The Indiana Fever are 10 games into the 40-game WNBA season, and they have 2 wins, thanks to Saturday’s 1-point win at home over the Chicago Sky. On this edition of the WNBA Clark Watch, our first check-in column since the team started out 0-4, we see not much has changed with Caitlin Clark—except the media coverage of her statistical achievements, of course. The advanced sabermetrics show her to be below average.

[Editor’s Note: We will point out the win over Chicago was the first game of the inaugural Commissioner’s Cup in the WNBA, the equivalent of the silly and stupid midseason NBA Cup. Anything to keep the media darling on the TV for higher ratings, eh?]

Clark leads her bad team in scoring with 16.9 points per game, but she’s already had more single-digit scoring games in the WNBA than she did in her overrated entire career at Iowa. Very few mediots are pointing that out, of course; it’s like they’re now afraid to criticize her after blowing her out of proportion for clickbait revenue over the past 5 months. The factual realities run a lot deeper, though, as explained:

  • 8th on the Fever in Win Shares (minus-0.1)
  • 9th on the Fever in Offensive Win Shares (even-0.0)
  • 9th on the Fever in Offensive Rating (93 points per 100 possessions)
  • 6th on the Fever in Effective Field Goal percentage (.474)
  • 5th on the Fever in True Shooting Percentage (.548)
  • 10th on the Fever in Turnover Percentage (26.7)
  • 1st on the Fever in Usage Percentage (28.2)

No wonder the team is so bad: the person who gets the ball most isn’t very good. Even when the team won its first game with Clark hitting the “winning” shot? The mediots ignored her shooting line—4-for-14 overall and 2-for-9 from downtown—and called her game-winning basket “clutch” while clearly ignoring the math. She had missed her first 7 shots from behind the 3-point line to create the team’s deficit. Clutch?!

Just because her sabermetrically superior teammates kept the game close while she kept missing shots should never mean she gets “clutch” credit for finally making 2 baskets late to gain the lead. It’s just like it was with Kobe Bryant: terrible shooting percentages but if a few shots going in late, he was a hero—despite the fact the reason his team was behind in the first place was because he was shooting poorly. Logic!

Even in the Fever’s win yesterday, Clark was brutal: 4-for-11 from the floor, 2-for-9 from downtown, only 11 points, along with 5 turnovers. She is adding value to her production by passing and rebounding (more so than someone like Bryant ever did, of course), so that keeps her hovering around the “average” areas in terms of sabermetrics, but her shooting is a joke, even if she does lead the team in scoring. Shots are shots.

And any fool can take them: the good players hit a lot of them. The bad players miss most of them. Guess where Clark is profiling right now? But again, you’ll never hear the mediots admit it. She is shooting just 31 percent from 3-point range right now, and as we have acknowledged, she probably very tired after going straight from her college season to the WNBA in a matter of weeks. But those are the waters: swim them.

She should get better in time if she puts in the offseason work. We can see that. But right now? She’s struggling, and no one is admitting it. That’s bad journalism, period. We don’t expect this change, but we will be back in a month or so when the team has reached 20 games in its short season. We suspect Clark’s numbers will get worse overall as she experiences more fatigue, but maybe we will be wrong. Check back!