ESPN’s WNBA commentators Ryan Ruocco and Rebecca Lobo answered questions on Tuesday via Zoom to preview AT&T WNBA All-Star 2025 on ESPN and ABC.

This year’s All-Star Weekend will emanate from Indianapolis, IN with the WNBA Skills Challenge on Friday, July 18 at 8 p.m. ET on ESPN and the 2025 AT&T WNBA All-Star Game on Saturday, July 19 with coverage starting at 8 p.m. ET on ABC.

Rebecca, with Caitlin and Napheesa and how they drafted, how would you grade their drafting skills and how they picked their teams? Ryan, for you, calling an All-Star Game like this, how would you separate it from the entertainment aspect of it and also for like the seriousness of it?

REBECCA LOBO: I’ll start. I give them both A-pluses for their drafting. A big thing for the players at All-Star Weekend is to have fun and enjoy the people who they’re with in the locker room, so they both right away take teammates in that regard.

It’s a great opportunity to kind of also get to know some of the players who you might not know as well that you’re just used to competing against, but you haven’t really had a chance to get on a team with.

I thought they both did great. I think it’s going to be a really fun and entertaining game, and you want to be, again, surrounded by the people who are going to make you have the most enjoyable experience, and I think both of those women did that with their selections.

RYAN RUOCCO: For an All-Star Game, you’re definitely going into it with kind of a more broad strokes feel, a more light feel than you are a regular game. You want to have an expanded audience. We want to make sure they know why each of those players is playing in this game and what kind of season they’re having and what kind of career they’ve been having and make sure we’re accurately painting the picture for their accomplishments and why they’re here, and also bringing to light all the levity that comes with an All-Star Game while also keeping your finger on the pulse of the competition and understanding there’s moments where it’s going to dial up and moments where it’s going to dial back down.

I think one of the great things about the WNBA All-Star Game is it is typically very competitive and typically has some drama at the end of the game where there is a win-loss component that feels compelling.

At those moments, it’s our job to be able to dive into the competitive piece of it as well.

In Christine Brennan’s recent biography and some of the online discourse, there’s been a lot of focus on the growth of the league in the last two years and the idea that Caitlin Clark has had to — in those narratives, that she’s had to work against some of the players in the league and the league as a whole to grow the sport of women’s basketball. Do you think that’s an accurate perception at all, and where do you think that idea is coming from?

REBECCA LOBO: I haven’t read the book, so I don’t know exactly what Christine is saying or asserting.

I’ve since last year kind of refuted over and over the idea that Caitlin is having to work against the league or the players in the league. I think you have a bunch of competitive women in this league who go out every day to learn and to, if they’re defending Caitlin Clark, try to shut her down.

Again, I haven’t read the book, but sort of the narrative that started a year ago of the other players being jealous and that fueling physical play that steps over the line, I think for the most part is not an accurate narrative.

RYAN RUOCCO: I would just add this. I think what is absolutely true — and Rebecca even went back and just looked up data and video when it came to this — is Caitlin Clark has been defended unlike any player that we’ve ever seen in the history of this league. And so if people try and act like, oh, she’s being defended just like every other great rookie is, that’s not true.

We’ve covered this league a long time. Rebecca was in its infancy. People weren’t covering every great rookie guard 94 feet, and even if you look at the number of times that Paige Bueckers gets trapped in a pick-and-roll, a blitz and a pick-and-roll, it’s not nearly as much as Caitlin Clark, but those are basketball things.

So I think, like, that’s definitely true. I don’t think that that is motivated by targeting. I think what’s happened is anytime people see zealous defense against Caitlin, they try and retrofit the narrative of, oh, she’s being targeted, when I think the vast majority of the time — I’m not going to say there aren’t any exceptions to it because I’m sure there are at times — but the vast majority of the time, really what it is from my perspective is it’s people trying to defend the most unique offensive weapon this league has ever seen.

REBECCA LOBO: I’m just going to tail end that, too. Her getting picked up full court, the way she’s blitzed, it’s not because of any other reason than that’s how you have to guard her because of how dangerous she is 94 feet from the basket because she’s one of the rare players in the league who, when she’s 80 feet from the basket, can lead you into an assist that needs no dribbles.

That’s the reason that the players have defended her has been different from any other player we’ve seen, as Ryan pointed out, is because she’s different from any other player that we’ve ever seen.

Rebecca, I think there’s six players in this game with three years of experience or less, and I think across the league you see some young players having a lot of early success. I’m curious, what have you noticed about the level of preparation some of these young players have coming into the league in these last couple years?

