Aces center A’ja Wilson is already well on her way to a plaque in the Basketball Hall of Fame, having ended four of her eight WNBA seasons with an MVP award in hand. Her Time Athlete of the Year award Tuesday was a richly deserved one.
However, Wilson is a WNBA star in 2025, so it was probably inevitable in hindsight that she would be asked about the key driver of the league's 2020s-era growth—Fever guard Caitlin Clark. Speaking with TIme's Sean Gregory, Wilson—without slighting Clark—expressed her belief that popular lionization of the 2024 Rookie of the Year's impact on women's basketball overlooked the contributions of the Black women who helped build the WNBA.
“It wasn’t a hit at me, because I’m going to do me regardless. I’m going to win this MVP, I’ll win a gold medal, y’all can’t shake my résumé,” Wilson told Gregory. “It was more so, let’s not lose the recipe. Let’s not lose the history. It was erased for a minute. And I don’t like that. Because we have tons of women that have been through the grimiest of grimy things to get the league where it is today.”
This uneasy dynamic has been widely discussed in coverage of the WNBA, including by Clark herself, who told Gregory in Dec. '24 that “as a white person, there is privilege.”
While Clark’s status as a primary ratings driver is not in dispute, the league fared quite well in ’25 despite the Indiana guard missing most of the season due to injury.
“Sometimes you need a proof in the pudding,” Wilson told Gregory, who clarified that the four-time MVP was in no way cheering Clark's injuries. “The biggest thing for us, and why I was so happy, is that we continue to rise to the occasion. This was just a matter of time for us to really bloom and blossom. Because we have been invested in each other and our craft for a very long time. It was just like, ‘They’re going to pay attention.’”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as A’ja Wilson Explained What She Didn’t Like About Caitlin Clark-Fueled WNBA Popularity.
