Indiana Fever rookie Caitlin Clark already has broken the all-time, single-season WNBA turnover “record” as she has 145 turnovers through 26 games. With 14 contests left in the season after the 2024 Summer Olympics conclude, Clark is on pace for 223 turnovers this season—with the former record being just 137 turnovers. Yet nary a word from the mainstream sports media about this dubious achievement, right?

It’s dishonest reporting at its worst: this is like a quarterback setting a record for interceptions in a season by dozens without the media printing a word about it. As if that would ever happen! Instead, the media only reports the “good stuff” about its meal ticket, and clueless fans are in the dark—as usual—about the facts. We last reported on all this nonsense about three weeks ago, and this update will reiterate a lot now.

In our recent examinations of current NBA players like Klay Thompson, Nikola Jokić, Chris Paul, and Stephen Curry, we focus on a handful of key sabermetric measurements, and we use the exact same data points for analyzing Clark’s WNBA rookie season, as that is equity. Thompson is washed up; Jokić is a legend in the making; Paul is an all-time great; and so is Curry. By comparison, Clark is pretty much an albatross:

  • Third in Player Efficiency Rating on her own team
  • Third in Defensive Rating
  • Fourth in Win Shares
  • Fourth in True Shooting Percentage
  • Sixth in WS/48
  • Seventh in Effective Field-Goal Percentage
  • Ninth in Offensive Rating

Clark is first on her team in usage rate, despite some of these rather humiliating numbers. She is tops on her team in assist rate, which is great, of course, but she’s also worst on her team—and all time, of course—in turnover rate, which is why her overall Offensive Rating is so bad. In fact, with that ORtg (99), she is worse than the average WNBA player on offense overall. So the turnovers are literally burying her team.

Not to mention the mediocre shooting numbers specified above: these are categories where a truly great shooter like Curry is Top 15 all time in NBA history, and Clark can’t even top her own team in these measurements. Being sixth on the team in value per minute played, however, is the kicker: there are five better players on the Fever roster than Clark, but guess who gets all the fan and media attention? Unreal.

The sooner the masses are educated and informed on the most accurate sabermetrics in the sport, the better.