Culture
Caitlin Clark wins Rookie of the Year, Napheesa Collier wins DPOY for 2024 WNBA season: Sources
Having etched her name across the record book during the 2024 WNBA season, Caitlin Clark has been named the league’s Rookie of the Year, league sources told The Athletic on Friday.
That Clark won the award came as little surprise considering how prolific her debut season was.
Clark broke both the WNBA’s single-season and single-game assist records. She scored the most points by a rookie ever, and the most points by a point guard ever. She became the first rookie to record two triple-doubles and the first Fever player ever to record a triple-double.
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Those are just some of her many accomplishments among averaging 19.2 points and 8.4 assists per game — numbers that were even better in the second half of the season — and led the Fever to their first postseason appearance since 2016. Indiana also improved its win total by seven in 2024.
Clark, the No. 1 pick in the 2024 WNBA Draft, entered the league as the most-anticipated rookie in league history. She flourished at Iowa for four seasons, leading the Hawkeyes to two Final Fours and setting the women’s NCAA Division I and major college women’s basketball scoring records.
The spectacle around Clark followed her to the professional ranks. While Clark dazzled fans and tormented opponents, she also played an instrumental role in a season of explosive growth for the WNBA. Six different league television partners set viewership records this year for its highest viewed WNBA game, and all six included the Fever.
Attendance in Indianapolis hit a record high, with an average of 17,036 fans packing Gainbridge Fieldhouse for home games. Indiana led the league in attendance for the first time in WNBA history.
Friday’s news, however, is not a reflection of the off-court Clark Effect, but her successes between the court’s four lines.
“She’s been special,” Indiana coach Christie Sides said ahead of the playoffs. “She came into the best league in the world, the best women’s basketball league in the world. She found her footing. She’s continued to get better. She’s put herself in position to be called one of the best players in the league. That’s incredible for a rookie.”
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For the first half of the season, the Rookie of the Year race seemed as if it would be among the tightest ever. Through the first two months of the season, Angel Reese helped the Sky remain in playoff contention. She had 14 double-doubles in 20 games and broke Candace Parker’s consecutive double-double streak.
Reese, like Clark, earned All-Star honors and was awarded WNBA Rookie of the Month in June. She set the league’s single-season total rebound record (446) and recorded the highest per-game rebound average in WNBA history (13.1).
The No. 7 draft pick, Reese would have become only the third player taken after No. 6 in the WNBA Draft to win Rookie of the Year. But her second half proved different than her first. Chicago slumped and Reese eventually was ruled out for the rest of the season on Sept. 8 with a wrist injury. The Sky missed the postseason.
During the season Clark and Reese downplayed the importance of the race.
“I’m sure (Angel) would give you the same exact answer—I’m sure she has given you the same exact answer,” Clark said in late August. “So for us, everybody can write that, but our focus is on winning basketball games. It’s as simple as that.”
Said Reese: “We don’t either care about Rookie of the Year. I think you guys have made it a big thing. We haven’t. We both want to win. We’ve been wanting to win, and that’s what we’ve done in our collegiate career.”
Clark became the third consecutive No. 1 pick to win top rookie honors.
“I know there’s a lot of room for me to continue to improve,” Clark said after the Fever were knocked out of the playoffs by the Connecticut Sun. “I feel like I had a solid year, but for me, the fun part is I feel like I’m just scratching the surface.”
Collier wins DPOY award
From the beginning of the regular season until its conclusion, the Minnesota Lynx had one of the WNBA’s top defenses. And that defense now boasts the league’s top defender after Napheesa Collier was named the 2024 WNBA Defensive Player of the Year award winner, league sources told The Athletic on Friday.
The Lynx finished the year first in opponent field goal percentage (41), first in opponent 3-point percentage (30.1), first in opponent assist rate (18.6), and a close second in defensive rating (94.8). Collier’s versatility was key to all their success as an anchor Minnesota’s defense.
Often Collier was tasked with guarding an opponent’s top frontcourt players. At other moments, she rotated over to provide crucial help. She was especially impactful against top competition as the Lynx went 7-4 against the other top-four playoff seeds, including Minnesota’s Commissioner’s Cup victory.
Collier finished second in the WNBA in steals per game (1.9) and eighth in blocks (1.4 per game). According to Synergy Sports, opponents shot only 34.3 percent against her.
“I’m so proud of Phee’s defensive work in 2024. Her commitment to all aspects of our defense — deflections, denials, steals, blocks, rebounds — anchored one of the top defensive teams in the league and led to her best season yet as a pro,” Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve told the AP.
Minnesota finished second in the WNBA standings and swept the Phoenix Mercury in the first round of the playoffs. The Lynx, winners of four WNBA titles, will be looking to win their fifth this postseason. If they do, they would move into first place for titles won by an active WNBA franchise, breaking a tie with the Seattle Storm.