REBECCA LOBO: Well, first of all, I’m completely distracted by that spectacular shoebox display behind you. I’m assuming there’s actual shoes in the boxes, too.

I’ve got a small problem.

REBECCA LOBO: I wouldn’t say it’s a problem. Well-played by you. It’s been so exciting, right, especially this year to see all the rookies who are having a big impact, and not only the ones who have been voted to All-Star Games. You have a year 2 in Washington and Paige Bueckers and others, but when you just look at what a rookie means this year in the WNBA, I had our research department look it up last week, I wish I knew the exact number, but the number of 2025 draft picks who have gotten game action this year is really high.

The part that’s fascinating to me about the rookies is all the rookies who are playing in the league this year, and it’s double digits who weren’t drafted in 2025, some of them are 28, 29, 30 years old — you look at the Valkyries as an example or the Phoenix Mercury as an example as well.

It’s interesting what encompasses a rookie these days, as teams look to get rookie salaries but getting players with experience, much like Phoenix did, but also some of the really young talented players that are true drafted this year rookies who are having an impact and the way that they are ready for the league.

It’s interesting, Ryan and I talk about this, too, a player like Sonia Citron, we thought she was going to be a really good pro. We didn’t know she was going to be this level of a pro. Even Kiki, yeah, she’s going to be a pretty good pro, didn’t know that she was going to be this level of a pro right away because usually there’s a little bit more of that learning curve.

The whole rookie conversation to me is fascinating this year because you have young rookies just out of college and then you have all these old, experienced, veteran from overseas rookies making contributions as well.

RYAN RUOCCO: I know the question was for Rebecca, but Rebecca and I have talked about this as well. A few years ago we had a string of years where when we got to the fourth or fifth player on the All-Rookie Team, we’d be texting each other like who do you pick, and you literally would have to find someone who just played minutes. That’s how thin those rookie classes were.

Last year and this year, it’s a real competition to get into that Top 5, and there are a lot of worthy candidates, and I think that’s such a great sign.

Rebecca, Gabby is having a career season so far only halfway through the year, Gabby Williams. What do you see as the biggest improvement she’s taken to her game and that next level that she’s added to that, now being that face of Seattle?

REBECCA LOBO: Well, I think it’s a huge help that she’s been there from the beginning. She had an onramp to not just joining the team at some point in the season, and her confidence level is sky high.

She was so incredibly impressive a year ago in the Olympics. I remember watching the Olympics and the gold medal game, and Coach Auriemma texting me and saying have we ever had an MVP of the Olympics who wasn’t on the gold medal winning team? That’s how impressive her performance was.

You’ve seen a growth not only in her game but in her confidence. She’s so incredibly disruptive on the defensive end of the floor. When she was at UConn, we talked consistently about her elite athleticism and how she was always going to be the best athlete on the floor, and now we’ve seen over the course of her WNBA career, that her skill set has caught up to that as well.

But just her comfort level and her confidence, her disruptive nature on the defensive end, but she just has a different level of skill and comfort within that skill now on the offensive end, as well.

I just figured obviously we’re at the halfway point of the season or thereabouts, and last year it was an obvious narrative. Caitlin Clark comes in, the ratings are just through the roof. This year it’s been a little bit more kind of fits and starts, she’s missed a lot of games. Seems like the ratings are kind of holding up well. I was curious, obviously, what are both of you sensing about this second season? Is there maybe an element where the momentum has kind of maybe lagged a bit because she’s missed so many games? Is it maybe the case that some of the rest of the league is starting to pick up a bit more than we saw even last year? What is your sense?

RYAN RUOCCO: I mean, my sense is that things are still trending in a very positive, progressive, at times explosive way. I think we just put out our graphic today, and maybe you can check me on this, but our game this past Sunday, which was a 30-point blowout, did over 2 million viewers and were up I think like 69 percent year over year for our ABC games, 7 percent for our overall WNBA on ESPN games.

And when you look at the games we still have to come, we still haven’t had our New York-Minnesota matchups which are coming. We have a lot more Indiana coming than what we’ve had thus far. So I think everything feels great. We definitely are — to your last question, we’re definitely seeing a rise in those non-Indiana games as well. That has become steady.

Obviously Caitlin’s peak is different, and that’s a metric, an objective fact. But what is now kind of the floor has been raised significantly for all games, and then even the heights that we’re seeing on some of the other games are hitting places that a couple years ago we would have dreamed of, and now it’s happening with a lot of regularity.

