Caitlin Clark entering the WNBA has led to the league coming under the spotlight in recent weeks. While the W has been growing pretty rapidly over the last few years, the addition of a high-profile rookie class headlined by Clark has brought a ton of eyeballs onto the sport. It’s generally a good thing, but unfortunately, this has also led to the league (and, more specifically, Clark) getting caught up in the sports media take cycle.
An example of this came when ESPN’s Monica McNutt went onto First Take and called out Stephen A. Smith for not using his platform to discuss the W in the past. The exchange highlighted the fact that the sports media as a whole is hitching their wagon onto Clark specifically in ways that can get really weird, and unsurprisingly, Jon Stewart brought it up when McNutt appeared on The Daily Show on Monday night. Stewart asked McNutt about the conversation with Smith, who revealed that she was surprised Chennedy Carter’s foul on Clark was going to lead First Take that day.
“I’m not gonna lie to you, Jon: If I took you through my day that morning, I get the call — or the text, rather — and I’m like, ‘Are we really leading sports with this? Are we really leading sports with a foul?’” McNutt said, with Stewart likewise expressing his surprise over the whole thing.
“I’m like, fine, let’s just do it,” McNutt continued. “So, we have the conversation with colleagues and friends — Stephen A. Smith, Shannon Sharpe. And my larger point in the conversation was the tenor and the prevailing narrative that has been created around this season’s WNBA play is that it’s the league vs. Caitlin Clark, and that is just absolutely false. It is unfair to the women that have been there, building this league to this moment, so that Caitlin Clark’s popularity can take it to the next level. And so, by the end of the show, Jon, the tone had changed, and I just kind of needed to put my foot down.”
Stewart mentioned that there was “defensiveness” that came about in this conversation “on the part of the individuals,” a reference to how Smith and Sharpe reacted to the way McNutt brought this up. He went on to lay out how McNutt has been around the game for quite some time — Stewart, of course, is a Knicks fan, while McNutt is an analyst for MSG and calls their games on the radio — and described their approach as “no, we know what we’re talking about, even though we just turned into this whole thing last Wednesday.”
“As I have said about this, it was a little bit of a challenge to gentlemen I admire in terms of what they’ve built, because if you haven’t been here, I need three years,” McNutt replied. “I need you to kind of have jumped in when Sedona Prince went viral for calling out the NCAA, I need you to kind of be here as the league has seen its best viewership year-to-year. Now, yes, it has absolutely been taken over the top this year, but this has been a snowballing effect to get to this moment. And so, while Caitlin is fantastic and I think she’s gonna have an incredible career in the WNBA, there are women that were worthy of coverage prior to her arriving, and I just will not be silence when it comes to that.”
The entire conversation between McNutt and Stewart is pretty great, and if you’d like, you can view it at the top of this post.
