Can Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese Give the WNBA Its Bird-Magic Moment? (2024)

Existence is cyclical. You probably see it in your own life: '90s fashions hit store racks once again. Another mega-movie franchise gets remade. Throwback jerseys populate the stands at every sporting event.

There's also an echo of sorts happening in the game predicated upon tossing a leather ball through a steel hoop. Chances are, if you have even a passing interest in professional sports, you might have noticed it.

Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese are helping to crystallize the WNBA in the American sports consciousness, much like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson did for the NBA in the early 1980s.

The Bird-Johnson rivalry is perhaps the most serendipitous pairing North American sports have ever seen. It was a perfect storm defined by race, fierce competitiveness, jaw-dropping talent and a league that needed some heroes.

Add in the challenges that come with being a professional female athlete and those that accompany the growth and acceptance of women's sports in America, and we may just be witnessing another such storm—this one for the 21st century.

Clark and Reese became inextricably linked as college rivals—just as Bird and Magic did—though the story doesn't stop there, with their first pro meeting set for Saturday at Indiana's Gainbridge Fieldhouse.

But how did we get here, and what might be next?

Collegiate Rivals

The breadcrumbs along this trail began to drop during the 2023 women's NCAA tournament—specifically during that year's title game, which featured Clark's Iowa Hawkeyes and Reese's LSU Tigers.

Clark's co-opting of the "You can't see me" gesture that John Cena brought to the masses. Reese giving it right back to her and then pointing at her ring finger—symbolizing the 2023 title her Tigers were about to win. The fallout of it all, dissected to the last molecule.

The sparks of that rivalry sent a sport already on the upturn to the tips of everyone's tongues for those few days in the spring of 2023.

Clark dropped 30 points in a 102-85 loss to bring her tournament total to a record 191, while LSU set a new high-water scoring mark for a women's national title game. But beyond the numbers and accolades, beyond who actually won that matchup, America saw the birth of a rivalry so good that words didn't even need to be exchanged to set it ablaze.

Even then, people were noticing the parallels to Magic and Bird, whose legendary rivalry began in the 1979 men's NCAA national championship game. "People do compare that matchup all the time, but I've never seen the matchup, so I'm not really familiar with it," Reese told reporters in the run-up to that '23 bout.

For those who find themselves in the same boat as the Sky rookie, the championship game between Johnson's Michigan State and Bird's Indiana State drew a rating of 24.1—the equivalent of nearly one in every four TVs in America watching—a mark that has never been surpassed in college basketball.

The pair drew an estimated 35.1 million viewers that day and is credited with sparking March Madness as we know it. The Spartans won the first men's hoops title in school history, downing the then-33-0 Sycamores. Entire tomes have been written about it.

The 22-year-old Reese can be forgiven for missing out on that one. She's been understandably busy over the last few years, having won a national championship, tournament Most Outstanding Player and SEC Player of the Year while with the Tigers.

Reese and Clark's title-game exploits in 2023 set the stage for a ratings behemoth this past March, as viewership marks seemed to fall nightly. The Iowa-LSU rematch—this time with Clark's Hawkeyes taking the Elite Eight tilt behind her 41 points, 12 assists and seven rebounds—was the most-watched women's college basketball game of all time, surpassing the '23 title bout.

Until it wasn't. Iowa's subsequent two games each posted all-time-high ratings, with the Iowa-South Carolina championship game shattering the record by pulling in 18.7 million viewers clamoring to watch the two-time AP Player of the Year.

For context, men's NCAA tournament rights fees exploded after 1979. When NBC renewed its contract to broadcast the tournament in 1980, it doubled the previous figure of $5.2 million, as Seth Davis noted in his book When March Went Mad.

There's still plenty of room for growth on the women's side, as this past title game didn't get a prime-time spot. It's feasible a similar jump is in store.

