Don’t Let Bored Football Fans Tell The Story Of Caitlin Clark’s Season

Covering WNBA games in person is a strange experience.

Enriching, for sure: It's cool to hear directly from players and coaches, to be able to pepper them with whatever questions I'd like.

Recently, I was able to cobble their insights into https://defector.com/olivia-miles-is-the-throwback-point-guard-of-the-future">an Olivia Miles profile that received, I suspect, fewer comments than this post will.

Sometimes you luck into great color: It was funny, at Wednesday night's Fire-Sky game, to hear Portland head coach Alex Sarama directing his players to hunt Rachel Banham on "every single possession." (She was mercifully benched before they could do this.)

The in-person experience is also disorienting.

If my powers of observation feel heightened in some ways, they are certainly dulled in others.

I've learned to appreciate all the work that goes into constructing the story of a game, work done for me by statisticians, broadcasters, beat writers, and online posters when I'm watching on TV. My eyes supply me no graphics, no tickers, no counters.

If a player sits for an unusually long stretch, that doesn't always register to me.

It might strike me that a team's offense has slowed down, but I might not clock that they haven't actually scored a field goal in six minutes.

Turns out, I'm not very good at watching basketball on my own. 

In the play-by-play data, the most controversial moment of the WNBA season, a play from Wednesday night's Mercury-Fever game, is dispassionately tagged as "MISS A. Boston 26' 3PT":