USA Basketball officially announced its women’s roster for the 2024 Summer Olympics on Tuesday.
As you may have heard, Caitlin Clark isn’t on it.
That’s right, the most famous women’s basketball player on the planet won’t be representing her country on one of the sport’s biggest stages this summer. Why not? Believe it or not, it came down to Team USA’s desire to select a roster purely based on basketball.
“Here’s the basketball criteria that we were given as a committee and how do we evaluate our players based on that?” selection committee chair Jen Rizzotti told The Associated Press (via ESPN). “And when you base your decision on criteria, there were other players that were harder to cut because they checked a lot more boxes. Then sometimes it comes down to position, style of play for [coach Cheryl Reeve], and then sometimes a vote.”
As is the case with most things relating to Clark nowadays, her exclusion from the Team USA roster has been controversial — even if most agree that there isn’t a strong basketball case for her making the team. While there’s no doubting her ability, the reality is that USA Basketball’s women’s roster is filled with more accomplished, experienced, and Olympic-ready players as the program looks to bring home its eighth consecutive gold medal.
Some, however, have argued that Clark’s transcendent star power is such that Team USA should have found a way to get her on its roster to ride the wave of momentum that has already resulted in record ratings and attendance for women’s basketball in the country. That was the case on Monday’s episode of ESPN’s First Take, in which Stephen A. Smith and Shannon Sharpe made the case that Clark’s marketability should have been considered to grow the women’s game.
More SAS on Caitlin Clark: “It was a stupid decision. Because it compromises what your ultimate goal is, which is to elevate the WNBA brand. How could you be that idiotic and not make that call, when throughout history, Team USA has been, in part, about marketing? It’s dumb,… pic.twitter.com/ohfD60JSi0
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) June 10, 2024
Smith and Sharpe were joined by the likes of Colin Cowherd and Tony Kornheiser in calling for Clark to be included on the Olympic roster. Such complaints — which predominantly came from men — however, didn’t sway Rizzotti, who remained steadfast in selecting the best basketball roster, regardless of Clark’s marketability.
“It would be irresponsible for us to talk about her in a way other than how she would impact the play of the team,” she said. “Because it wasn’t the purview of our committee to decide how many people would watch or how many people would root for the U.S. It was our purview to create the best team we could for Cheryl.”
That’s not to say that USA Basketball doesn’t have a high opinion of Clark and it would hardly be a surprise to see her participating in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. But for now, her presence in Paris will be limited to the controversy surrounding her snub, unless she gets added as a replacement player (or as an analyst for NBC).
[ESPN]
