Basketball Loves a Rivalry
And it can always use more of them
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ESPN isn’t what it used to be as the font of all sports coverage, but I still think there are things worth noting about what they choose to cover.
On Monday morning, I saw Get Up do an entire segment on the rivalry between WNBA stars Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese. On the next screen over — here’s to you, Crunch Fitness — I saw Nate Burleson talking about the exact same thing on CBS Mornings. I saw it everywhere, as a rivalry that first emerged in college made yet another leap into the public consciousness after a hard foul from Clark on Reese in a recent game.
So, Takeaway 1.) all available evidence suggests that the WNBA’s surge in popularity is here to stay.
2.) We’re at the point where national media consistently find reason to engage with it, in ways that would’ve been completely unrecognizable even a few years ago. (Case in point — let me know the next time you see Nate Burleson talking baseball or hockey on CBS.)
3.) Caitlin Clark is a singularly giant part of that, in ways that you can and maybe should compare to what the rise of Michael Jordan did for the NBA in the 90s.
4.) And, like Jordan, Clark has rivals in the league that she will either succeed or fail in overcoming as her career progresses. In Angel Reese, she has a foil, a star in her own right. Together, they bring real juice every time they’re on the court together.
5.) People like that. People like to gently “sports hate” players on opposing teams. You can be team Clark or you can be team Reese, but most people aren’t both. People like that too, picking sides.
The reflection here is not so much about the deserved rise in women’s basketball coverage — notable on its own — but rather the fact that sports at their very best are kind of like a different level of unscripted drama.
The stakes are real, yes, but also imagined. It doesn’t actually matter, in the grand scheme of things, who wins a championship let alone a single game. But it does to the people who are playing for it, and it does for the fans who are cheering them on. We all collectively agree to those terms for the express purpose of getting swept up in it. That’s the point!
And every great drama must have characters. Right now, more than any point prior, the WNBA has a readily identifiable cast of characters. We know them. The people watching ESPN know these characters, as do the people watching CBS. That counts for a lot. Clark and Reese are right at the top of that cast list, and that’s not a small part of why the league is succeeding at a level it hadn’t before.
The fact that they also happen to be on this constant collision course is what, in the construction of a story, we call conflict. These two have history! They also have a present, and, we’re quite sure, they have a future. All that accrues to a compelling story that people want to engage with, and so they are.
This is a complaint from the NBA old heads that I endorse more than most. The league really is a lot more friendly than it used to be. More brand-conscious stars really are a little more reticent to paint outside the lines, as it were. We don’t really have any Allen Iversons these days.
And all of these guys get along off the court (in part, probably, because of the frenetic era of player movement/empowerment that frequently paired former rivals together within a few years of any kind of true beef emerging). We don’t have as much full-on beef as we used to. And maybe that’s better in some ways. I’m not saying that these guys need to despise each other for the sole purpose of our entertainment.
I’m just saying that the instances where people are at least performing that rivalry — take a look at Tyrese Haliburton and Jalen Brunson lately — is really compelling stuff for the sport. Any sport! And certainly basketball, where you can see these guys directly matched up against one another, going blow for blow in a heavyweight bout.
The Pacers won Wednesday, which is the understatement of the year. That was insane. Everyone was waiting for Haliburton’s Reggie Miller impression, and they didn’t have to wait long. The villain arc continues. And here I’ve been thinking Haliburton was a little too corny to make the heel turn. Then this year happened.
Not only did he start with an almost-always-ill-advised 180 back to the perimeter, he then shot an off-balance three that was actually a two, and that ball bounced straight up in the air, falling perfectly through the hoop as if dropped from twenty feet up. It literally went above where we could see it. It briefly left our perceived reality before coming back down to deliver Indiana’s salvation.
If I were a Knicks fan, I would be a little aggrieved about the goaltending that wasn’t called on the other end. But it’s hard to make excuses for a team that collapsed like that, just like these Knicks had done to the Celtics in Games 1 and 2 last round.
It all makes for a pretty great opening salvo in this series. We’ve seen these two teams duke it out, both very recently and going back 20+ years. It was a real rivalry then, and it has all the potential in the world to turn into a real rivalry now. We should welcome that. Everyone should.
🤵 You may notice a slight downturn in All Fields output over the next few months, as I’m getting married (!!!) in a little over three weeks now followed by a honeymoon shortly after. There is much to do! Such that it’s hard to justify working on much else right now. (Laura, who is both a saint and, unlike me, an actual event planner, approves this message.) I haven’t figured out the full details of the OOO plan quite yet — might go back and revisit some old stuff, or pre-load some stuff that won’t run much risk of dating — but you’ll all be the first to know once I do.
🏀 Not gonna lie — feeling pretty good about the Thunder. Denver ran out of fuel, but I was glad to see David Adelman get the full-time coaching gig. Think he deserves that after that team, depleted from the jump, made it as far as they did. Again, after firing everybody. Pretty impressive stuff.
🏈 The Tush Push lives. As it should! It’s a surprising W for the Eagles, as the tea leaves seemed to be pointing pretty clearly to the ban passing. But that’s not the way this went. I don’t particularly love the play or anything, but I can acknowledge that that’s not a good enough reason to legislate it out of the game. Make a better case, people. Nothing’s stuck so far.
🏈 Glad to see the College Football Playoff quickly abandon the idea of conference champions getting the top four seeds. Let’s just do it straight up. All the champs are still getting in, and in all but the most unusual of cases (like one conference being absolutely terrible one year), I think they should. There’s a lot to be said for backtracking on a bad idea when it doesn’t work.
📚 If you’ll allow me the brief interlude away from sports, allow me to be thousandth person to dunk on this Chicago-Sun Times fabricated book recommendations thing. I do think it’s notable, as
points out, that we’re dealing with an emerging technology we all agree will only continue to grow, but that none of us particularly want to grow. There’s a resignation to the inevitability of AI that is awfully (don’t)… perplexing, no? Anyways, if you want any recommendations for real books, you can always ask me. I make myself available with the following, self-indulgent ~new segment~!!!Currently reading Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler, which I found a little on the slow side to begin with. It feels a bit too much like preamble, and it largely is. Now that we’re just about to the halfway mark though, it’s picking up and I dig it. Once we’re to the point where we’re getting a little more of Lauren (the protagonist/narrator) in the driver’s seat, as it were, the book opens up into something more compelling. I won’t say it’s my favorite this year (I’ve currently got that as a three-way tie between Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, Same Bed, Different Dreams by Ed Park, and The Sun Walks Down by Fiona MacFarlane) but you can see how this got to be such a classic. We’ll talk more books the next time I have something interesting to say. Which could be never! Who knows!
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! Writing about the Cardinals! More positively than not! Christmas came in May this year. I’m not ready to declare them a good baseball team yet — I’ve been fooled before — but I’m ready to admit that I’ve been pleasantly surprised.
(And again, seriously. If you’re into All Fields, I’d love for you to share it far and wide.)