Commercial Success

The NBA was able to take advantage of Johnson and Bird's popularity to great effect. The league focused its PR machine on the high-wattage rivals by splashing them across highlight packages and marketing campaigns to raise the league's profile.

Clark and Reese, the Nos. 1 and 7 picks in this past WNBA draft, respectively, are thriving as needle-moving stars after being among the initial wave of NIL beneficiaries in college.

Clark's endorsem*nts are already rolling in. She became the first athlete to land a signature basketball deal with Wilson since Michael Jordan in the '80s, and she features in the new Gatorade campaign narrated by MJ. She'll get $28 million from Nike in a deal that could turn out to be a bargain for the shoe company. Her list of endorsem*nts is already lengthy, and it figures to only grow.

While other players in this draft class may have a higher ceiling than Reese, she's no pushover on the hardwood, and her star is rocketing upward as well. You might have noticed her at the Met Gala or making a cameo in the video for Latto and Cardi B's "Put It On Da Floor Again," in which LSU was referenced.

She also has her share of business interests, having endorsed Reebok, PlayStation and Beats by Dre, among others. Both Clark and Reese are partnered with Panini, a leading trading card company.

Yet beyond individual public profiles, there's a phrase floating around these days about Clark that could crash squarely into the realm of the hackneyed: A rising tide lifts all boats.

Ripple Effects

Cliches are popularized for a reason, and in this case, it's not wrong. It certainly wasn't in the case of Magic and Bird.

It's often said that the duo saved the NBA, or at the very least revitalized it. As Davis wrote, "The NBA was in the midst of a terrible season beset by sagging attendance, plummeting TV ratings, and the growing perception that white America would never buy into a sport dominated by Black players."

It's unfair to Clark and the rest of the WNBA to imply that it needs saving, but Clark seems to be helping to solidify all of the league's positive momentum over the last several years. Mention her name at the dinner table, and you have a good shot at drawing something more than blank stares from non-sports fans. That's no small feat in the age of fractal attention spans and limitless entertainment options.

The runway is clear for the WNBA rookies. The 2023 season was the most-watched in 21 years and featured the highest leaguewide attendance in 13 years.

TV is leaning in, taking advantage of Clark's gravitational pull. It also seems like the basketball world at large is on board. When a fan jokingly pointed out on X that her games have already been featured on ESPN more times than those with 2022 NBA No. 1 overall pick Paolo Banchero, the Orlando Magic star simply replied, "rightfully so! my time coming."

Early reports have shown the effect that Clark, Reese and the '24 draft class has had. Following the first week of the season, the AP's Doug Feinberg reported leaguewide attendance was up 14 percent, with the New York Liberty and Fever each welcoming over 17,000 fans in their respective home openers. Ratings continue to soar, even when the league is pitted against the NBA and NHL playoffs.

WNBA app downloads? Up 146 percent. League Pass buys? Up 182 percent. First-week viewership? Two-hundred-twenty-six percent increase, all per Feinberg. You get it. The numbers are bonkers.

But in some ways, the WNBA could have been better prepared for the arrival of this rookie class. When the league incorrectly listed the preseason Sky debuts of Reese and former South Carolina star Kamilla Cardoso as being available on its app, fans expectantly tried to tune in to no avail. Someone in the stands at the May 3 Sky-Lynx matchup then picked up on the situation and livestreamed the game on X from the stands. The video picked up over 430,000 views.

In a sense, the W seems surprised by its own success. Clark's Fever jersey took roughly an hour to sell out after Indiana took her No. 1 overall. Reese's Sky jersey did the same inside a week after she went No. 7 to Chicago. Yet the merchandise isn't expected to ship until August in many cases, when the league could be three-quarters of the way through its season.

Jersey scarcity has been a longstanding problem for the WNBA, though on this go-around, Nike and Fanatics—the company at the center of the MLB uniform debacle this spring—shoulder some of the blame. Still, it isn't ideal timing for a league that's attempting to capitalize on a generational star, a loaded rookie class and all-time-high popularity.

