Put your mouths where the money is.
For ESPN and the increasingly popular national spectacle of the WNBA playoffs, that means reserving the Sunday afternoon broadcast television window and dispatching the announcing A-team of Ryan Ruocco and Rebecca Lobo to Uncasville, Conn., where rookie phenom Caitlin Clark will make her eagerly anticipated playoff debut at 3 p.m. on ABC.
No. 22 is pulling up from 3.
You’re pulling up a chair.
The presumptive Rookie of the Year steered the sixth-seeded Indiana Fever (20-20) to the postseason for the first time since 2016 with a stunning rebound from a 1-8 start — the Fever went 9-5 after Clark was left off the Olympics team and received a much-needed month-long break — setting the league’s single-season assists record and a slew of viewership and attendance marks along the way.
Now her young, up-tempo squad, which ranks third in the league in offensive rating behind Clark’s 19.2 points and 8.4 assists per game, encounters a veteran-laden, physical foe in the No. 3 seed Connecticut Sun, who lead in the league in defensive rating.
Clark cemented her profound cultural reputation in the madness of March.
What can she do on the stage of September?
“Once we get there, I think it’ll feel a little more real and, obviously, we’re not just happy to be there,” Clark said. “We really believe we can compete with every single team that’s going to be in the playoffs.”
Don’t be mistaken.
The playoffs are rich with other storylines: The top-seeded Liberty enter as favorites to claim the first title in the original franchise’s history; A’ja Wilson tries to steer her Las Vegas Aces to a championship three-peat after submitting arguably the best individual season in WNBA history; Diana Taurasi plays what more and more appear to be the final games of her storied career with the Phoenix Mercury.
But for pure intrigue and attention capture, competing against the NFL behemoth, baseball’s homestretch and a presidential horse race, there is no WNBA equal for witnessing Clark’s next test — certainly not in a traditionally upset-proof first round.
The WNBA playoff format has a best-of-three first round with the higher seed hosting the first two games and the lower seed hosting a potential Game 3.
If the Fever can steal a game in Connecticut, expect an extraordinary environment Friday in Indianapolis — the team averaged a league-high 17,035 in attendance at Gainbridge Fieldhouse, according to Across the Timeline.
“I always thought this year with this group that we were a playoff team,” Fever GM Lin Dunn recently told ESPN. “The question for me now is: What can we do in the playoffs? Are we old enough, wise enough, tough enough, experienced enough to surprise some people?”
The Fever are priced as just slight underdogs in the series (+150), no doubt influenced by pro-Clark bettors.
But as a proxy for competitiveness, no other series is even close: The Seattle Storm are listed at +375 against the No. 4 seed Aces, Taurasi’s Mercury are 6/1 against the No. 2 Minnesota Lynx, and the Atlanta Dream are a broom-ready 13/1 against the juggernaut Liberty.
That portends a blockbuster semifinal between the Liberty and Aces, a rematch of last year’s WNBA Finals — which ended with Sabrina Ionescu vomiting, Breanna Stewart passing up a possible game-winner and stunned silence at Barclays Center.
The Lynx, who emerged this season as the Liberty’s sharpest foil, loom on the other side of the bracket, unless the Sun have something to say about it.
Or, more fascinatingly, unless Clark — who has made a career of living up to the moment — and the rising Fever can make a real run.
Now that would be box office.
