Rachel Nichols, Chiney Ogwumike Shut Down All Of The Caitlin Clark Haters

No, it wasn’t the greatest professional debut anyone has ever seen, but a month ago Caitlin Clark was playing against college players and still managed to lead the Indiana Fever in scoring on WNBA opening night.

She knows that she can play better, and she will, but that’s not good enough for a lot of fans who are, for some strange reason, hoping that she will fail.

Two women who know a thing or two about basketball, Rachel Nichols, who has covered the NBA for ESPN, CNN, Showtime and Fox Sports for over 10 years, and Chiney Ogwumike, who was drafted first overall in the 2014 WNBA draft and is now a full-time basketball analyst for ESPN, aren’t having it.

“She’s got so much poise, she’s had so much heaped upon her shoulders,” Rachel Nichols said on Undisputed. “She is expected to go out there and represent women everywhere every time she takes the court. No one in the NBA is expected to do that, by the way.

“Anthony Edwards, if he has a bad game, the only people who are affected by that are the Timberwolves and the Timberwolves fans, right? When Caitlin Clark has a bad day, all of the sudden it’s a statement on what it means for women in America and can women play basketball and should anyone be paying attention to this, right?

“And the fact that she doesn’t crumble in those situations, that she did have the highest number of turnovers ever for a rookie making her debut, and her answer isn’t, ‘Oh, it doesn’t matter.’ She didn’t say that. She said you absolutely can’t win games that way and I need to work on it, but she also made the point that it’s not going to help her or the team, she made the point of saying, to beat herself up and go into some sort of tailspin. I thought it was an incredibly poised, mature response.

“I have been bowled over. I mean, she is young. We just kind of forget. So looks so authoritative out there. She has been so, so self-possessed and I loved seeing that last night, because I think that is an indicator more than anything else.”

“Let’s remind everybody that it is a month since she was playing for Iowa to now playing pro,” Chiney Ogwumike said on Get Up. “She had the ball in her hands and she’s going to make mistakes because she’s an unselfish player.

“This is not surprising, considering she is going up against the Connecticut Sun. I played with those ladies. Alyssa Thomas is a bad woman. DiJonai Carrington can guard anyone on the planet in single coverage.

“So this was the hardest, probably the worst match-up to open the gates with, but we saw her relentlessness, we saw her fortitude to keep going, and her learning.”

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