Caitlin Clark averaged 25.7 points, 5.6 rebounds and 9.0 assists on 53.7 percent shooting over a 2-1 road trip last week, capped by a triple-double against the Portland Fire, and the league gave her a Player of the Week nod for it. That’s her third this season, tying her with A’ja Wilson for the most Player of the Week honors in the WNBA.
Three is not a career-highlight stat.
Three is a full-season sample.
That distinction is the whole story. Most of the skepticism about Clark this year was never really about a box score — it was about whether one hot week would hold up over an entire season instead of just a week. The sample is big enough now that “wait and see” isn’t a real position. Betting against that pattern for months running is a bigger claim than betting against one good week, and she’s tied the league’s best player for the season, not for a month.
The Portland game is the one worth sitting with: twenty-six points, ten rebounds, ten assists, her fourth career triple-double and the most by a guard in WNBA history, tying Sabrina Ionescu for third all-time. The Fever won that one 112-98 — one of two wins on the three-game trip that got her here.
Wilson picked up her own Player of the Week honor out West the same day. Whatever moment Clark is supposedly having, the league’s presumptive best player is having the exact same one, at the exact same time, with the exact same trophy.
This is the same week Skip Bayless decided she was “becoming a problem,” which has been the discourse trailing Clark all year regardless of what she actually does on the floor. It’s a strange thing to call a player statistically tied for the best month-over-month form in the league. I don’t know what problem he means. I know what the box score means.
The Fever posted the news themselves:
https://twitter.com/IndianaFever/status/2084688270005268607
Third time saying it, and the tweet still undersells it. A conference award sounds smaller than tying the league’s most dominant player for the season lead.
I’ve been doing this long enough to remember invoicing $50 a piece and triple-checking the math on my own rate by hand, back when every dollar actually mattered. I check Clark’s weekly total with the same instinct now — count it twice, because the number keeps holding up.
None of this is news if you’ve watched the Fever run through opponents for weeks. It’s just the first time the league put a name on it three separate times.
Three ties is a pattern now, and patterns stop needing defenses.