As far as the All-Star Game coming up this weekend, last year we saw that USA versus WNBA format, and there was a lot of competitiveness because of that format. I know you guys have said the WNBA All-Star Game is usually competitive, but do you expect it to — you would have to think it can’t possibly reach what we saw last year with those narratives of Caitlin being left off the team, Arike Ogunbowale being left off. Do you think it’ll look a little bit more like a regular All-Star Game in terms of that intensity?

REBECCA LOBO: Yeah, I think it’s unfair to expect this kind of an All-Star Game to look like the USA team All-Star Games do because those are so incredibly competitive whenever we’ve had those because the USA team comes out from the jump with a certain purpose. It’s not like a game where anybody’s ramping up to the closeness at the end.

Also when you add in the 4-point shot, which they have again this year, it changes the dynamic of it. A couple of years ago in Chicago, I don’t know how many were taken, but too many.

But in terms of All-Star Games and people who are really familiar with the NBA All-Star Game, WNBA All-Star Games tend to be a lot more competitive than NBA All-Star Games tend to be. Will it be as competitive and played as hard as we saw a year ago? No, that’s just an unfair ask just because those USA years are just so different from every other All-Star Game.

Rebecca and Ryan, last year my colleague asked you what did you believe that the WNBA needed to do to increase their representation of Black female coaches in this league and we have seen two actually lose their jobs since then, and Noelle Quinn is now the only Black female coach in the WNBA right now in a league where the predominant players are actually Black women. I’m wondering what do you think the W has to do to increase the representation of Black women in the league since there doesn’t seem to be an increase over the years?

REBECCA LOBO: Well, I think you have to have head coaches who continue to make it a priority to hire young Black women coaches so that they can learn and continue to get better and flourish and then have the opportunity to move on to be head coaches.

You even see that with Tanisha Wright. She’s not the head coach anymore, but she’s now an assistant, and I think she’s a terrific coach and hopefully will get another opportunity, especially as the league expands and grows and there’s more opportunities in general.

But I think the biggest piece of it will be for young women, whether they’re former players or not, to continue to get the reps on the sideline as assistants so they can get the experience and the know-how so that they can be successful, and hopefully because they have a lot of support from ownership groups as well and have a chance to thrive once they become head coaches themselves.

This is for both of you guys, but mainly Rebecca, starting with you. With all the additions of new teams, the game continues to be on the ascent and really a transformative time. There continues to be drama laden around Caitlin Clark. No matter what she does, there’s some kind of drama. Do you think it’s the way women’s sports are covered, where women — I’d like to especially ask Rebecca — are expected to be nurturing at all costs, and if they give a competitive answer, sometimes people have a problem with that? Is it really fair to treat people like that?

REBECCA LOBO: I don’t know if that’s the case or if we just have that Caitlin Clark is sort of a lightning rod. In terms of if people want to watch her play and there’s a lot of attention around her so there’s going to be a lot of conversation around her.

New fans come to the W a year ago and they’re not used to watching it. They don’t know it’s a much more physical league than the college basketball that they’ve watched, so there’s a lot of opinions and discussion just because people aren’t familiar with the game and how it’s played.

I think it’s more that than it is just sort of a gender narrative. I think it’s people have not been paying this close attention to the WNBA, and so some of the things that they’re seeing are a little bit surprising to them.

But I don’t necessarily — I think it’s more that than I think it’s sort of a gender attack.

Obviously this is the first season for the Golden State Valkyries. I want to get your thoughts on how they’ve added to the WNBA, and what can we expect from this year’s All-Star Weekend?

RYAN RUOCCO: I mean, I’m blown away with what the Valkyries are doing. It is incredible when you look at the way they have spackled together their roster and that they are competitive every single night. I’m talking about spackling together their roster in the off-season. Then they’ve had to do it multiple times during the season.

And for them to be able to compete with the best teams in the league, to really — every single game, whether it’s last night in a tough loss to Phoenix or it’s against the better teams in the league, they’re in it every night.

I think Natalie would obviously be the Coach of the Year if the season ended today. I don’t think there’s any doubt about that. And the atmosphere at those games — I haven’t been out there for one yet, but it just looks unbelievable.

Yeah, I just think it’s so impressive what they’re doing, and for All-Star Weekend, I think we’re going to have an amazing pool of candidates for the 3-Point Contest and Skills Competition. The All-Star Game, we have so many prime-age transcendent stars right now in this league, and I think also just the league is in this place where it’s culturally iconic, and the All-Star Game is maybe the crown jewel event that celebrates all of that.

