US women’s hoops should draw huge Paris crowds but isn’t. It needed Clark

PARIS — The game was a rout, seemingly over not long after it began. The final score was the United States 85, Australia 64, but the margin seemed bigger. 

The U.S. women’s basketball team, the most dominant team in any sport in the world, men’s or women’s, has now advanced to its eighth consecutive Olympic gold medal game. The Americans have won the previous seven, and there’s no reason to think they won’t win the eighth on Sunday.

So why were only 18 journalists hanging around the massive mixed zone in the bowels of Bercy Arena Friday evening to speak with U.S. head coach Cheryl Reeve after the game when the night before, for the U.S. men’s comeback over Serbia, the same area was packed? 

Why were there so many empty Olympic family seats, the best seats in the house, left untaken for the entire semifinal game?

Why, when this team is just so majestic, is there so little buzz about them at these Games? Why do heads turn for the track stars and the gymnasts and the swimmers and the U.S. women’s soccer team, but not for them?

And going back a couple of weeks, why, just before the Olympics began, did the U.S. men’s basketball press conference draw well over 100 reporters, while the women’s attracted perhaps 20 sitting in the first two rows?

Because USA Basketball left the woman who would have changed all of this at home.

If it wasn’t clear before, it certainly is now: Caitlin Clark should have been here. The attention this team should have had, the crowds, the interest — it’s not there because she’s not here.

USA Basketball had it within its power to give women’s basketball the most magnificent global platform it has ever had, and it failed to do so. Were Clark here, playing even five minutes a game, reporters would have flocked to see her. I’m thinking of the Brazilian reporter who asked me in the first week why Clark was not here because she wanted to see her and interview her. I’m thinking of the Australian journalist who said the same thing.

A lesson learned over and over during these Olympic Games is that cultural star power matters greatly in driving interest in certain sports, and with both Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky done competing, as well as many of the track stars, Clark would have still been playing, helping the many veteran standouts on the U.S. women’s team receive the attention they deserve. 

Having covered the U.S women’s basketball team in 10 Olympic Games before this one, I have seen this over and over again. The relative ghost town of a mixed zone Friday was so predictable; I wrote about this when Clark was passed over for the Olympics in early June and sure enough, it has happened. To get journalists from around the world flocking to a venue when so many other sports are going on, there has to be something more: a huge name, a personality, a storyline, something. USA Basketball had all that in Clark and decided not to use it.

We all know the arguments against putting Clark on the team. She will have many other chances to play in the Olympics. (To which I’ll add, hopefully that’s the case.) She needed a break, something that she said was true, but that’s a decision that was hers to make for herself, not USA Basketball’s to make for her. 

Then there’s the argument that she would have taken the spot of someone else, which of course is what happens every time a team is picked in any sport, from high school to the pros to the Olympics. 

And the gold-medal-winning reason for Clark to not be here for those who didn’t want her here: she wasn’t playing well enough in her first month in the WNBA. In addition to the fact that she actually was playing well enough while facing the toughest defense and most difficult schedule in the league, we now have women’s selection committee member Dawn Staley’s own words on the matter. 

“If we had to do it all over again,” she told NBC here in Paris, “the way that she’s playing, she would be in really high consideration of making the team because she is playing head and shoulders above a lot of people, shooting the ball extremely well, I mean she is an elite passer, she’s just got a great basketball IQ. …”

So to summarize, on the court, Clark, the WNBA’s assist leader, would have been a wonderful, fresh and exciting asset for the U.S. team. Off the court, she is the greatest draw not just in women’s basketball, but in all of women’s sports. When she plays, women’s sports outdraw men’s sports, as we saw in the spring when four million more people watched her in the NCAA women’s final than watched the men in their NCAA final. 

What would that have looked like here on the Olympic stage? Wouldn’t that have been something to see? Oh, what might have been.