As for the NBA, its transformation wasn't instantaneous—nor did it even fully take effect by the end of Bird and Johnson's rookie year. The WNBA can thus be forgiven for not immediately transforming into the global goliath its counterpart eventually became.

When David Stern took over as NBA commissioner in 1984, he inherited a league that still had teams operating at a loss. But he would prove adept at wielding Bird and Magic's star power, highlighting them across three Finals matchups between those Lakers and Celtics, with one or the other making the last round in every year of the '80s.

Before Bird and Magic, some NBA Finals games were shown on tape delay—a postseason practice that held on until 1986, even after the league signed its network TV deal in 1982. Attendance was waning. The last Finals before the duo entered the league posted a Nielsen rating of 7.2.

A few years later, in 1982, Magic's Lakers had pushed the number to 13.0 in a championship tilt with the 76ers. The '85 Finals between L.A. and Boston sat at 13.5—representing 30 percent of all television sets in use. It took some time, but the nation was eventually hooked.

And it seems the WNBA will figure it out. In several aspects, the league is making the right adjustments. Anticipation of Clark's arrival caused some teams to move games to bigger arenas, including Friday's matchup in Washington against the Mystics, to meet ticket demand for Clark and the Fever.

Perhaps the biggest cog in the machine that the WNBA could become is its next media pact—particularly as rumblings surface that it would be open to seeking its own deal separate from the NBA. As Michael McCarthy reported for Sportico in mid-April, the W believes its media rights are worth more, and rightly so.

Currently, the league's deals with Amazon Prime, CBS, Ion and ABC/ESPN pay it $60 million per year, two-thirds of which comes from a pact with the latter company that runs out after next season.

The WNBA and NBA, as recently as mid-April, were jointly negotiating a new deal with ABC/ESPN parent company Disney, though McCarthy reported the W could be open to working out its own contract. He cited former ESPN exec John Kosner, who predicts the W will look for between $80 million and $100 million annually on its next deal.

Similarly, the NBA looked to capitalize on its increased star power by taking advantage of the dawn of the cable era in the early '80s, making deals with various channels to give the league and its stars a bigger launching pad.

And just like the NBA did in 1980 when it expanded to 22 teams by adding the Dallas Mavericks, the WNBA will grow to 14 clubs beginning in 2026 when Toronto joins the league, a year after the Golden State Valkyries suit up for their inaugural season in 2025.

Public Perception

Of course, with redrawing the fate lines of multimillion dollar entities comes scrutiny. Loads of it. And a lot of it unwanted. Both the Magic-Bird relationship and the Clark-Reese duo rested on racial fault lines.

As USC professor Todd Boyd noted to The Ringer's Michael Weinreb, at the end of the 1970s, basketball still featured an even Black-white split among its players. Boyd wrote in his book Basketball Jones that the sport was "the late twentieth century's version of an acceptable race war" as more Black players entered the game.

These days, that burden isn't on Clark and Reese in quite the same way, but that doesn't mean it isn't continually present. One of the most heartbreaking ways this manifests is the way in which Reese, a Black woman, is shoved into the role of villain.

After the '23 title game, podcaster Keith Olbermann called her a "f--king idiot" for her taunting of Clark—completely unaware of the Iowa star's previous actions or any sort of proper context.

Lest we forget, Michael Jordan once called Larry Bird the game's "greatest trash-talker and mind-game-player of all time." While the Magic-Bird pairing would've been enchanting in any case, the anecdotes of his legendary smack talk only add to the lore.

The same goes for Reese and Clark, only there weren't droves of people clamoring to label Bird or Magic idiots for their fabled back-and-forths. While race and racism was a real obstacle for the NBA duo, neither had to contend with the sexism Reese and Clark face as well.

That villain role was once again cast upon Reese in March when Los Angeles Times columnist Ben Bolch referred to the Tigers star and her LSU teammates as "villains" and "dirty debutantes," which the paper retracted and he later apologized for.

