We are back for Friday Funday this week, and we found it entertaining—to say the least—that the Indiana Fever lost to the Golden State Valkyries last night at the Chase Center in San Francisco. Yes, we have season tickets to the Vs, and yes, we do not think Caitlin Clark is the cat’s meow, let alone much more than a solid hooper at this point in her WNBA career. Still, it was a fun time to watch her lose to an expansion team.

Clark shot 3-for-13 from the floor, while her teammates collectively made 50 percent of their shots. She committed six turnovers, as the rest of the team coughed it up only 10 times total. She went 0-for-7 from three-point territory, while her work colleagues managed to shoot 8-for-22 from downtown. She did have a team-leading nine assists while grabbing seven rebounds, although none of those were offensive boards.

Overall, to update the numbers from our Wednesday Wizengamot statements, this is where Clark stands on her own team right now, among the players with regular playing time so far:

  • Player Efficiency Rating (PER): Second, 3.4 points behind top player (see below)
  • True Shooting Percentage (TSP): Fifth, .060 behind top player (see below)
  • Effective Shooting Percentage (eFG): Fifth, .092 behind top player (see below)
  • Offensive Rating (ORtg): Fifth, 23 points behind top player (see below)
  • Defensive Rating (DRtg): First, one point ahead of four teammates tied below her
  • Win Shares per 40 Minutes Played (WS/40): Third, .122 behind top player (see below)

We’d also like to remind everyone that her more-valuable teammate, Aliyah Boston, posted 6.0 WS in her rookie year (2023) to much less fanfare than the Clark with her 3.0 WS in 2024 did. It continues to mystify us as Boston tops the league right now in overall shooting percentage; Clark should not be chucking threes that have no chance to go in. Instead, she should focus on feeding her better teammates easier shot access.

Case in point: two of Clark’s teammates—Lexie Hull (second, 56.2 percent) and Sophie Cunningham (19th, 40.9 percent)—are in the Top 20 for three-point percentage, yet it’s Clark (shooting just 35.5 percent) who takes the volume of the downtown attempts. Why?! Smarter players would realize their teammates are better at it than they are and pass the rock. She is literally Kobe Bryant, and that’s not a compliment.

Boston is the player that leads this current in value, as shown above, by leading the team in five of those sabermetric categories and tying for second in the other one. How much press does Boston get? Seemingly none, despite winning the Rookie of the Year award in 2023 and finishing in the league Top 10 in 2024 for PER, etc. She was the No. 1 overall pick in 2023 as well, with much less fanfare than Clark despite her talent.

There’s no doubt to the data here: Boston is the Fever’s best player, but the mediots keep hyping Clark. Why? We really don’t understand this at all, in the sense that the media is treating its audience like idiots. Or else is an ethnicity issue, where the WNBA doesn’t think it can make a Black woman the poster athlete for the entire league—which would be horrible. We want to believe the WNBA is above that, but … yeah.

Let’s leave that alone for now: even at her own position, Clark isn’t close to being the best player in the league, etc. Using the 2025 sabermetric Top 20 lists, where does she rank among guards? Fourth in PER, behind even current rookie Paige Bueckers—so where is Bueckers’ mediot adoration? We could go on, but it just beats the dead horse. For now, we’re just thrilled that the Valkyries beat down the overrated Clark.