Caitlin Clark picked up her eighth technical foul of the season Saturday afternoon against the Sky, triggering the automatic one-game suspension that comes with number eight, and then watched the WNBA erase the whole thing before dinner. I don’t think that’s a conspiracy. I do think it’s worth saying, out loud, why it moved that fast.
The sequence, per CBS Sports: Clark made incidental contact with rookie official Genesis Perrymond while driving out of bounds in the third quarter against Chicago. It got called a technical, her eighth of the year, and under WNBA rules an eighth technical means an automatic one-game suspension. No hearing, no discretion. For a while there, Clark was staring down missing Tuesday’s game against the Liberty.
The Indiana Fever appealed immediately.
The league rescinded the technical two hours and twenty minutes later, same afternoon, and Clark was cleared to play.
Two hours and twenty minutes. That gap should bother you a little, not because it proves anything sinister on its own, but because of what it gets measured against.
Paige Bueckers picked up a technical this year for clapping too aggressively after a whistle on her own drive, and per SI.com, that appeal took roughly two days to resolve. Two days for clapping. Two hours for contact with a referee, in a much bigger game, attached to a much bigger name.
None of this is a new pattern where this particular star is concerned. The league has a Clark problem it won’t name, and it shows up in weirder places than officiating, like the time the WNBA left her off a promo and said nothing about that either.
Clark told reporters afterward that the contact “wasn’t intentional or anything,” and told ESPN’s Holly Rowe she’d see her Tuesday, which is a fairly confident thing to say about an appeal that technically hadn’t been ruled on yet. Fever coach Stephanie White picked up a technical of her own arguing the call, insisting the contact was incidental and that “that happens all the time in the game.” She’s right that it happens all the time. It just doesn’t usually get sorted out before most people finish dinner.
Underdog WNBA had it the moment it dropped:
https://twitter.com/UnderdogWNBA/status/2086232274349981948
I actually think the technical probably deserved to get rescinded on the merits. I just don’t think the merits are the only reason it happened in two hours instead of two days.
Before anybody turns this into a “the league always protects her” theory, it doesn’t, not automatically. Clark’s seventh technical, from a July 22nd run-in with Connecticut’s Saniya Rivers over a “look at the scoreboard” chirp, got appealed too. That one was denied. She spent the next stretch of games one whistle away from actually sitting.
So call it what it is: a business with a franchise-player problem, solving that problem faster than it solves everyone else’s, and not saying so out loud.
I get hit with a coach’s tech about once a month in Tuesday night rec league for a lot less than incidental contact. Nobody’s rescinding mine by tip-off.
