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00:00 (upbeat music)
00:03 - It is great to have Mike DeCoursey
00:05 from the Sporting News with us,
00:07 as we always love to chat about things all around sports,
00:10 usually collar tubes, usually some soccer or whatever,
00:12 but Mike had an absolutely phenomenal column the other day
00:17 about this entire Caitlin Clark situation
00:21 going on right now as she navigates through,
00:24 I guess you could say, Mike, her rookie season in the WNBA.
00:28 Good to see you as always, Mike, how are you?
00:31 - I think her rookie season is already over, Mike,
00:34 because the WNBA scheduled the entire thing
00:36 in the first three weeks of the season.
00:38 She's done, right?
00:39 - Let's start, let me start there,
00:41 and there's a couple things obviously to discuss here,
00:44 'cause I read that in the cop.
00:45 I didn't realize, now I knew they played a lot of games,
00:49 and they've played, I guess it's 11 over the first few.
00:52 I didn't realize that like Vegas have played like seven,
00:55 other teams have played like eight.
00:56 Like I didn't realize that the gap was that wide,
01:00 and it's specifically for what you said.
01:01 They tried to, right out of the gate,
01:04 hammer home as many Caitlin Clark games
01:07 as they possibly could to catch the wave,
01:09 and boy, Mike, if they caught it.
01:11 - Well, they allowed the wave to subsume her.
01:16 She fell off the board
01:17 and went head over heels into the surf,
01:21 and it shouldn't have been that way.
01:23 She should have been allowed to move into her rookie year
01:27 with the same pace as every other rookie in the league.
01:29 75% of the league has played eight or fewer games.
01:34 They've already played 11, this is as of Sunday.
01:38 They had already 11 games in the first 20 days of the season,
01:42 and that included a road trip that went to Seattle
01:45 from Indianapolis, then to LA, and then to Vegas,
01:48 a 4,500 mile road trip.
01:51 It was three games in four days.
01:54 How do you like that?
01:54 That's great stuff.
01:55 That's really treating your prize rookie,
01:59 the player who electrified college basketball
02:03 over the last two years,
02:04 that completely changed the dynamics of the viewing patterns
02:08 for women's college basketball,
02:10 and promised to do the same for you based on television,
02:14 excuse me, on ticket sales
02:15 for the first several weeks of the season,
02:17 promised to do the same for you,
02:19 and all you could do was grab everything you could.
02:23 Not let's do this strategically,
02:25 but let's grab as much as we can early,
02:27 and who the heck cares if it wrecks her rookie season?
02:31 - Yeah, there's a lot of things that are kind of,
02:35 I guess you could say, wrecking her rookie season.
02:38 At this point, Mike, let me get your thoughts on Saturday,
02:42 the incident with Carter and Angel Reese.
02:46 I guess we could say Angel Reese was kind of a part of it
02:48 with her jumping off the bench and cheering,
02:51 and her press conference yesterday,
02:52 and Carter hip checking Clark.
02:55 Your thoughts on that whole incident
02:56 from Saturday against Chicago.
02:58 - Well, first of all,
03:00 obviously Kennedy Carter was out of line,
03:02 but it's not the,
03:03 I mean, some of the things we've seen,
03:04 some of the reactions that we've seen to that play
03:07 have been absolutely hysterical,
03:09 including the editorial in the Chicago Tribune.
03:13 That was ridiculous to say that that would have been
03:19 beyond objectionable on the street,
03:22 as opposed to on a playing surface.
03:24 It was a problem.
03:25 It shouldn't have happened.
03:27 It certainly was at least a flagrant one foul.
03:30 And the real problem with that, again,
03:34 begins with the league, which is its game officials.
03:37 If they missed it, Mike, I could live with that.
03:39 You miss things, especially it was transacted in a period
03:43 where there wasn't any real basketball activity going on.
03:46 So it would be understandable if they were looking elsewhere
03:49 but they saw it enough to call a foul.
03:51 And they didn't call it a flagrant foul.
03:53 How is it not a flagrant foul?
03:55 It has nothing to do with the game.
03:57 It had nothing to do with the ball
03:59 or the pursuit of the ball or any of that.
04:01 So it's definitely a flagrant foul, A,
04:04 and they saw enough of it to call it a foul.
04:07 And then they didn't review it to assure
04:09 that it wasn't a flagrant foul, which of course it was.
04:12 The only good thing that came out of that
04:15 was that it didn't affect the outcome of the game.
04:18 As we saw in the Boston Pacers series
04:21 a week and a half ago or so,
04:24 when Jalen Brown clearly committed a flagrant foul
04:27 against TJ McConnell and the officials
04:29 didn't call it a flagrant live
04:31 and then checked and didn't call it.
