Culture
Caitlin Clark is a threat from anywhere, against anyone. Here are the numbers to prove it
During Caitlin Clark’s three-plus seasons at Iowa, she has frequently sprinted toward, and past, whatever is in front of her. Often, that means blowing by defenders en route to layups at the rim. Sometimes, she dashes around screens and away from opponents to create space for catch-and-shoot 3s. Since the start of the season, Clark has had her eye on chasing former Washington star Kelsey Plum’s NCAA women’s basketball scoring record of 3,527 points. “(She was) coming in ready to bust it down,” Hawkeyes coach Lisa Bluder told the Big Ten Network last week. “This hasn’t been a burden to her.”
Leading into No. 4 Iowa’s contest Thursday against Michigan, Clark had averaged a nation-leading 33.8 points through her last five games. History didn’t seem to weigh on her.
Time and again, as Clark passed opponents on the court and contemporaries in the record book, she elevated from 3 and rose to the occasion. As she became the NCAA women’s basketball all-time leading scorer on Thursday, she did so in a 49-point outing, setting a new career-high and Iowa record in the process. Now, holding the NCAA scoring title with 3,569 points, her chase to the top will be remembered for her sheer dominance and unmatched consistency. “What she’s done to uplift our program and women’s basketball nationally is spectacular,” Bluder said after the Hawkeyes’ 106-89 win.
During Clark’s freshman season, her 3-point prowess was immediately apparent. In 30 games, she made 116 shots from behind the arc, more than double that of any of her teammates. According to CBB Analytics, Clark also knocked down 22 more above-the-break 3s in the 2020-21 season than any other player in the country, shooting almost half of her field goal attempts from that range.
Playing in a fast-paced system, Clark has been encouraged to shoot whenever, and from wherever, she feels comfortable. In each of the last three seasons, she has taken more than 30 percent of Iowa’s total shot attempts. By comparison, fellow top-five career scorers Kelsey Mitchell and Brittney Griner both took around 26 percent of their team’s shots during their senior seasons. Last year’s second-leading Big Ten scorer (behind Clark), Mackenzie Holmes, took only 21.6 percent of Indiana’s total field goal attempts.
Clark’s success from deep has been integral to her success. Of the four other players in NCAA top-five scoring, only Mitchell (2014-18) totaled more points from 3. Nevertheless, Clark’s point total, much like Plum’s, reflects a balanced repertoire. The 6-foot Iowa guard has recorded nearly 40 percent of her points from 2 and just over 40 percent from behind the arc.
Clark is a threat pretty much anywhere on the floor. Consider that she entered Thursday as a career-42.4 percent shooter on right wing 3s — the national average from there last season was 30.6 percent, according to CBB Analytics — while also shooting nearly 40 percent on left baseline 2s — just under 10 percent above the national average in 2023. Even around the rim, she’s more prolific than her peers, shooting 66.1 percent in her career heading into Iowa’s most recent victory, compared to the 57.1 percent Division I mark a year ago. “Most everybody wants to talk about her long-range shot,” assistant coach Abby Stamp said. “We are a little bit more full dimensional in how we view her game.”
Aside from Clark’s production around the basket, the second-highest percentage of her points come from the left wing. She often creates space from there for her defenders on step-back leaning triples.
As Clark’s career progressed, her game created a fervor. According to Vivid Seats, the average ticket price for Iowa’s road games this season is nearly $108. Of the Hawkeyes’ 32 regular-season games this season, 30 are either sold out or have set arena attendance records for women’s basketball — the lone exceptions were Iowa’s neutral site games at a Thanksgiving tournament.
Though Clark has lit up seemingly every foe she’s faced — only once in her 126 career games has she scored fewer than 10 points — there is no opponent she has dominated quite like Nebraska. Following last Sunday’s contest, in which she finished with 31 points, she has scored 309 total points against the Cornhuskers, the most against a single foe. Her success against conference contenders Indiana (226 points) and Ohio State (203 points) reinforces her greatness against the conference’s top competition. Unsurprisingly, Clark has thrived against Michigan as well, despite playing only her fifth game against the Wolverines on Thursday. She entered the record-breaking contest averaging 34.8 points against the Wolverines, her highest per game average against an opponent she’s played at least three times. That average only increased with her 49-point showing.
Beyond Big Ten schools, Clark has scored more than 100 points against three other conferences. In particular, she has thrived against Missouri Valley Conference schools. Of her 325 career points against MVC opponents, 102 of those are against Northern Iowa. Clark has scored 93 points on Drake, which is located in nearby Des Moines. Following a similar theme, the Big 12 opponent she’s scored the most against is Iowa State (114).
Stamp applauds Clark for her commitment to Iowa’s conditioning, nutrition and strength programs as often overlooked keys to her success. “I think she just deserves a ton of credit for how she’s bought into that, and the way she’s treated her body and really thinks of herself in a professional way,” Stamp said. Clark has remained durable and has never missed a game. She has averaged at least 33 minutes per game each season, too. Coupled with her availability and her ability to play extended minutes, Clark has created an opportunity for much of what she’s earned.
Following Thursday’s game, 799 of Clark’s 1,171 field goals have been unassisted, with teammates credited for an assist on only 372 baskets.
Considering the experience on Iowa’s roster, it’s not exactly surprising that sixth-year senior forward Kate Martin has thrown Clark the most assists. Fifth-year guard Gabbie Marshall has played four seasons with Clark and has found her backcourt mate open for shots the second-most.
Clark could take advantage of a COVID-19 eligibility rule and return to college for a fifth season. If she does, she would create even more distance from Plum and the rest of her peers, potentially creating an insurmountable margin for future generations to catch. Seven years went by between Clark and Plum setting the record, but if Clark goes pro, it might not take that long for a new standard. USC freshman guard JuJu Watkins is averaging 27.7 points per game — up from Clark’s 26.6 freshman average. Could another record chase be on the horizon?
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Data visuals: Drew Jordan / The Athletic; Photos of Caitlin Clark: Greg Fiume / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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