Caitlin Clark, who helped develop the recognition of ladies’s basketball together with her record-breaking faculty profession on the College of Iowa, was probably the most no-brainer choose of the WNBA Draft on Monday, going No. 1 to the Indiana Fever.
The league will waste no time placing Clark entrance and heart: The common season begins Might 14 with a doubleheader on ESPN2 main off with Indiana in opposition to Connecticut, the primary of a full slate of Fever video games slated for nationwide broadcasts.
Clark led Iowa to back-to-back NCAA girls’s nationwide championship video games, most just lately earlier this month when the Hawkeyes misplaced to undefeated South Carolina within the title recreation, a matchup that drew extra viewers than the lads’s finale for the primary time ever and drew 18.7 million viewers.
Clark, who scored 30 in that recreation to finish her profession, scored an NCAA Division I document 3,951 factors in her 4 years, breaking each the lads’s and girls’s marks. She additionally turned the primary girls’s Division I participant to document 3,000 factors and 1,000 assists.
The 6-foot taking pictures guard now joined a workforce within the Fever that haven’t made the WNBA playoffs since 2016, however now should back-to-back No. 1 picks in Clark and Aliyah Boston.
Final week, when the WNBA launched its schedule for the 2024 season, it had 36 of 40 Indiana Fever video games set for nationwide broadcasts or on streaming platforms: Eight video games throughout ABC, ESPN and ESPN2 together with Might 14’s opener, eight on Ion and two on the CBS Tv Community. Indiana can even be highlighted 13 instances on NBA TV, 4 instances on Prime Video, and as soon as on CBS Sports activities Community.
Clark’s reputation has boosted her personal profile as nicely, with commercials for State Farm peppering this 12 months’s Ladies’s NCAA Event protection. Most just lately, she appeared on Saturday Evening Reside this previous weekend (she was in New York for tonight’s draft, held on the Brooklyn Academy of Music), collaborating in a “Weekend Replace” skit skewering co-anchor Michael Che for his jokes making enjoyable of ladies’s sports activities.