Caitlin Clark, who helped develop the recognition of ladies’s basketball together with her record-breaking school profession on the College of Iowa, was essentially the most no-brainer decide 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 Could 14 with a doubleheader on ESPN2 main off with Indiana towards 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 sport, a matchup that drew extra viewers than the boys’s finale for the primary time ever and drew 18.7 million viewers.
Clark, who scored 30 in that sport to finish her profession, scored an NCAA Division I report 3,951 factors in her 4 years, breaking each the boys’s and girls’s marks. She additionally turned the primary girls’s Division I participant to report 3,000 factors and 1,000 assists.
The 6-foot taking pictures guard now joined a group within the Fever that haven’t made the WNBA playoffs since 2016, however now need to 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 Could 14’s opener, eight on Ion and two on the CBS Tv Community. Indiana may even be highlighted 13 occasions on NBA TV, 4 occasions on Prime Video, and as soon as on CBS Sports activities Community.
Clark’s recognition has boosted her personal profile as nicely, with commercials for State Farm peppering this 12 months’s Girls’s NCAA Match protection. Most just lately, she appeared on Saturday Evening Stay 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.