PHOENIX — Caitlin Clark sat on the couch for once and clapped as the final seconds ticked here Sunday. The Indiana Fever rookie celebrated an 88-82 win over the Phoenix Mercury with teammates, and then she was surrounded by television cameras and photographers. While speaking to an ESPN reporter, Diana Taurasi walked more than 20 feet away, heading to the home locker room.
This match was big for the Fever, the first win over a winning team in twenty tries, but it also presented a before-and-after picture that was impossible to ignore. Clark, 22, is the hotshot rookie, the future of the WNBA. Phoenix’s Taurasi, 42, is the league leader, someone who has a street named after her outside the arena.
In front of a sold-out crowd at Footprint Center, Clark was steady for 39 minutes. Although she shot 4 of 14, she finished just short of her first professional triple-double with 15 points, 9 rebounds and 12 assists. “My god … she’s just an unbelievable passer,” Indiana coach Christie Sides said. “She just finds the plays that need to happen.”
Taurasi scored 19 points, 3 assists and 3 rebounds in 32 minutes. Two nights earlier, in a home win over the Los Angeles Sparks, Taurasi had buried five 3-pointers. Against the Fever, she shot 2 of 10 from deep without finding an offensive rhythm.
a near triple-double from Caitlin Clark in today’s win over Phoenix 😈 pic.twitter.com/KSJriLAb3l
— Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) June 30, 2024
Other than the on-court interview in which she praised her team’s resilience, Clark did not speak to reporters after the game. Sides said the guard was not feeling well and needed to meet with the trainer. It’s also a good bet that Clark didn’t want to be put in position to answer questions about beating Taurasi, the rising star who topples a legend. In some ways, this was a challenge for the entire Indiana franchise.
This weekend, Sides was asked twice to rate Clark’s performance. Twice she focused her answer more on the Fever’s youth and their collective growth. Following Indiana’s loss to the Seattle Storm on Thursday, Clark met with reporters alongside teammate Aliyah Boston. After reporters asked Clark a fifth question in a row, Clark waved her hand and said, “Ask Aliyah a question.”
If anyone can identify, it’s probably Taurasi, but this is marked with an asterisk. Twenty years ago she found herself in a similar situation. Like Clark at Iowa, Taurasi had finished her college career at Connecticut as the best player in the sport. She was the No. 1 pick in the WNBA Draft and was expected to take the league to the next level. The difference was media attention. Since joining the league, Clark has been at the center of countless debates — some about basketball, some about race. She has learned that anything she says can become a national headline or conversation.
That may explain her reaction Saturday when asked about the WNBA All-Star Game, which takes place July 20 in Phoenix. Even though Clark came in second place in recent fan voting, she didn’t want any part of the conversation. “I don’t know if I’ll be there,” she said after practice at Arizona State University. ‘I’m not going to talk in hypotheses. My focus is on playing basketball. That all takes care of itself.”
In the same media session, Clark was asked about her first memory of Taurasi, a difficult task considering she was only two when Taurasi first joined the WNBA. But after thinking for a moment, Clark said Taurasi was always someone she associated with women’s professional basketball. She appreciated the intensity and fire with which Taurasi played, calling Sunday’s match an opportunity to compete against the best, “a dream come true.”
“That’s someone I grew up watching, that I look up to and that I want to be like one day,” Clark said. “I don’t know if there will be many people who can do it like her.”
As a Phoenix rookie in 2004, Taurasi immediately became the face of the franchise. Her first home game drew 10,493 fans, the most for an opener in three years. Before many road games that season, Taurasi met pregame and spoke to a select group of 50 fans. Former Phoenix general manager Seth Sulka told reporters at the time that the attention was unlike anything he had seen in the WNBA.
“I loved it,” Taurasi said when asked about this Sunday. “I just really enjoyed playing basketball. I didn’t really care about what was happening on the outside, or what people thought of me. I enjoyed every minute. Being a rookie was cool, man. It was fun. You could do whatever you wanted, you didn’t know any better. In Sports Illustrated, Slam … ESPN the Magazine.
Taurasi glanced at a young reporter in the room.
“You’re too young. You don’t know what I’m talking about,” she said.
