It’s been awhile since our last Wednesday Wizengamot proclamation, and now we’re checking in with Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever after 22 games in the 44-game season have been played. The results so far are not pretty for the most overhyped athlete in the world right now. Clark is ninth on her own team in Win Shares per 40 Minutes Played, and she’s barely ahead of tenth-place Damiris Dantas. This is fact.

Anyone can verify it, and the sad reality is that the sports mediots just make up their own narrative here. This sabermetric measurement takes into account all facets of the game and breaks it down to show which players contribute the most to their teams with their overall game. And Clark is barely ninth best on the Indiana Fever. Yet the league continues to shower her with gifts and rewards as if she was the league MVP.

Which, obviously, she is not. She’s not even the MVP of her own team—that would be Aliyah Boston (.275 WS/40), who easily has outplayed Clark (.058 WS/40) this year … and last year, too. Yes, Clark has been injured, and that probably has impacted the quality of her play some this season, but she wasn’t injured last year. Also, the WS/40 measures value per minute played, which is not a counting stat affected by absence.

So, here is the breakdown of Clark’s ranking on the Indiana roster alone—never mind a league ranking—for the key sabermetric categories at season’s midway point. 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):

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

Overall Win Shares, which do consider volume of playing time, finds Clark seventh on her own team. Compare these rankings to where she rated after a quarter of the season was played last month, and it’s clear Clark is sinking in value to her own team. That ORtg is the most damning, because that’s her alleged prowess, while the DRtg is her most impressive contribution to the team’s success so far this year.

When a player is this lowly on their own team, that certainly impacts league ranking, showing Clark to be nowhere near worthy of the All-Star Game this Saturday—let alone a team captaincy in the All-Star Game. Considering the laughable formula used by the WNBA to choose the All Stars, well … let’s just say giving the fans a vote is wrong, since they’re the least informed, and when the players themselves ranked her so low?

Yeah, you get the point. Fans voted Clark number one at her position, while the media voted her number three. Her peers? Voted her ninth, and even that was generous considering how poorly she’s played this year. Clark is also fourth in the WNBA overall for total turnovers, despite missing nine games. With her 5.1 average for turnovers per game, we can project 45 turnovers to her count—and she’d be No. 1 there again.

Just like last year, when she set the all-time record for most turnovers in a season ever—by almost two turnovers per game. And her shooting has gotten worse, too: she’s not even shooting 28 percent from three-point range this year, and her 34.4-percent mark last year was pretty mediocre already. Again, isn’t this supposed to be “her thing”? She has cut down on the TOs per game, by half a turnover, which is impressive.

But anyone turning the ball over five times a game still while shooting 27.9 percent from three-point range would be benched in a second by most, if not all, coaches. Yet the WNBA has invested too much of its own credibility in this overrated player, and we’re all stuck with her now—for better or for worse. It’s the latter.