The Caitlin Clark conversation isn’t slowing down. The Indiana Fever guard returned to the WNBA last weekend after missing most of her sophomore season, and her arrival in the league two years ago is still being unpacked.
USA TODAY columnist Christine Brennan, whose 2025 book “On Her Game” dug into the Clark phenomenon and the WNBA’s response to it, is now running a podcast miniseries called Hoops Hype: The Caitlin Clark Conversation.
The latest episode featured a guest with serious credibility on what happens when one athlete carries an entire sport, and she didn’t pull her punches.
What Briana Scurry Said About the WNBA’s Caitlin Clark Mistake
Two-time Olympic gold medalist Briana Scurry knows what a tidal wave looks like. The former USWNT goalkeeper was on the 1999 World Cup-winning team and has spent decades watching women’s sports navigate moments of mainstream breakthrough.
Speaking with Brennan on the podcast, she said the WNBA missed an obvious step when Clark entered the league.
“The league, I think, dropped the ball on that. The league should have had seminars or workshops preparing these players for not only the groundswell of a wave of people coming to watch their games that wasn’t there before and all the conversation and controversy around how the league is going to change because of Caitlin Clark,” Scurry said.
She made clear this wasn’t a knock on Clark and that her talent is real.
“She’s once in a century kind of talent. There’s no ifs ands and buts about it. She hits that three from past the NBA line. So, there’s no mistaking that she is an incredible talent and once in a generation a century talent.”
The disservice, in Scurry’s framing, was to the players already in the league. They weren’t equipped to handle either the resentment that came with a white player suddenly becoming the face of a majority-Black league or the commercial windfall sitting in front of them.
“But the players that were currently in the WNBA were done a disservice by the league for not preparing them for no. 1, if they had bitterness or anger around this particular situation, where now this white player was coming and all of a sudden all these other people are coming and looking.”
The point lands harder when you map it onto what’s happened in the league since 2024.
How the Numbers Back Up Scurry’s Argument
The Clark Effect was never theoretical. Her rookie year drove WNBA regular-season viewership to its highest level in nearly 30 years.
Fever games averaged 1.18 million viewers in 2024 compared to 394,000 for everyone else. The Fever became the first team in WNBA history to draw more than 300,000 fans across a regular season.
But then 2025 happened. Clark played in just 13 of Indiana’s 44 regular-season games and missed the Commissioner’s Cup Final. She suffered from a string of soft tissue injuries that shut her down by mid-July.
And this is where it got interesting. Viewership numbers began to decline, as Scurry had warned.
When Clark was not on the floor, numbers collapsed. According to Front Office Sports and Sports Media Watch, WNBA national broadcasts had 55% fewer viewers during stretches without CC.
Yet, the league posted its most-watched regular season since 1998, averaging 969,000 viewers across ABC, ESPN, CBS, and Ion. It’s a 3% increase year-over-year, propped up largely by Nielsen’s new “Big Data + Panel” measurement. Non-Fever games on Ion actually went up 15 percent.
Numbers show that the league is in a healthier place than it was three years ago. Rookie class behind Clark is actually helping carry the broader interest. New names like Paige Bueckers, JuJu Watkins, and Azzi Fudd are carrying this interest forward, but the dependency on Clark is pretty real.
All thanks to Clark, every single player in the league has a bigger platform than they did before Clark arrived. The endorsement portfolios, podcast deals, and brand campaigns that have flowed to players like Angel Reese, Sophie Cunningham, Napheesa Collier, and A’ja Wilson all sit downstream of the audience Clark pulled in.
Clark scored 20 points, 7 assists, and 5 rebounds in the Fever’s season opener against the Dallas Wings on Saturday. She passed 1,000 career points in her 54th professional game.
