Caitlin Clark’s season has weird energy. Saturday night made it harder to ignore.
During the Indiana Fever’s 83-75 loss to the New York Liberty at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, Clark was caught on the broadcast appearing to snub a high-five attempt from teammate Tyasha Harris coming out of a timeout. The Fever were trailing 76-70 with 1:26 left in the fourth quarter and the game was already slipping away.
The clip is the kind of thing that lives on the internet forever. Clark is visibly frustrated, Harris extends a hand, Clark walks past her, and the broadcast catches every awkward second of it. It is not the worst body language anyone has ever seen on a basketball court, but it is the kind of moment that fuels every narrative people already had about this Fever team.
And there are a lot of narratives.
Indiana is 5-5 on the season, ninth in the WNBA standings and currently outside the playoff picture. The team was supposed to be one of the favorites coming off last season’s improvement. Instead, they have lost five of their last seven games and look completely out of sync with their best player.
Clark is averaging 18.7 points and 8.2 assists per game, which sounds great. The shooting numbers are not. She is at 37.7 percent from the field and 32.4 percent from three, both well below her standards. Saturday night against the Liberty, she went 4-of-14 from the field for 10 points in 34 minutes. The MVP-level offensive engine is not running the way it ran last summer.
Then there is the relationship with head coach Stephanie White. A few games ago, Clark and White had a heated exchange on the bench that was caught on camera and immediately turned into a multi-day discourse. Cheryl Miller had strong words about it. Other former WNBA players weighed in. The story would not die, mostly because it had been quietly simmering all season.
And there are the trade rumors. Clark has been mentioned in connection with the Los Angeles Sparks in recent days, which is the kind of rumor that should be impossible to take seriously and yet keeps getting written about. The Fever moving the most marketable player in WNBA history would be a franchise-altering disaster. Nobody seriously expects it to happen. The fact that the rumor exists at all says something about the temperature in Indianapolis.
Harris, the player on the receiving end of Saturday’s high-five awkwardness, is in her first season with the Fever after coming over from the Connecticut Sun. She received a DNP in the Liberty loss, which adds another layer to the moment. A bench player trying to lift up the star, the star not having the energy to engage, both of them watching the lead slip away.
The good news for Clark is that the broader career trajectory is still ahead of her. She is in her second WNBA season. She remains the biggest needle-mover in the sport by a comfortable margin. The Fever sell out arenas on the road. The TV ratings are up across the league. Caitlin Clark is still the reason any of that is happening.
The bad news is that the magic that made her rookie season so special, the floor vision, the deep range, the unreal court awareness, has not been showing up consistently this year. Some of that is opponents game-planning her differently. Some of that is the Fever offensive scheme not maximizing what she does best. Some of it is just shooting variance that will eventually balance out.
None of that fixes the body language. The Fever need Clark to be the engaged, energized, locked-in version of herself for the next 22 games or this season is going to spiral. She does not have to high-five every teammate after every play. She does have to look like she wants to be there.
Saturday night, she did not. And the camera caught all of it.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
