into the WNBA draft. Immediately the Indiana Fever, the current team with the number 1 selection in the draft, received huge interest in ticket sales for the upcoming season. The WNBA as a whole also saw ticket sales increase after Clark’s announcement.
If you ask anyone who has followed Clark’s career so far, most would say she is on the path of being an all-time great. But we’ve seen a dominant player like her before who was the former all time college women’s basketball leading scorer, such as Kelsey Plum from the University of Washington. There are similarities between Plum’s game and Clark’s, but Plum did not become the all-star level player that she is now until a couple of years of adjustment in the WNBA.
Now granted Clark is definitely coming in on a completely different scale. Her shooting efficiency is compared to the likes of Steph Curry, and her passing is touted be of the likes of Sue Bird and John Stockton. She already trumps what Plum’s stats were in college, only averaging around 5 assists a game, while Clark has consistently averaged 8 in her career. So that does add to Clark fans’ reasoning of her coming out of the gate on fire right at the jump.
But even though I agree with most fans that are saying she is going to be fantastic, I would be remiss not to at least give Clark grace time to adjust to the professional game. She is not going to be going against subpar defenses on a weekly basis. She will be going against top talent in every fundamental of the game– everyone will be athletic, everyone can score. So, it will be important for the critics and believers to give Clark time once she steps on a WNBA floor for the first time.
So can Caitlin Clark surpass the legends of Cynthia Cooper, Maya Moore, Cheryl Miller, and the current named GOAT Diana Taurasi? Yes, I definitely think she can and could go miles ahead of a lot of the players I just named. But it may be a possibility that instant dominance may not be in her rookie year. But who am I to doubt everything she has accomplished despite the critics?
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