I feel like it’s just going to be fun. It’s going to be a really fun, vibrant weekend.

REBECCA LOBO: Same. I’ve so enjoyed watching the Valkyries play this year. It’s pretty incredible what their organization has done in terms of what they’ve built there, the environment, you can feel it when you’re watching games on TV. Like Ryan, I haven’t called game out there yet. The way they play, it feels like it’s such a fun team to play for, just the way they share the basketball.

You’re not looking at one or two superstars yet. There are all these players who just blend so well with one another, and I agree with Ryan; if a vote was taken today, certainly Natalie would be the Coach of the Year.

In terms of WNBA All-Star Weekend, I think it’s going to be a blast. I think it’s fascinating, and Ryan can add on to this if he wants. The All-Star Game in Chicago in 2023 was the first time it felt like there was an event happening outside of the game. There were sponsor parties, there was just like a feel in the city like you have for NBA All-Star Games. So that was just a couple of years ago.

Now it’s this great event. We were just in Indiana and seeing all the signage on the buildings and how the anticipation already a week out for the All-Star Game was pretty incredible.

I’m really excited to get there and just feel the energy of it all.

RYAN RUOCCO: Yeah, that is definitely true. I think was it ’23 or ’22, Chicago? I think Chicago might have been ’22, Vegas ’23 and then Phoenix last year, right, but it felt like that was the one — that felt like the watershed one that kind of broke through, and then it’s just steadily continued to climb since then.

I joke, and Rebecca has heard me reference this before, but it used to be you do the All-Star Game, the 3-Point competition was like at halftime, and then there was like a little banquet after the All-Star Game, and that was the extent of the All-Star parties.

Now there’s all these really cool, fun events and activations all around All-Star, and I think it just speaks to the place that this league is now in when it comes to sports and pop culture.

I want to get your thoughts on the expansion teams again with Cleveland, Detroit and Philadelphia. What are your thoughts on that? Also the Portland Fire, their name is coming back. I want to get your thoughts on both of them.

REBECCA LOBO: I was thrilled to see that Portland went with the Fire because that was from my era and their logo is amazing. I love it. I love the colors. I love the look of it. I’m excited for them.

In terms of the expansion out through ’30, it’s all going to come back to the collective bargaining agreement that is signed. What is the expansion draft going to look like next year? How many players are teams going to be able to protect of the players that are left after free agency when everybody is a free agent coming out of this year?

There’s just going to be a lot that’s unknown, but certainly there’s a ton of opportunities now for more coaches, as we were talking about earlier, but certainly for whether it’s young talent coming out of college to make a team or to bring in more players internationally, excited to see the league expand and mostly, for me, excited that a couple of those cities have direct flights from Hartford.

Rebecca and Ryan, I was just wondering, what have you made of how Paige Bueckers has performed in her rookie season, and also how she’s been handling some of the adversity in Dallas?

RYAN RUOCCO: I mean, she’s awesome. She looks great. We were talking about it the other day, that was the first chance we had to call one of her games this year, and she already moves like one of the best guards in the league.

I think there’s a real shot she’ll be All-WNBA this season. If she’s not, she’s going to be under serious consideration for it. She will be one of the top three or four or five guards in this league for a very long time.

Paige, she’s, as we saw documented throughout her UConn career — and we got to cover all her years there, so we got to know her pretty well — she’s an amazing teammate. She’s so thoughtful and deferential and respectful, and I think, whether it’s something like the other day speaking up about what Arike did on the floor when she didn’t shoot well, or just like how much she cares.

Even when we were talking to her in pregame, she talked about how much she cares about getting her teammates going when she’s in that point guard spot, and she’s just a winner. I think some people wondered how she was going to translate to the pros. I know even watching her a couple of years ago in college, I started to wonder, wow, what is her ceiling as a pro, what’s the adjustment going to be like?

But I felt like this year at UConn she got her full swag back. She got her ability to take over games herself, to score when she needed to, and it just feels like her season has been a continuation of that, even though she’s on a Dallas team that has struggled as expected.

REBECCA LOBO: I’ll just add, because we just did that game and had a chance to talk to her beforehand, she thinks the game at the next level. Even when she was talking to us about some of the things she was going to try to do against Indiana’s defense, she was just talking and thinking the game at another level, and Ryan asked her specifically, too, about how she was handling having some struggles in terms of the team’s win-loss record, and she just talked about not getting wrapped up in the result and really trying to stay focused in the moment and the ways she can get better, how she’s adapted to the pro game in terms of the schedule, the physicality and all those things and how she needs to get her rest and recovery in and all the things that she’s doing in that regard.

