Rebuilding Rob

The Saga of Caitlin Clark continues, and she still hasn’t clocked even one minute in a professional basketball game.

This past Monday, Caitlin Clark was the first overall pick in the WNA draft, going to the Indiana Fever. Per the WNBA’s rookie pay scale, Clark will receive $338,056 over her first 4 years in the league; which includes a rookie salary of roughly $76,000. But fear not Clark fans, word is that she is close to signing an 8 figure deal with Nike that would include her own signature shoe. This NBC News article does a great job of breaking down her salary over Clark’s first four seasons. It also addresses the pig-skinned elephant in the room: Why are WNBA players paid so poorly, compared to their male counterparts?

Before I go any further, let me say that I WANT to see the WNBA succeed. I want to see the league become so popular that they have to start referring to the NBA as “The MNBA” to distinguish the men’s league from the women’s.

But the truth is that the NBA makes SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MONEY than the WNBA. The NBA gets SIGNIFICANTLY HIGHER RATINGS than WNBA games; which means networks will pay SIGNIFICANTLY MORE MONEY for the rights to air NBA games. We can blame all of this “on the patriarchy” all we want to; but these are facts and the money does talk. It doesn’t hurt that the NBA began 50 years before the WNBA did. To put things into a better perspective, the average salary for an NBA rookie this season is $10 million. Hell, I heard this morning on the radio that several NBA MASCOTS make $60,000 per year.

Burt not everything is doom and gloom in the WNBA, or women’s sports in general, as NPR explains here. Earlier this year, the Las Vegas Aces become the first WNBA team to sell out their entire allotment of season tickets. This year’s Women’s March Madness tournament saw record breaking ratings, and quite frankly, more entertaining match-ups than their male counterparts.

So I find myself returning to the same question that I asked HERE: Can Caitlin Clark be the first truly transcendent super-star of the WNBA? The kind that makes non-WNBA fans watch games on TV? Pay for tickets to the games? Buy the merchandise? Can she have the same effect on her league that Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods did on theirs? All signs point to “yes” but its ultimately up the the fans. Fan receptions is what dictates all those money markets that I mentioned earlier.

I don’t know if women’s sports will ever be held in the same regard as men’s, but I think we’re about to see that disparity diminish real quickly in the next few years.

UPDATE: Not even one hour after I published this post, I saw this on my Facebook timeline. The Caitlin Clark effect is real!

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The article “Caitlin Clark and the Pay Disparity Between Men’s & Women’s Sports” first appeared on Rebuilding Rob.