Kareem Abdul-Jabbar misses the point on Caitlin Clark and the face of the WNBA debate
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar has every right to think A’ja Wilson is a better basketball player than Caitlin Clark.
A lot of people do, and I'm not here to argue they're wrong.
Wilson is a four-time WNBA MVP, three-time Defensive Player of the Year, eight-time All-Star and three-time league champion. There’s no argument that Clark’s professional résumé is as robust as Wilson’s.
But that isn't the same argument as saying Wilson is the "face of the league" and Caitlin Clark is not.
That's where Kareem is very, very wrong.
Abdul-Jabbar wrote on his Substack about the letter sent by 11 Republican lawmakers to the WNBA asking commissioner Cathy Engelbert to address the physical treatment Clark has received on the court. The letter called Clark "the face of your league," which apparently bothered Kareem quite a bit.
He called Clark "a very good, possibly even a great, player," but argued that labeling one player the face of the league without the "on-court and cross-platform dominance" of Michael Jordan or LeBron James is insulting to other great players.
OK, fine. But Kareem is leaving out some critical context.
LeBron James did not have LeBron James’ résumé when fans decided he was the face of the NBA.
LeBron was on the cover of Sports Illustrated as "The Chosen One" while he was still in high school. He entered the NBA with a massive Nike contract, national television attention and the full weight of the basketball world already on his shoulders before he played a single minute in the league.
He won Rookie of the Year in 2003-04, but he didn't win his first MVP until the 2008-09 season. He didn't win his first championship until 2012.
In other words, what on-court accomplishments is Kareem talking about? When James was in his third NBA season, as Clark is now, the commercial anointing had already happened, even though championships and MVPs were still years away.
The Cavaliers didn't make the playoffs in either of his first two seasons. Clark, meanwhile, helped a Fever team that had missed the playoffs seven straight seasons reach the postseason in her rookie year. And, like LeBron, she was the No. 1 overall pick in the draft and won Rookie of the Year.
So what exactly is the standard?
Kareem is using the finished version of LeBron to argue against the early version of Clark. That's convenient, but intellectually dishonest. The NBA didn't wait for LeBron to become a champion before treating him like the sport’s next great commercial engine.
Remember "The Decision"? LeBron had an entire television special dedicated to his free agency in 2010. What were his accomplishments to that point? Two MVPs and zero championships.
Now, two MVPs isn't nothing. But he had never won a title and had been swept in his only NBA Finals appearance. The season prior to "The Decision," LeBron's Cavs were bounced in the second round of the playoffs. And ESPN still turned his free agency into a television event, the only TV special anyone can name dedicated to one player choosing his next team.
Nike signed 18-year-old LeBron James to a historic deal worth a guaranteed $87 million over seven years before he stepped foot on an NBA court.
As for the fans, James' No. 23 Cavaliers jersey was the top-selling jersey during his rookie season and helped the NBA shatter its previous merchandise sales records.
The media, Nike and fans didn't wait for LeBron to pile up championships, MVPs and other accolades before anointing him "the face of the league."
Does all of this sound familiar? It should.
WNBA WANTS A BIGGER STORY THAN CAITLIN CLARK, BUT TV RATINGS KEEP POINTING BACK TO HER
Clark won WNBA Rookie of the Year and set the WNBA single-season assists record. She set rookie records for points and made threes. She averaged 19.2 points, 8.4 assists and 5.7 rebounds as a rookie.
Oh, and she easily led the league in jersey sales and boosted WNBA television viewership to levels it had never seen.
That doesn't make her Michael Jordan or LeBron James.
It also doesn't mean she is a better player than A’ja Wilson.
But "face of the league" is not the same as best player. It simply refers to the business reality.
And the business reality is obvious to anyone not trying desperately to pretend otherwise.
When Clark plays, people watch. Recently, she helped the league set a late-night regular-season viewership record, with Fever-Sparks averaging 1.04 million viewers across USA Network and CNBC for a game starting at 10 p.m. ET or later. That is the kind of audience the league could only dream about prior to her arrival.
That didn't happen because of A'ja Wilson, who has been in the WNBA since 2018. Clark helped a late-night regular-season game on cable draw more than one million viewers. Game 4 of Wilson’s 2022 WNBA Finals, when the Aces won their first championship, drew less than 400,000 viewers on ESPN
So Clark's Fever averaged more than two-and-a-half times as many viewers for a regular season game in mid-July starting at 10 p.m. ET as Wilson's team drew for the 2022 WNBA Finals clincher.
Clark is the one who brought millions more people into the tent. Thanks to Clark, far more people know who A'ja Wilson is today. It's not the other way around.
Tim Duncan won five NBA championships and collected two league MVPs and three NBA Finals MVPs. He was an excellent basketball player. But he was never considered the "face of the league."
Allen Iverson, a contemporary of Duncan, was a much bigger cultural force and has a stronger claim to "face of the league" in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Iverson won one MVP and zero championships. Except no one was complaining about Iverson being more popular than Duncan among fans. Everyone understood that it just happens sometimes.
That's why the blowback against Clark is so revealing.
There is a growing group of people who seem almost offended by the idea that Clark matters this much. They don't just want to argue that Wilson is better, they want to downplay Clark’s impact.
Let's return to Kareem's diatribe for a perfect example.
Kareem, like many in the media (and in the WNBA itself), tried to shift the conversation away from the abuse Clark is suffering on the court to the online abuse suffered by Black players. Recall that Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas, Fever coach Stephanie White and WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert all used the same tactic.
Thomas, who drove her fist into Clark's throat, immediately claimed she was receiving racial insults and death threats on social media. She did not publicly provide evidence of either claim in that immediate response. White and Engelbert quickly acted to condemn online trolling, but stayed mostly quiet about the actual incident on the court where Thomas flagrantly fouled Clark.
Another recent example involved Las Vegas Aces guard Chelsea Gray. She posted a message she received on social media that contained a racial slur.
Gray said she received the message after the Aces played the Fever, and Hilton Grand Vacations said the accused employee was no longer with the company.
Here's what Kareem wrote: "To the people in Congress and the commissioner’s office: take the constant, deliberate, and premeditated online abuse of players as seriously as you take the occasional incidents that occur on the court in the heat of the moment. We have systems in place for dealing with what happens to players during the game, but we need to get better at helping them when the games are over."
What, exactly, is Kareem's point here? That Congress should step in and stop people from hurling racially charged insults on the internet? That's a direct violation of the First Amendment.
Is he suggesting the WNBA should step in and start policing internet trolls? Good luck.
The league has infinitely more control over what happens between the lines than what happens on social media (where they have zero control). It controls the officials, the discipline, and the messages it sends to players in the league.
That's what lawmakers were asking about.
Kareem can disagree with the framing of the letter or even the value of sending it in the first place. He's certainly not alone.
But using DMs sent by trolls to minimize the on-court treatment of the league’s biggest star is a dodge.
And it keeps happening.
Kareem is right about one thing: Caitlin Clark is not Michael Jordan or LeBron James.
At least not yet.
But if he wants to use LeBron as the example, then he has to stick to the timeline. LeBron was anointed before he won anything. He was made the face of the future because everyone could see where the sport was headed.
That's exactly what's happening with Clark. She is the face of the WNBA.
The people so fervently arguing otherwise are actually proving the point, even if they don't realize it.