She already was doing those things in college to a degree. She already kind of had the pro mentality in terms of how she was taking care of her body and preparing and developing. But every time we talk to her, just an incredibly impressive young women who I think really understands that No. 1 picks tend to go to places that are going to struggle that first year and to kind of work through that and still perform at a high level, which she has done. She’s just so, so good.

There has of course been a heightened interest in the WNBA over the years. Can you detail the changes you’ve seen or the non-changes you’ve seen in how the game is covered or how players are approached or how team PR members protect their players from the media or any fan vitriol?

REBECCA LOBO: Well, I’ll start with how I’ve seen it change. This year I did two games in Indiana where after the game I went to the airport to fly back because they were afternoon games, and both of those times in the security line it was littered with fans wearing Indiana Fever clothes who had flown in for the game.

Over the course of time, I’ve flown out a lot after different games, and I’ve never seen an airport with that many people who had flown in for a WNBA game. People are traveling to these places. Same thing when you go to hotels. People fly in, and in particular I’m talking about the Fever who are staying there, and they’ve made an excursion from wherever else in the country to come back.

While we’ve seen places draw a lot of fans, it hasn’t been quite like this in terms of it being a destination weekend for somebody to come out and watch games.

Certainly there’s been a lot more coverage, whether it’s from the change in the way media operates anyway, but like back when I first started covering this league in 2004, there were times where I was going to call a game, and I was trying to find clips online of local media writing about their team, and there were some teams where there was very little. You could not even find a recap of the game from the night before.

Now there is so much information out there, and of course with social media, the players can put so much out on their own as well.

But the way this league is covered and also consumed over the course — I’m going to go big picture here, but over the course of the last 20 years, has completely changed, a night-and-day change.

I just wanted to know, what have you noticed when you’re going to all the NBA cities about the atmosphere of the arenas and also the cities when people are excited to go watch a lot of these WNBA games that you haven’t seen in a few years back or even longer back in the WNBA history?

RYAN RUOCCO: Well, I think that just in general, attendance just feels up everywhere. This is my 13th year doing the WNBA, and I can remember in the beginning, we used to talk about before every game, what kind of crowd are we going to get. Oh, there’s a few thousand people here, that’s great. If you talked to some of our cameramen, directors, they would talk about how they might only — they might want to concentrate the fans on one side of the arena where the game is being shot from so it looked more filled in or behind one hoop or another for that reason. Those worries are just gone. Really kind of across the board, the crowds and the atmospheres are unbelievable, and whether it’s Barclays Center, what’s happening at Chase Center or what we’ve seen in Vegas — I know they’re not an NBA city, to the origin of your question, or Target Center, what’s happening in Gainbridge Fieldhouse, these crowds are 15,000 plus every single night.

It’s just fun. I think everybody who worked on the project knew how awesome the league was, knew how special the women were, knew how great the competition was, and what’s happened is over the last few years, I think people have just realized more broadly, and it’s gotten this stamp of being culturally cool, and we were all like, yeah, we’ve known it’s cool forever. Now everybody else sees that it is as well, and they’ve hopped on. So now it’s an event.

I’ve had more people in my life asking me for tickets to games than ever before. And from all corners of my life. People who you would not necessarily expect it from, like middle-aged men: Hey, I want to go to a W game; can you get me tickets?

Just that has been rewarding, and I think for all of us, it’s fun, because you like to be able to share something you love with other people as broadly as possible, and that’s kind of what’s happened here.

You talked about the event that the All-Star Game is, and I think with the WNBA, it is because there are so many different people coming in, but to what Rebecca just said, it was announced Caitlin Clark will participate in the three-point shootout along with Sabrina Ionescu, Allisha Gray, and obviously Caitlin turned down the NBA, so what do you think that says as a statement for this weekend coming up?

REBECCA LOBO: I loved when she said she wanted the first one she did to be at All-Star in front of her own fans for the WNBA. I thought that was phenomenal. I’m thrilled to hear — who are the other participants?

RYAN RUOCCO: Sonia, Sabrina, Kelsey, Allisha and CC.

REBECCA LOBO: Could we ask for a better pool for our three-point contest? It’s really cool because it’s been coming up on my feed from when Sabrina won a couple years ago and Ryan’s delightful call as she’s making shot after shot after shot after shot, and I think that three-point contest when Sabrina won that year, I really think it brought a lot of new fans to the league because it was such a unique and fun representation by her.