Like Clark, Taurasi still had to deal with physical play, with veterans trying to put her in her place. Opponents respected her talent, but allowed her to earn their respect. On April 5, while doing TV commentary during the Women’s Final Four, Taurasi recalled a “Welcome to the WNBA” moment and how an intimidating defenseman named DeLisha Milton-Jones shoved her in the face twice. It created a kind of rivalry.
During a recent phone conversation, Milton-Jones, the coach of the women’s program at Old Dominion, laughed. She had seen Taurasi’s comments on social media. “I’m like, ‘Invite me to your show so I can tell them the other side,’” she said.
Milton-Jones was aware of Taurasi’s skill. She saw it up close in the WNBA. How Taurasi manipulated the game with her vision. How she understood distance and timing. How she applied a point guard’s touch to multiple positions. But what impressed Milton-Jones most was how Taurasi came up with tricks that most rookies would take a season or two to learn.
Milton-Jones said Taurasi would poke her in the stomach as she went up for a jump shot, just hard enough to make her flinch and throw off her shot. On offense, Taurasi came out of a pindown and tried to block Milton-Jones to create space.
“She literally punched me in the stomach,” Milton-Jones said. “Then she bolted wide open. My coach yells at me, “You have to guard her!” And I said, ‘She just hit me in the stomach!’ She was feisty and cunning and she had a veteran way of playing her game.
(Responded Taurasi outside the media room on Sunday: “I think it’s my upbringing. Italian Argentinians, we are sneaky. We always try to find an advantage somehow. In the game of basketball there are games within the game. And when you’re not as physically gifted as other people, you have to find little ways to get that edge.”)
Carrie Graf, who coached Taurasi her first two professional seasons, said Taurasi’s biggest mistake was with the referees. She was too loud. Instead of shouting in their faces, she told Taurasi to use her charisma. To remember that public servants are people. But there was no doubt about her willingness.
“I can imagine this shot as if it were a photograph,” Graf said on the phone from Australia. ‘She came to the path and stood against the high beams. She is sitting on the right side and extended her right arm as if it were a raised hook shot. And then the shot blocker comes in with her left hand, and while she’s in the air, she goes up and grabs the shot blocker’s arm to clear some space so she can put the ball on the rim. Women didn’t do things like that back then.”
Diana Taurasi will ride in Sunday’s match against Caitlin Clark. (Chris Coduto/Getty Images)
Clark also has this quality, but instead of hanging in the air, it rises from the logo, a signature move that has made her famous within the sport. She did this twice on Sunday, setting the crowd on fire. Even in Phoenix, the “Clark” jerseys outnumbered those of the Phoenix players in many parts of the arena.
Caitlin Clark shows off her deep range with another logo three 🎯 pic.twitter.com/IX8wnVb3g4
— Indiana Fever (@IndianaFever) June 30, 2024
Clark is still working on this transition. As she has done all season, she forced too many passes on Sunday, resulting in 6 turnovers. She tried a behind-the-back pass that had little chance. She failed on a lead pass in transition. She lost the ball and fell on the field.
Before the game (Clark meets with reporters before each game), she had said her biggest adjustment had simply been the pace of everything. After losing to South Carolina in the NCAA national championship, Clark returned to Iowa City for a day and “that’s when my life kind of changed,” she said.
After the draft, Clark moved to Indianapolis. On May 3, she played her first game of the preseason. She hasn’t slowed down since, playing 20 games for the 8-12 Fever. What’s exciting is that she knows she has room to grow and master details that can take her game to the next level. The frustrating thing is that she hasn’t had much practice time for this.
“I had to learn from game to game,” Clark said. “That was actually the biggest adjustment.”
Taurasi predicted the same. She didn’t mean it as a shot at Clark and the league’s talented rookies. Only that this transition often takes time. In a radio interview in Phoenix, Taurasi likened it to a college quarterback adapting to the NFL. After Sunday’s loss, she said how much she respects the way Clark handled it.
“It’s amazing what Caitlin has been able to do,” Taurasi said. “Her short career to date has been nothing short of remarkable. The one thing I really like about her is that she loves the game. You can tell she worked hard. And even in her short WNBA career, a lot of pressure has been put on her, a lot of things have been thrown at her, and she continues to show up and get better every game. Her future looks super bright.”
(Top photo: Kate Frese/NBAE via Getty Images)