Caitlin Clark’s season is over. The Indiana Fever confirmed on Thursday night what many suspected, when the 2024 rookie of the year announced on social media that she would not be returning this year from the groin injury that has limited her to 13 games.
“I had hoped to share a better update, but I will not be returning to play this season,” she wrote. “Disappointed isn’t a big enough word … This has been incredibly frustrating, but even in the bad, there is good. The way the fans continued to show up … brought me so much joy and perspective.”
It was a statement full of grace, perspective and a focus on the team. Yet for the mob that has attached itself to Clark, this was not enough. Their outrage was instantaneous, not because Clark is missing the rest of the year, but because they have lost the ability to use her as a weapon in their endless culture wars.
Some of her so-called fans on X predicted the WNBA “will fade back into obscurity” without Clark, or that “other players couldn’t wait to hurt her”, ignoring the fact that the ratings for the league remain robust and the W has always been a tough, physical league, even before Clark’s arrival.
The reality is that Clark’s absence is the only sensible outcome. Athletes are programmed to want to play through pain. From middle-school gyms to NBA locker rooms, the slogans on the wall all say the same thing: pain is weakness leaving the body; what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. Of course Clark wanted to return, just as Tyrese Haliburton wanted to play for the Pacers in the NBA finals, just as Robert Griffin III wanted to play for Washington in the NFL playoffs. That is what competitors do.
But this is why medical professionals exist. It is their job to say no, to draw the line, to protect players from themselves. Time and again they have failed in that responsibility – Haliburton worsening his injury by suiting up in June is only the most recent example – and the careers of countless stars have been shortened because team doctors bowed to short-term pressures. Clark’s rushed comeback in July carried the same whiff of desperation: a marquee game against New York, All-Star weekend, national television. She did not look right even before breaking down again.
The Fever, at least, appear to have learned the lesson. Even though they have made the playoffs, they are unlikely to topple the juggernaut Minnesota Lynx. Risking their franchise player’s long-term health for a token playoff berth would be malpractice. For anyone who actually cares about Clark, shutting her down should be a relief. Better to lose a few months than an entire career.
But the mob that has turned her into a political totem does not care about her health, or her wishes. Clark has asked repeatedly not to be used to promote racism, grievance and white-supremacist narratives. Those pleas have gone unheard. To her most toxic followers, she is not a player but a symbol: the “great white hope”, the damsel under attack from jealous Black opponents. With her sidelined, those narratives lose their fuel. No fouls to inflate into morality plays, no on-court moments to twist into evidence of persecution.
This, more than anything else, is what enrages them. Not that Clark is out. Not that the Fever’s playoff hopes are dimmed. But that their favorite weapon is gone, at least until next season.
For the rest of us, the conclusion is clear. Clark’s season is finished, and that is a loss for the WNBA. But the decision protects her future and strips her name from the ugliest corners of the discourse. That is worth far more than a doomed playoff run.
