Mark Madden: Caitlin Clark is WNBA's catalyst, only player to impact new media rights contract

Caitlin Clark is the only reason for the WNBA’s increase in popularity.

Clark gets fouled, injured, disrespected and excluded despite being the rising tide that lifts all boats. (Clark’s eight-year, $28 million deal with Nike makes the hurt easier to live with. Clark works for Nike, not the WNBA. The league pays her $78,066.)

The latest evidence for Clark’s lone-wolf status as catalyst:

• Clark didn’t play in the WNBA All-Star Game. The All-Star Game’s TV rating went down 36% from last year, when Clark played.

• The WNBA is signing a new media rights contract with NBC Universal. It pays $2.2 billion over 11 years. Without Clark, that deal disappears. Clark got that deal. Not A’ja Wilson, not Breanna Stewart, not Angel Reese. No other player had impact. Not remotely.

That’s not what the other players think, though.

The WNBA was founded in 1996. Nobody cared till Clark showed up.

But, locked in their echo chamber, the WNBA’s rank and file foolishly believes the current popularity is a team effort.

That stupidity was put on T-shirts the players wore at the All-Star Game: “Pay Us What You Owe Us.”

Poor choice of words: The WNBA lost $40 million last year. What, exactly, are the players “owed”? Like comedian Steve Byrne said, those shirts were “borrowed from public school teachers.”

WNBA All-Star Kelsey Plum chuckled that “zero members of Team Clark” were present at the meeting when players discussed wearing the T-shirts.

Two questions: A) Why not? and B) Who is Kelsey Plum? America couldn’t pick her out of a police lineup or out of the crowd at the ESPYs. (Shane Gillis represent, yo!)

Given the impending deal with NBC Universal, the WNBA’s players should get more and certainly will.

But the WNBA players have not been cheated to this point.

Given the WNBA’s annual deficit and its subsidization by the NBA as a loss leader, the players have basically been recipients of charity. There was minimal clamor for women’s pro basketball before Clark. If the WNBA never existed, few would have noticed.

A rapper told Reese that “you’re doing exactly what LeBron (James) is doing.”

That got headlines. A rapper said it, so it must be true.

But therein lies what WNBA players really want: Equal pay for equal work.

That sounds like something Norma Rae would hold up on a sign in the middle of the factory. It’s never outright voiced because it’s so ludicrous.

But “logic” holds that WNBA players are playing pro basketball just like NBA players and should be on a similar pay scale. That ignores incoming revenue vs. outgoing expenses, the very basis of running a business. But women getting what’s “equal” is so much more noble.

If you want logic, here goes:

• The WNBA only exists because of “equal.” It might never be profitable, even with that new lucrative media rights deal.

• The American public can’t relate to the vast majority of the WNBA’s players.

• Clark is the golden goose, but most of the WNBA’s players hate her and always will. Her Nike paycheck and massive popularity fuel jealousy.

• The players should get paid more. But the WNBA’s economics dictate it’s only a fraction of what they likely want. (Clark should quit the WNBA players’ union and negotiate her own chunk of that media rights deal. She deserves the lion’s share.)

Jemele Hill says that WNBA players need higher income so they don’t have to spend the WNBA offseason playing in Europe. She blamed Brittney Griner’s 2022 jailing in Russia on needing to play there to make ends meet.

Griner’s WNBA salary was $221,000 when she got arrested in Russia. She’s currently earning $214,000. Ninety percent of Americans make less than $200,000. Griner didn’t need to play overseas to make ends meet.

Don’t vape hash oil in Russia. That’s the lesson learned.