I focus on football, I’m an expert on football. But as a sports fan, I have opinions on many different sports. In this edition of Mike On Sports, I have to give my take on no Caitlin Clark for the Olympic team.
The people running the WNBA and women’s basketball in general are as dumb as a box of rocks. That’s my take. You’ve got to be kidding me with this crap. From a business standpoint, leaving Caitlin Clark off the Olympic Team is one of the dumbest moves in history.
The NBA got lucky in the early 1980s. A league no one cared about with tape-delayed NBA playoff games fell into Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. At first, they had no idea how to market the two despite Larry and Magic playing for the NCAA title in 1979. In fact, Magic Johnson was ostracized even after winning an NBA title because he had the gall to befriend an owner and get a coach fired. Even Lakers fans booed him but that didn’t last long when he won another title. But with Magic and Bird winning the first three titles they played for in their first three years, the NBA went from nothing to something.
And they learned from it. Since then, future superstars like Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, and LeBron James were embraced by the marketing people for the NBA and pushed hard to the public because of what they saw with Magic and Bird. The WNBA? They’re not learning.
Caitlin Clark is Bird and Magic combined. She’s the most influential woman’s basketball player in history and providing the biggest marketing boom ever. Unfortunately, Clark’s Indiana Fever team isn’t close to winning much of anything so the WNBA won’t luck out the way the NBA did with Bird and Magic. With that, her rivalry with Angel Reese falls short of the Celtics-Lakers hatred that came into play early with Magic and Bird. But the WNBA has a distinct advantage — they can look at the NBA blueprint and what they learned about superstars. And they just aren’t doing that.
Clark might not be amongst the top 12 women’s basketball players in the world. She might not belong on the Olympic team. But so what? This is about marketing and those in charge — men and women — are morons. There are rumors that they are concerned that her “millions of fans” would be upset at her limited playing time as a rookie on the elite US Team. I can’t think of anything more idiotic. Those “millions of fans” won’t even tune in now and Olympic women’s basketball will be what it has always been, of zero interest to anyone.
I don’t really watch women’s basketball nor do I care. But business intrigues me and always has. And this is simply a dumb business decision from a group of people who say they want to grow their game. No you don’t, you clearly don’t. And this decision is a perfect example.