Tipoff for Game 1 of their semifinal series against the third-seeded Sun is set for 8:30 p.m. ET on Sunday.
Required reading
(Photo: Dylan Goodman / NBAE via Getty Images)
A famous poet once observed that it is difficult to get the news from poems. The weather is a different story. April showers, summer sunshine and — maybe especially — the chill of winter provide an endless supply of moods and metaphors. Poets like to practice a double meteorology, looking out at the water and up at the sky for evidence of interior conditions of feeling.
The inner and outer forecasts don’t always match up. This short poem by Louise Glück starts out cold and stays that way for most of its 11 lines.
And then it bursts into flame.
“Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” comes from Glück’s debut collection, “Firstborn,” which was published in 1968. She wrote the poems in it between the ages of 18 and 23, but they bear many of the hallmarks of her mature style, including an approach to personal matters — sex, love, illness, family life — that is at once uncompromising and elusive. She doesn’t flinch. She also doesn’t explain.
Here, for example, Glück assembles fragments of experience that imply — but also obscure — a larger narrative. It’s almost as if a short story, or even a novel, had been smashed like a glass Christmas ornament, leaving the reader to infer the sphere from the shards.
We know there was a couple with a flat tire, and that a year later at least one of them still has feelings for the other. It’s hard not to wonder if they’re still together, or where they were going with those Christmas presents.
To some extent, those questions can be addressed with the help of biographical clues. The version of “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson” that appeared in The Atlantic in 1967 was dedicated to Charles Hertz, a Columbia University graduate student who was Glück’s first husband. They divorced a few years later. Glück, who died in 2023, was never shy about putting her life into her work.
But the poem we are reading now is not just the record of a passion that has long since cooled. More than 50 years after “Firstborn,” on the occasion of receiving the Nobel Prize for literature, Glück celebrated the “intimate, seductive, often furtive or clandestine” relations between poets and their readers. Recalling her childhood discovery of William Blake and Emily Dickinson, she declared her lifelong ardor for “poems to which the listener or reader makes an essential contribution, as recipient of a confidence or an outcry, sometimes as co-conspirator.”
That’s the kind of poem she wrote.
“Confidence” can have two meanings, both of which apply to “Early December in Croton-on-Hudson.” Reading it, you are privy to a secret, something meant for your ears only. You are also in the presence of an assertive, self-possessed voice.
Where there is power, there’s also risk. To give voice to desire — to whisper or cry “I want you” — is to issue a challenge and admit vulnerability. It’s a declaration of conquest and a promise of surrender.
What happens next? That’s up to you.
Cold weather can serve as a plot point or emphasize the mood of a scene, and this week’s literary geography quiz highlights the locations of recent novels that work winter conditions right into the story. Even if you aren’t familiar with the book, the questions offer an additional hint about the setting. 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 books if you’d like to do further reading.
When a writer is praised for having a sense of place, it usually means one specific place — a postage stamp of familiar ground rendered in loving, knowing detail. But Kiran Desai, in her latest novel, “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny,” has a sense of places.
This 670-page book, about the star-crossed lovers of the title and several dozen of their friends, relatives, exes and servants (there’s a chart in the front to help you keep track), does anything but stay put. If “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” were an old-fashioned steamer trunk, it would be papered with shipping labels: from Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj), Goa and Delhi; from Queens, Kansas and Vermont; from Mexico City and, perhaps most delightfully, from Venice.
There, in Marco Polo’s hometown, the titular travelers alight for two chapters, enduring one of several crises in their passionate, complicated, on-again, off-again relationship. One of Venice’s nicknames is La Serenissima — “the most serene” — but in Desai’s hands it’s the opposite: a gloriously hectic backdrop for Sonia and Sunny’s romantic confusion.
Their first impressions fill a nearly page-long paragraph. Here’s how it begins.
Sonia is a (struggling) fiction writer. Sunny is a (struggling) journalist. It’s notable that, of the two of them, it is she who is better able to perceive the immediate reality of things, while he tends to read facts through screens of theory and ideology, finding sociological meaning in everyday occurrences. He isn’t exactly wrong, and Desai is hardly oblivious to the larger narratives that shape the fates of Sunny, Sonia and their families — including the economic and political changes affecting young Indians of their generation.
But “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny” is about more than that. It’s a defense of the very idea of more, and thus a rebuke to the austerity that defines so much recent literary fiction. Many of Desai’s peers favor careful, restricted third-person narration, or else a measured, low-affect “I.” The bookstores are full of skinny novels about the emotional and psychological thinness of contemporary life. This book is an antidote: thick, sloppy, fleshy, all over the place.
It also takes exception to the postmodern dogma that we only know reality through representations of it, through pre-existing concepts of the kind to which intellectuals like Sunny are attached. The point of fiction is to assert that the world is true, and to remind us that it is vast, strange and astonishing.
See the full list of the 10 Best Books of 2025 here.
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