There has been a lot of chatter on social networks about comments made by ESPN hosts on Pardon the Interruption about Iowa basketball star Caitlin Clark.
Most of the indignation is over a comment from the show saying that Clark will have to take a pay cut when she goes to the WNBA.
The pushback is that Clark will still get most of her endorsements on top of her WNBA salary. While that is true, this misses the point. The women who play basketball for a living are woefully underpaid.
According to Spotrac, the player with the highest contract in the WNBA is Arike Ogunbowale, a guard with the Dallas Wings, who this year signed a three-year contract extension for $725,952 or an average of $241,984.
The NBA average contract, average, not the highest, is $9.7 million. According to Spotrac, that is the highest average salary for any sport in the world.
Caitlin Clark will likely keep NIL deals and get more endorsements
Clark has NIL – or Name, Image and Likeness – deals with companies such as Bose, Buick, Gatorade, H&R Block, Nike, State Farm, Topps and Hy-Vee. Those won’t go away when she gets drafted by a WNBA team.
Clark will surely be one of the Top 4 picks in the draft, likely the No. 1 pick by the Indiana Fever, and will make a base salary of $74,305.
After that contract expires, she’ll likely make in a similar range as Ogunbowale, if Clark is as good in the pros as she is in college and there’s no reason to believe she won’t be.
Clark, this season, became the 15th Division I women’s basketball player to pass the 3,000-point mark. Last year’s national player of the year has 3,041 career points. She’s averaging 31.5 points, 7.4 assists and 6.9 rebounds per game and shoots 49% from the field.
Yes, the guys on PTI misspoke about Clark taking a pay cut and yes, they were also wrong when saying the Iowa women draw as well as the men – they average more 14,998 to 12,371 – but the idea that WNBA players are properly compensated is false. (Iowa played DePaul in an outdoor game earlier this season before 55,646 fans to set a record for the most people to watch a women’s college basketball game).
They have to have endorsement deals to make the kind of money professional athletes around the world make, especially the ones who are the best at what they do.