This is going to be awesome. I’m thrilled about it. I’m thrilled that the league got these particular players, that the players agreed to do it. But back to your question, I loved it when Caitlin said, I want to do it for the first time in front of my fans, for the W, because we all know a couple years ago when Sabrina did it at NBA All-Star, that’s what everybody was tuning in for was to see her do it again. It’s going to be pretty great this year.

RYAN RUOCCO: To that point, Rebecca, I think even Liberty superfan Jason Sudeikis, if I remember the origin story, he talked about watching Sabrina at the three-point contest and being like oh, my gosh, this is unbelievable and that being what really hooked him into the franchise.

I think we have the potential for moments like that, and it’s so cool that Caitlin was like, no, this is — you don’t need to go somewhere else. This platform is big enough because they’ve made it big enough.

What have you thought of Sabrina and Stewart’s first half of the season? It’s probably a little bit harder with Jones out, creating space so much, but what have you thought about their first halves?

REBECCA LOBO: I think they both had a great first half of the season. There have been stretches or times where shots aren’t going in, but I think they both have played incredibly well. What’s been interesting to me when I look a little bit more globally outside of just the Liberty but at teams in the league, when a team might be struggling or if they’re exceeding expectations, look at their schedule and look at who they’re missing, and for the New York Liberty, they went off to that 9-0 start with one of the easier schedules in the league. Now they have this home stretch, but they’re without Jonquel Jones for a period of time. They’re without Fiebich for a period of time. We see the Minnesota Lynx, who are right now in the middle of eight games in 14 days; that’s a ridiculously tough schedule. We saw a couple of games ago where they lose to Chicago.

But I think you have to look at things a little bit globally. Like how is this player playing. Well, what is her schedule looking like right now, who else is beside them, who is not.

But Sabrina has flourished and did, when Cloud was out, kind of leading the charge and she’s gone back and forth from being the primary ball handler to secondary, and then Stewie, once again, just having a great year. In a weird way, Stewie sort of flying under the radar because of all the conversation in terms of MVP being with Fie and AT.

But both of them performing really well for a New York Liberty team that I think is going to be super dangerous, and especially once they get JJ back I think will kind of be on the ascent again.

My question goes back to the Christine Brennan biography, and in the biography she credits Caitlin Clark for the league’s growth over the past couple seasons in attendance and viewership and things of that nature. For both of you guys, do you think it’s fair to say Caitlin Clark’s arrival to the league has acted as the catalyst for the league’s growth, or do you think it’s more complicated than that?

RYAN RUOCCO: Well, these things are always more complicated than the mediums that are often discussed and allowed for. The reality is that in so many of these conversations, multiple things are true and nuances required, and I’m sure everybody here can attest that Twitter or any other derivative of it is not the best place for those conversations to take place if we’re actually looking for truth and honesty and learning and understanding.

I think what’s true, and I think it’s just objective fact at this moment, is Caitlin Clark is a metric phenomenon like we have never seen in the history of women’s basketball. Maybe we’ve never seen in the history of women’s sports. We’ve only seen a couple times in the history of sports, period. The best comp would be Tiger Woods and what he did for golf when it comes to viewership, merchandise, attendance, ratings. She’s had that supernova-like effect. And to deny that is to deny reality.

However, if Caitlin Clark had come along 10 years ago, I don’t know that it would have mattered. I don’t know that we would have gotten to this place because what was happening is every metric was already pointed in the right direction. If you go back before Caitlin Clark exploded, if you were to look at our commentary from four or five years ago, you would have heard us talking about the great direction this league was trending in.

So the way, the analogy I often like to use and we use this sometimes in conversations that Rebecca and I will have with our good friend Sue Bird, is the fire was burning, and that fire was burning from a lot of different players who had built up this league for a long time to make it the credible place that it is, and what they needed was the lighter fuel to make it explode, and Caitlin has been the lighter fuel.

I think what’s unfortunate is when people try and build up Caitlin as she deserves, they feel a need to knock down everybody who came before her, or if people want to make sure the people who came before her get the credit they deserve, they feel a need to knock down Caitlin’s contributions, and the reality is they both — the old guard, the other players in the league, the league itself and then also Caitlin, have had a remarkable impact to get us to where we are, and it’s a symbiotic relationship.

Caitlin Clark needs the WNBA, and the WNBA needs Caitlin Clark. Unfortunately, I feel like it’s too convenient and juicy in the places that this is discussed to really get at the truth of it.

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