Caitlin Clark Is Contagious On The Court

There’s this bit of broadcast chatter that stayed with me, from a game this past February between Caitlin Clark’s Iowa team and Nebraska. Jason Benetti, Kim Adams and sideline reporter Allison Williams were on the call, and Benetti brought up an observation Williams had made in prep the previous day: Clark’s opponents sometimes seemed to take wilder shots because of her. When they asked Iowa head coach Lisa Bluder for her read, she told the crew she noticed it, too. “She said you do see it,” Williams said. “It’s a little bit of this If she can do it, I can do it mentality.” They framed this as an advantage for Iowa, which makes sense: It's generally unwise to take an "If Caitlin Clark can do it, I can do it" approach to shot selection. (Cue the Patrick Ewing meme.) But then, down 14 points to start the fourth quarter, Nebraska went ahead and won.

The phrase “Caitlin Clark effect” saturates articles about WNBA broadcast rights and ticket sales, but I've been thinking about it more as an on-court phenomenon in the second half of the season. The Fever began the year 3-10, but this week clinched their first playoff berth since 2016—not coincidentally, Tamika Catchings’s final season. With Wednesday night's win over the Sparks, Indiana is now 18-16. By net rating in the eight games since the Olympic break ended, the Fever have been the third-best team in the league. They're winning with an offense remade by its newest addition. Clark brought her playmaking gifts to a once-stagnant team. Now her teammates have all caught the bug. 

Aliyah Boston's offensive IQ, on display since she was in college at South Carolina, functioned like a small bonus in her rookie season. She was a big who could low-key pass in 2023; this year, she is high-key one of the best passing bigs in the league. In games against Seattle and Connecticut this month—two legit defenses who can give her some trouble in the frontcourt—Boston has recorded eight assists. Her short roll is near automatic, especially when a cutting Kelsey Mitchell is on the other end.

No one on the Fever has felt the Clark effect quite like Mitchell has. "When you have two guards that are both making plays, it puts the other team in the tough position of what to take away, who to put on who," Clark said after she and Mitchell combined for 64 points with 10-of-18 three-point shooting against the Wings this past weekend. Mitchell ranks eighth on the league scoring leaderboard, and has also decided to start doing stuff like this:

The cliché that a point guard makes the players around her better generally means that she makes their job easier. She is, say, drawing an extra defender or finding her teammate a high-percentage look. Clark does all that, but the real magic of the Fever lies in their balance; there's never the sense that a single player is carrying everyone else. Everyone has leveled up, and it's turned their campaign from developmental to playoff-bound. They are officially the team no one wants to see in the first round—the league's best offense post-break.

On my visit to Indianapolis in May, when the team was showing its inexperience, I thought the Fever made basketball seem incredibly hard. But this is a hard game. It's hard to carry on playing while you get lobbed around in online culture wars. It's hard when hundreds of thousands of people who had never seen your head six months ago are suddenly calling for it. It's hard to play 11 games in the first 19 days of the season. It's hard to be young in the WNBA. You get by with some help from your teammates, and eventually, the game gets easy.