Once Caitlin Clark got her feet wet, she started leaving footprints all over the WNBA

The WNBA semifinals start Sunday, and the league goes on without Caitlin Clark for the next couple weeks.

“I’m going to play some golf,” Clark said Wednesday night. “That’s what I’m going to do until it becomes too cold in Indiana. I’ll become a professional golfer.”

She’ll probably be breaking par before the first snowflakes arrive.

If Clark isn’t worn out from basketball right now, she never will be. Starting with the exhibition game one in Kinnick Stadium last Oct. 15, Clark played in 85 games from then until Wednesday when her Indiana Fever were eliminated in the playoffs by the Connecticut Sun.

There was a third-straight Big Ten tournament title, a second-straight NCAA title-game appearance, a second-straight consensus national Player of the Year designation, the No. 1 pick in the 2024 WNBA draft, that league’s Rookie of the Year honor, and the Fever getting their first non-losing season and playoff appearance since 2016.

Of course there’s more. So many statistics. Totaling a league-record 337 assists. Setting the 28-year-old league’s single-game record with 19. Rookie-records for points, 3-pointers and triple-doubles.

Shattering attendance records at home and on the road. Shattering WNBA television ratings records. Getting the WNBA to claim turf in national sports forums after doing the same at Iowa.

It’s exhausting just making a list.

“Phenomenon” doesn’t do Clark justice. Who else could have gotten a significant number of people watching a WNBA playoff game on an NFL Sunday? Who else would have thousands of people in Las Vegas, Brooklyn and Atlanta cheering for the visiting team?

Who else could go the entire year without saying anything remotely controversial and yet be a central figure in so many controversies?

Clark knows better than anyone that she can take a hard foul and dish one out, get jawed at during a game and jaw right back, and bark at referees like a 10-year veteran. But so far, she has always left it on the court. Unlike fans, who were happy to villainize players like Angel Reese and Chennedy Carter of Chicago, and this week, DiJonai Carrington of Connecticut.

Being smart, Clark never inserted herself into off-court commentary about it. She didn’t whine about injustice when she wasn’t chosen to be on the U.S. women’s basketball Olympic team.

She just kept playing, better and better. The Fever began the season 1-8. I was at their second game. It was hard to watch. They looked awful. Clark was indecisive, and her teammates seemed to have no idea how to play with her. The playoffs seemed a pipe dream.

You know the rest. Indiana went 20-20 and made the postseason without having to sweat its final few games. In the 14 games after the WNBA’s Olympic break, Clark averaged 23.2 points and almost 9 assists.

“Caitlin Clark is the best passer in the WNBA,” Hall of Famer/ESPN analyst Rebecca Lobo said during Wednesday’s telecast of the Indiana-Connecticut finale. That was after Clark fed Aliyah Boston beautifully for a layup.

Boston, the No. 1 WNBA pick in 2023, gradually clicked with Clark, leading one to believe a lot of winning is in their future.

“I just can’t wait to see what the future holds,” Boston said after the game.

Indiana needs a couple more players. Whether Christie Sides is the right coach to get the Fever to go deep in the playoffs, I don’t know. Indiana’s players didn’t have a mutiny when they were 1-8, so there’s that.

Another thing Clark did was introduce a lot of other wonderful players to a larger audience. A’ja Wilson, Chelsea Gray and Kelsey Plum of two-time defending champion Las Vegas are fantastic. So are New York’s Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu, and Minnesota’s Napheesa Collier, and everyone else who was on the U.S. Olympic team.

Those who said Clark would struggle against them were right at first, but not for the whole season. By season’s end, they’d had seen enough of her to know she was the real deal and will be that and more for years to come.

Unless, of course, she is playing on the LPGA Tour.

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Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com