Well, we were wrong with our last Wednesday Wizengamot proclamation, and we’re licking our wounds. Yet as our site tagline states, ” … often wrong, never in doubt … “! Today, though, we feel pretty confident in the statements below. Why? We’ve been watching women’s basketball since the Cheryl Miller/USC days; we think the WNBA has agendas to maximize profits, just as its financial benefactor has been doing for 30 years.

Otherwise, how does one explain 6-5 team currently residing in sixth place get “qualified” to play in the Commissioner’s Cup Final? All the complaints about officiating in the league this season boil down to one conclusion, too: the WNBA is desperate to ride Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever to profitability, even at the expense of equitable and fair play for all the women in the league. In the end, it comes down to money.

We live in an era of fraud, and there are suckers born every minute. We’ve been hoping to support the WNBA this year with the expansion Golden State Valkyries franchise, yet now we see it’s just as rigged as the NBA has been for decades, and we feel like the suckers. We wanted to believe this league could do better, that it would do better. That misconception is officially dead at this point, with this latest WNBA drama.

The best team in the league—the New York Liberty—rates out about five points better than the next-best team in the sabermetric standings, on a neutral court. Yet the Liberty will not be playing in this Commissioner’s Cup Final, despite a 10-1 record. Somehow that one loss enabled the 6-5 Fever to snag a spot in the midseason tournament finals. Yes, it’s just as dumb as the NBA Cup is, but come on. Suckers?

All of the people who think Clark is something special. Here are her sabermetric rankings on her own team at the regular-season quarter pole (11 games of a 44-game season), none of these statistics based on volume and/or games played so missing games to injury doesn’t impact the measurements (which is the point):

  • Player Efficiency Rating (PER): Second
  • True Shooting Percentage (TSP): Third
  • Effective Shooting Percentage (eFG): Fourth
  • Offensive Rating (ORtg): Fifth
  • Defensive Rating (DRtg): Second
  • Win Shares per 40 Minutes Played (WS/40): Fourth

That DRtg is the most impressive thing here, considering she was so poor last year on defense. But we see, again, her positive contributions (assists, points, steals) are canceled out by the extremely negative ones (poor shooting percentage, turnovers). People who do not understand the game of basketball just look at the counting stats, and that is what the sports mediots provide. The deeper, quality analysis shows reality.

Now consider the Fever only have five players on their roster who have averaged 25-plus minutes per game played, and Clark is one of them. She’s fifth in ORtg, which means the team scores more per 100 possessions when the four players above her are on the floor. Now, which teammates are carrying which teammates here? One of them gets all the press while the others are doing the actual team-based dirty work.

The WS/40 mark is also key, as it is based on value per minute played. She’s fourth best on her team there; last year she was third. Need we say anything more about the “progress” she’s made since her rookie season, which was one of the worst ever for WNBA Rookie of the Year winners? And this is what the WNBA’s agenda is, of course: getting Clark maximum exposure at the expense of better players around the league. Hmmm.

She was overhyped in college, and she’s overhyped in the WNBA, too. Some people just live golden lives, eh?