Indiana Fever star guard Caitlin Clark took the WNBA by storm in her rookie season.
The Iowa product led the league to viewership heights that hadn’t been reached in decades. 32 WNBA telecasts reached the one-million viewer mark in the 2024 season, a milestone that hadn’t been reached even a single time since 2008 prior to Clark’s arrival.
And as she should, Clark is being praised for raising the profile of the league. During Sunday’s New York Knicks-Indiana Pacers game, which Clark attended, Knicks play-by-play announcer Mike Breen compared Clark’s impact on the WNBA to Michael Jordan’s impact on the NBA.
Mike Breen talked multiple times about Caitlin’s impact on women’s basketball during the Knicks vs Pacers broadcast. We need him to call a Fever game!
“She’s doing rating wise for the WNBA what Michael Jordan, Lebron James, and Steph Curry have been doing for the NBA.”
BANG pic.twitter.com/Zdu46IfS5B
— correlation (@nosyone4) November 11, 2024
“During the Summer when the Indiana Fever played here with Caitlin Clark, the building was packed every game. The TV ratings of the Fever this Summer for the local telecast were higher than a lot of the Pacers game because of Caitlin Clark,” Breen began. “She’s doing rating-wise for the WNBA what Michael Jordan, LeBron James, Steph Curry have been doing for the NBA.”
That’s not an understatement. As WNBA viewership soared this past season, NBA viewership has seen substantial decline so far. Per John Ourand of Puck, ESPN’s NBA coverage is down 27% year-over-year while TNT is down 16% so far this season.
Fever games last season averaged 1.59 million viewers during the regular season across all networks (excluding NBA TV), per Sports Media Watch. Through the first two weeks of the NBA regular season, ESPN was averaging just 1.21 million viewers per telecast.
It’s unquestionable the impact that Clark has had on the league, which make comparisons like Breen’s legitimate. Now, it’ll be a long road before Clark’s on-court performance should be compared to that of Jordan, or even WNBA greats like Diana Taurasi or Sue Bird. But she’s brought the same type of excitement to the WNBA that players like Jordan, James, and Curry have brought to the NBA.
And in many years, when Clark’s WNBA career comes to an end, perhaps we’ll be looking back on her as the “Michael Jordan of the WNBA.” It doesn’t seem so far-fetched.
