Liberal sports media are going to continue to use Caitlin Clark to push their agendas. In this case, ESPN is setting the stage to rob her of the WNBA Rookie of the Year award. More specifically, it is doing so on behalf of Angel Reese.
Clark’s case for the award is simple. She is the league’s 10th-leading scorer and second-leading passer. Despite being thought of as an offense-only guard, she actually averages the same amount of steals and more blocks per game than the taller, defensive-minded Reese (Reese is far more prone to having her own shots blocked). As of last week, Clark was responsible for over 40% of the Indiana Fever’s points, and she was leading the league in points scored or assisted on.
Jump into the stats more deeply, and you will see that while Reese has an impressive streak of games with double-digit points and rebounds, she is remarkably inefficient for being a player who only shoots from directly next to the basket. Clark’s impact (despite being the focal point of every team she plays against) is superior to Reese’s, a good athlete who is not very skilled and is not the focal point of opposing defenses.
The excuses for Reese are already flowing from ESPN, though, which is desperate to promote Reese and take Clark down a peg. (This much is obvious from Thursday’s ESPYs award show, where host Serena Williams implied Clark has too many delusional white fans and begged people to be fans of both her and Reese.) ESPN’s Monica McNutt said she would base the award on standings, a ridiculous standard for Rookie of the Year (where the best rookies are usually on the worst teams) and where Reese’s Chicago Sky barely sit ahead of Clark’s Fever in the first place.
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ESPN’s Carolyn Peck said that Clark gets to play “freer” than Reese despite Clark being a defensive focal point who is often guarded the entire length of the court. ESPN also put Reese atop its rookie rankings list halfway through the season. Given that the Rookie of the Year award is given out by the media, it is clear where ESPN is trying to take this conversation (one year after ESPN decided to make the NBA MVP discussion about race).
The reliance on standings and confused ideas of what playing “freer” looks like shows that ESPN pundits are willing to go to any length to ensure that Reese wins the award at Clark’s expense, all while the network has made it clear that it resents many of Clark’s fans. ESPN’s toxic racial interpretations of every sports topic are governing how it discusses league awards as the network tries to put Reese on the same level as Clark when their impacts on and off the court are nowhere near comparable.