In this case, Bolch cast UCLA as the protagonist and LSU on the dark side of the good-versus-evil equation. But this is far from the first time race and class have permeated these narratives—and it certainly played a role in the Celtics-Lakers divide of the early '80s. Bird was cast as the epitome of white, working-class, no-nonsense East Coast Boston, while Magic was at the center of the Lake Show, all that was West Coast, Hollywood glitz and glam.

The racial lines were so boldly drawn that Howard Bryant, formerly of ESPN, noted how "Black Boston in large part cheered for the Lakers over the home team."

Even Bird himself couldn't escape the issue. Dennis Rodman once said of Bird's three MVP awards, "He's white—that's the only reason he gets it"—a notion co-signed by then-Pistons teammate Isiah Thomas but later walked back.

Bryant noted of Bird: "Race and class—common motivators for most all of us—stood at the center of his drive. Bird would say constantly during his playing career that 'I just wanted to prove that a white boy who couldn't run and couldn't jump could play this game.'"

Racial subtext likewise plays a prominent role in Clark's narrative, but added to the concoction are gender, sexuality and sexism.

In May, the Indianapolis Star suspended columnist Gregg Doyel after he made Clark's famous heart-sign hand gesture toward her at an April press conference and followed up with inappropriate comments.

Clark has even drawn attention following the league's recent shift in its charter-flight policy.

WNBA players have had to fly commercially, which often put them in potentially unsafe situations. Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner found herself in at an airport in Dallas last year when team security told police a YouTuber acted aggressively and made inappropriate comments toward her.

But with Clark's arrival, the issue quickly became solvable. After the Fever touched down in Dallas ahead of a preseason game last month, video of Clark and her teammates at DFW airport went viral.

Five days later, WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced the league would commit $50 million over two years to provide charter flights for every team, effective late last month. Though a win's a win, plenty of people noticed its conspicuous timing.

Terrika Foster-Brasby recently said on the Brother from Another podcast, referring to Griner and Clark: "It's the optics. It looks bad that you have an international star, who could not get her team, who could not move the needle to get charter flights. It looks bad that that was a situation in 2023. But in 2024, it's like almost instant: 'You know what? We need charter flights. The optics look bad. ... and people wonder why we continue to invoke and talk about race."

Even if how the league arrived at this point wasn't ideal, it's a positive result that shows just how impactful Clark has already been.

Still, the Fever star's race and sexuality continue to receive attention. Emmy Award-winning journalist Jemele Hill recently told Los Angeles Times' Kevin Baxter:

"We would all be very naive if we didn't say race and her sexuality played a role in her popularity. While so many people are happy for Caitlin's success—including the players; this has had such an enormous impact on the game—there is a part of it that is a little problematic because of what it says about the worth and the marketability of the players who are already there."

Exactly how much Clark's race and sexuality play into her marketability is up for debate, but the brutal realities that can come with this sort of stardom aren't.

After Iowa knocked LSU out of last year's tournament, Reese told reporters of her post-national title experience: "I've been attacked so many times, death threats, I've been sexualized, I've been threatened, I've been so many things, and I've stood strong every single time. I just try to stand strong for my teammates because I don't want them to see me down and not be there for them."

Her heartbreaking admission, if nothing else, speaks to her strength—that she was able to take these hits and still somehow have the gumption to be there for her team. But the media has a lot to learn when it comes to its treatment of female athletes, especially Black women.

Top Talent

Johnson and Bird immediately found themselves among the NBA's best when they entered the league in 1979-80. The Celtics legend won Rookie of the Year and finished fourth in MVP voting as Boston made a run to the Eastern Conference Finals. Meanwhile, Magic won NBA Finals MVP after helping to push the Lakers to a title in his first year.

While Clark is perhaps the most anticipated WNBA rookie ever and one of the best young offensive talents in recent memory, the Year 1 expectations aren't quite that high for her or Reese.

