WNBA officiating is no longer an annoyance. It’s a threat to the game
The WNBA should change its logo to a bruise. Forget that little silhouette of a woman rising for a shot; just use Caitlin Clark’s arm or a leg with a purple discoloration. It’s more fitting. Or Kelsey Plum’s. Or Napheesa Collier’s.
Also, the league’s motto ought to be, “No call.” The chronically lousy, second-rate officiating has led to such a hard-play uglification of the game that it has become the storyline of the season. Clark is out again because of another groin injury, possibly aggravated after taking a knee in the abdomen from Jacy Sheldon of the Connecticut Sun on Tuesday night. No call.
Or perhaps she’s out because of the hooking and hammering she took from the Dallas Wings a couple of nights earlier. No call.
Either way, she’s out for the WNBA All-Star Game. Angel Reese, another casualty of this kickboxing league, is uncertain.
Since the refs can’t or won’t make the calls, it was left to Rebecca Lobo and her broadcast partner Ryan Ruocco, who called it out themselves on ABC the other night during a replay that showed Dallas guard JJ Quinerly repeatedly going all karate on Clark, with no whistle.
“There’s a grab; there’s a hold; there’s a grab. I mean, all of those are fouls,” an aggravated Lobo said, as Clark simply tried to dribble on the perimeter. “Every single one of them. That’s a foul; that’s a foul …”
The surest way to kill the league’s popularity and halt its commercial momentum is to put its star players in ice packs and traction. Yet that’s what is happening as the All-Star break approaches. According to kinesiologist and blogger Dr. Lucas Seehafer, who studies the health of the league, players have suffered 141 injuries since opening day. There are just 179 active players in the league, and teams play just 44 games apiece.
That’s some ugly math for Commissioner Cathy Englebert, who is demonstrating all the firmness of a silk dress in meeting this problem — and it will remain a problem, potentially even a dangerous one, until she picks up the phone and demands officials blow whistles at a higher rate.
We’re not just talking wrists and ankles, here. By Seehafer’s count, there have been 57 head and neck injuries in the past two and a half seasons. Nor is Clark the only star player and All-Star-playoff linchpin who has missed significant time. So have Collier, Jonquel Jones, Sabrina Ionescu, A’ja Wilson, Alyssa Thomas, Rhyne Howard and Kahleah Copper, among others.
Seehafer’s injury tracker shows that backcourt players have suffered more than 100 more injuries than frontcourt players — and not because they’re rolling ankles. There are more backcourt players [guards and small forwards] than frontcourters, but that does not explain why they are suffering so many more injuries than post players, because they should be absorbing less contact. Also, according to Seehafer, his logs show a significant rise in serious knee injuries to backcourters this season over previous ones he has kept.
“Some of that could be evolution of the game, the way it is going — it’s faster more explosive,” Seehafer said.
Which makes the need for good controlled officiating all the more crucial.
This is not a woman’s league problem. It’s an officiating problem. As Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White rightly pointed out this week, when refs allow unusually rough play it doesn’t just cause direct injuries but indirect ones.
“It causes you to load differently, it causes you to explode differently, it causes you to accelerate and decelerate differently,” she said. “ … I think all of those things at times, while it might not be one blow or another, over time can contribute to [injury] … So can you point it out to one thing or another? No, but I do think the physicality with which teams are able to play with her is a factor.”
The refs are particularly guilty of letting star guards get mauled. Great guards start the action, set the tempo, create the open spaces on the floor where things happen. They can’t do it when they’re slashed, decked and clobbered. It’s not fans’ imagination that Clark is especially targeted. But so are others.
In mid-June, Kelsey Plum, the all-star guard for the Los Angeles Sparks, lost it in a profane, irate rant after she was continually roughed up by the Golden State Valkyries, only for refs to call just three fouls in 40 minutes against defenders.
“I got scratches on my face; I got scratches on my body,” she said “ … I get fouled like that on every possession … There are multiple shots at the end of the game, either going into the third, into the fourth, where they’re just coming out and just (expletive) swinging, and they just don’t call anything. … I’m playing 40 minutes, touching the paint on almost every play. It’s absurd. It’s absurd.
“So I’m saying I’ll get fined for that, and that’s fine, but I mean … they’re fouling the (expletive) out of me every single play. I’m very frustrated with that, and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of it. I don’t know what I need to do. I’ve talked to the refs nice; I pray before the game. Like, (expletive), I’m over it.”
Why should a great player have to sound so desperate for relief?
Poor officiating hurts players, hurts the league, and hurts fans. It is destroying the rhythm of the game and distorting the title chase, turning it into a game of who can withstand the most body blows to their roster. Audiences did not come to the WNBA in record numbers to watch that. They came to see skilled, collaborative play — the kind the Fever, led by Clark, exemplify.
On Tuesday night before a sellout crowd at the Boston Garden against the Connecticut Sun, the Fever had 22 assists on 29 baskets, and Clark accounted for 11 points in less than four minutes of the fourth quarter. Then she got hurt, robbing the audience yet again.
If the WNBA commissioner allows roughhousing to be the brand, she will squander all the peak acceleration and lift that Clark has brought to the league, on the floor and off. “It’s not the free-flowing movement that we want to see,” White remarked.
No, it’s not. If audiences want to watch ultimate fighting, they will go elsewhere.