Inside Caitlin Clark’s coronation: WNBA’s first draft pick has Indiana basketball fans at a fever pitch as the league looks to capitalize on her historic NCAA career… and shed her “little sister” label

Maybe it was her white Prada blazer, matching miniskirt or her diamond cufflinks, but Caitlin Clark was almost unrecognizable at Monday’s WNBA Draft in Brooklyn — a significant feat for one of America’s most famous athletes.

Before becoming the obvious first overall pick of the Indiana Fever, Clark spent the last month guiding Iowa to its second consecutive NCAA championship game while garnering the largest television audience in tournament history. In the past few days, she’s been on Saturday Night Live and NBC’s Today Show, not to mention countless publications, websites, and sports fans across the country’s lips and ears.

Interest in this year’s WNBA Draft was so great that the league opened it up to fans for the first time since 2016 thanks to Clark, the NCAA’s all-time scoring leader. And back in Indianapolis, the Fever reported more than 17,000 in attendance for their WNBA Draft watch party. Clark won’t make her WNBA regular-season debut until May 14, but ticket prices on the secondary market have already climbed above $500. Meanwhile, the defending champion Las Vegas Aces have made plans to open up 7,000 more seats when the Fever comes to town on May 25.

Clark is used to attention on the basketball court, where her confidence ranks alongside that of Michael Jordan or LeBron James. But it is the other side of the business that she is still learning to tolerate. As her post-draft press conference wrapped up after weeks of grueling interviews, Clark quietly turned to a publicist and asked, ‘How many things do I have to do?’

Just weeks after graduating from Iowa, the clearly tired 22-year-old alluded to potential media commitments for the rest of the evening. But thanks to her immense shooting ability and a deft passing touch that she considers ‘overlooked’, Clark is now must-see TV. In short, the media’s demand for Caitlin Clark is just beginning.

“Obviously, I think the course of the last few weeks has been pretty crazy in my life,” she said Monday, trying to remember all the cities and places she’s been through en route to another NCAA championship.

“The last two months I’ve been playing basketball as long as I possibly could in my college career and then going home for a few days,” she continued. ‘I got off the plane when we landed in Iowa City, drove straight home, had my mom cook me, then drove back to Iowa City the next day.

‘Then I flew to LA, flew to New York and now I’m sitting here at this stage.’

Clark was likely talking about the literal stage she sat on in the draft media room or offering a figurative reference to the professional ranks she now joins.

But more broadly, ‘this phase’ is fast becoming Clark’s to define at a very opportune time.

The WNBA has seen an increase in attendance and television ratings for several years, but the league has never rivaled its big brother, the NBA.

Women’s college hoops is a different story.

Iowa’s title game loss to Kamilla Cardoso and the South Carolina Gamecocks drew an average of 18.7 million viewers — about four million more than the men’s championship. Admittedly, the men’s match was on cable and not on national television, like the women’s. But Clark, LSU’s Angel Reese and a growing number of women’s players actually became more recognizable than NCAA men’s players in 2023-24.

And if there was any doubt about their popularity, Monday night in Brooklyn put an end to it.

The scene was reminiscent of the 2023 NBA Draft 10 months earlier, when the San Antonio Spurs selected 7-foot-4 uber-prospect Victor Wembanyama amid a sea of ​​wild fanfare.

Like Clark, Wembanyama was an obvious choice to take first, giving the draft the feel of a scripted coronation. And what’s more, there were countless young fans eager to get the supposed first-choice’s autograph, as had been the case in June 2023 when the young Frenchman was welcomed into the league.

“Everybody pushed and pushed and she just handled it like a champ and made sure everyone got her moment with her,” Reese Gittleman, a 17-year-old from Philadelphia, told DailyMail.com after getting Clark’s autograph.

“She was really, really sweet,” added Gittleman’s friend, 16-year-old Melina Day.

The difference between Clark and Wembanyama’s respective draft nights was the setting.

Both were selected in Brooklyn, a basketball-savvy borough filled with knowledgeable and eager fans. But while the NBA Draft was held at the Barclays Center, a full-size NBA arena, Monday’s WNBA Draft took place around the corner at the cramped 3,000-seat Brooklyn Academy of Music.

This venue, a grand music hall that first opened in 1861, was crowded on Monday.

Fans scrambled to get a glimpse of Clark and the rest of their favorite players. Aging elevators led reporters to a packed media room in the building’s attic, where the players held their first press conferences as professionals under a movie poster from a recent Robert Redford film festival.

There was a similar mood at the Elite 8 in Albany weeks earlier, when Clark and Iowa beat Reese’s LSU in a rematch of the 2023 NCAA final. The game drew a whopping 12.3 million viewers and easily sold out Albany’s MVP Arena.

Both that event and Monday’s draft felt bigger than their respective venues, and that’s what makes Clark such a game changer. She’s not just drawing fans to women’s hoops — she’s changing the math of women’s basketball, and the WNBA is well aware of the opportunity at the door.

The league already plans to add a new team in 2025, but with Clark’s arrival, more expansion talk is on the way, not to mention a new media deal that could overshadow the current contract.

“This is an important year for us around viewership, around attendance, around all the qualitative and quantitative factors that go into valuing media rights,” Commissioner Cathy Engelbert said Monday.

“The one thing I know about sports is that you need household names, rivalries and games that matter,” she continued, referring to the women’s NCAA tournament. “Those are the three things we’ve had over the last few weeks.”

And with Clark on board, those are the kinds of possibilities for the WNBA’s future.

“This is not something that everybody can do,” Clark said Monday. ‘It’s once in a lifetime.’