The ex-Hawkeye and No. 1 overall pick coincidentally landed in Indiana, Bird's home state and the place where he became one of the greatest college basketball players ever—much like Clark did en route to setting the women's all-time NCAA scoring record.

So far, the WNBA ride has been bumpy for Clark. The phenom is posting averages of 17.6 points, 6.6 assists and 5.1 rebounds per game while shooting 32.0 percent from three. It also took the Fever six games to get their first win, and they stand at just 1-8 heading into Saturday's matchup.

But she's getting it. While she set the WNBA record for most turnovers in a rookie debut with 10, she scored a career-high 30 Tuesday, and her passing has been turning heads. At times, she's already been historic.

As for Reese, the LSU standout has posted averages of 11.0 points and 8.2 rebounds in six games, helping the Sky to a 3-3 record. The 6'3" forward entered the league as a double-double machine, having averaged 20.9 points and 14.4 rebounds over her last two seasons with the Tigers, and she was known for her athleticism and competitiveness.

The latter part of that equation could help her hold up her half of what could be an unforgettable WNBA pairing. Because this is about more than their initial on-court production. It's about star power, the cult of personality and how the league can parlay that into revolutionizing how the average sports fan views the W.

The Future

While Clark may have enough star power to help the W's name ring out by osmosis, Reese seems to have a strong interest in growing the sport. Case in point: Her comments on Clark ahead of LSU's Elite Eight matchup with Iowa grabbed headlines, but there's a subtler point she hit that may have been overlooked.

It's as much about growth as it is about competitive fire.

"For me, I don't think people realize it's not personal. Once we get out between those lines, if I see you walking down the street, it's like, hey, girl, what's up, let's hang out. I think people just take it like we hate each other. Me and Caitlin Clark don't hate each other. I want everybody to understand that. It's just a super competitive game. I just wish people would realize that. Once I get between those lines, there's no friends. ... I don't think people really realize that. That's fine. I'll take the villain role. I'll take the hit for it. But I know we're growing women's basketball. If this is the way we're going to do it, then this is the way we're going to do it. You either like it or you don't."

Though the villain mantle is undeserved, Reese is willing to embrace it if that's what it takes to get women's hoops more of the limelight.

This entire comparison may be a bit reductive of the impact that the rest of the rookie class can have beyond Reese and Clark. Cameron Brink, Cardoso and Rickea Jackson are all brimming with potential. Not to mention all of the tremendous preexisting talent in the W.

But true to form, Reese is making it her mission to make sure others get noticed as well—particularly her fellow rookies.

"It's not just one person, I think people don't realize that [because] the narrative out there is that just one person changing the game," Reese said on May 23, per Feinberg. "It's a lot of us—me, Kamilla, there's Cameron, Rickea. There's so many great players and it's been long overdue and just being able to see that our impact has been able to change the game. I love it for us all, and we're just going to continue to keep going."

Not only that, but Reese is also attempting to push forward other women's sports. She's become part owner of a USL Super League club, which is a pro women's soccer team.

No one asked Reese and Clark whether they wanted to be linked forever, just like Magic and Bird didn't have any say in the matter. But the stars aligned for both duos to become unforgettable pairings.

And much like how Bird and Johnson later became off-court friends, Clark and Reese have done nothing but support each other off the hardwood. But this is going to be a thing, whether Clark and Reese like it or not.

Words will be twisted to fit narratives. Intentions will be misinterpreted, regurgitated on daily talk shows and morphed on social media. But these two are the stars here, just like Magic and Bird.

We saw this when Reese criticized the league's lack of charter flights for players on social media—perhaps with a veiled reference to Clark—and many jumped to conclusions that she was shading her rival. Parse those comments how you want. But it's clear that some part of the public psyche wants these two to be rivals.

This is all predicated upon the idea that they'll actually come through on the court. If they do, we just might get another Magic-Bird moment out of it.