04:32 That was bad and it did affect the outcome of the game.
04:35 At least this didn't.
04:36 But it starts with the league.
04:39 It goes to the game officials.
04:41 I do have a problem with how Kaitlyn Clark
04:44 is being treated by fellow players,
04:46 but it's not all physical.
04:48 Some of it's verbal as well.
04:50 This idea that they have to chop her down.
04:53 Look, you can do whatever you want to do.
04:56 It's your league.
04:57 But if you want your league to grow,
04:59 and you know what happens when the league grows, Mike?
05:02 The money grows.
05:03 If you want to make more money,
05:05 then you embrace her entry into the league.
05:08 And I'm not saying you let her,
05:09 here, take an open shot, Kaitlyn.
05:10 It's not about that.
05:12 But you don't have to cheap shot her
05:14 and take pot shots at her verbally as well.
05:16 - That's the part to me, Mike, that I can't grasp.
05:21 And listen, I'm not gonna sit here
05:22 and try to tell anybody that I've been watching
05:24 a ton of WNBA games over the last 20 years
05:27 since the league's been born.
05:28 I have not.
05:28 I have not.
05:29 Have I watched a few in the last month
05:32 since Kaitlyn Clark started playing in it?
05:34 Yeah, I have.
05:35 And I think there's probably a lot of people like me, Mike,
05:38 that are in that situation.
05:39 And let me say that.
05:40 Here's what I can't figure out the most.
05:42 Why is everyone in that league, not everyone,
05:45 why are a lot of players in that league,
05:47 at the root of it, Mike,
05:48 so upset that this girl is bringing notoriety, money.
05:53 I mean, it's not just her that got them the charter flights.
05:56 They should have had that probably a long time ago,
05:59 but I'm sure it helped that she was coming into the league.
06:01 But there is so much to gain, Mike.
06:04 And it seems like a lot of girls are unhappy about it.
06:07 That doesn't make any sense to me.
06:10 It's the same thing that I wrote about back in February
06:12 we were seeing reflected in the college game
06:14 when she was elevating the audience for the college game.
06:17 And let's not forget here,
06:19 a couple of years ago,
06:21 before Kaitlyn Clark made the final four,
06:23 they were happy if they got a 5 million audience
06:26 for the championship game of the women's final four.
06:29 They were happy.
06:30 5 million, okay, that's a good number.
06:32 That's what they were looking for.
06:33 When Kaitlyn Clark played in it last year
06:35 against Angel Reese and LSU, they got 10 million.
06:40 And when they played, and she played it this year
06:43 against Camila Cardoso and South Carolina,
06:46 they got 18 million.
06:48 That's three times the audience.
06:50 If that's what's out there,
06:52 look, you don't try to get mad because,
06:55 oh, why weren't you watching us all along?
06:57 Hey, the audience wasn't.
06:59 You can't explain a phenomenon, Mike.
07:02 Why were the NBA finals of the 1970s on tape delay?
07:07 They just were, the audience wasn't there.
07:10 Magic and Bird come along, all of a sudden,
07:13 it's magical and everybody's watching.
07:15 It's just sometimes that's how it works.
07:19 Joe Namath comes along in 1969,
07:22 and the NFL goes from a very watchable league,
07:26 a lot of fans, to the most powerful sports entity
07:30 in the world.
07:32 All of that happens because a certain player
07:35 at a certain moment draws people in
07:38 and enough of those people stick around
07:41 that everybody's boat is elevated.
07:44 Right now for the WNBA, that person is Kaitlyn Clark.
07:48 Don't try to explain why everybody wants to watch her play.
07:52 I put in my column today,
07:54 look, Sarah McLachlan is a magnificent musician.
07:57 She's a musical genius.
07:59 I've seen her in concerts, she's fabulous.
08:01 I've had her records, she's tremendous.
08:03 Taylor Swift is a musical genius, she's fabulous.
08:07 But when Sarah McLachlan goes on the road,
08:12 she's playing 5,000 seat arenas and packing them.
08:16 When Taylor Swift comes to town,
08:18 she's back to back on stadium nights selling 80,000 tickets.
08:23 It's just how it is.
08:24 So you embrace it and then everybody gets wealthier
08:28 as a result, that's not happening in the WNBA.
08:31 No one at any level in that league
08:34 is embracing what she can do for them.
08:36 - You're right about that.
08:39 And they are everywhere now.
08:40 - I don't mean, I mean there are people
08:42 at every level of the league.
08:43 I don't mean that no one is,
08:44 but every level of league has people that aren't.
08:47 (upbeat music)
08:50 [Music]