The last two years, my favorite college basketball player has been Caitlin Clark.
This should come as no surprise to anyone who has spent any amount of time watching the Iowa dynamo rain threes like hellfire from 30-plus feet on whichever team was unlucky enough to have her on the schedule that night. Clark and her predecessors—Sabrina Ionescu, A’Ja Wilson, those folks—are why we watch this sport, because they are brash, loud, confident and skilled enough to back all of it up and then some. If that’s not your speed for high-grade hoops, I’m sorry you missed the peach baskets by several decades. I leave you to your Dolph Schayes biography and your Adrian Dantley tapes1 but that is not where this game is at anymore and you're going to find a lot more Clark’s than Dantley’s on this particular branch of the basketball timeline.
I don’t understand how anyone can claim to like this sport and not, at a bare minimum, appreciate Clark for what she’s done AT MINIMUM as an ambassador for the women’s game. Fran McCaffrey would KILL for the crowds at Carver-Hawkeye that show up when Clark is playing, and the crowds they got for the first rounds of the Women’s NCAA Tournament would force the people in power to at least consider putting the men’s tournament back on campus sites2. But more than anything else, it’s this: people have an opinion about Caitlin Clark3. She passes the Mom Test with flying colors.
Loving Caitlin Clark as appointment viewing has also been a salve during a particularly dry period of exceptional talent entering or existing in the men’s collegiate game. Outside of Clark, my own personal vibes-based top-three of “I will watch this game personally and specifically because I like watching Player X play basketball” would be Aidan Mahaney (a sub-40% shooter playing 10 p.m. tip-offs), Emoni Bates (an incredibly inefficient player who absolutely starred on a MAC team going nowhere that killed itself in deference to him) and… Oscar Tshiebwe? Gradey Dick4? Maybe Reed Sheppard? There have been players with an exceptional skill I would marvel at upon watching them5, and there are talented players destined to have long and fruitful professional careers after their time on campus is finished. But none of them have made their very appearance in a contest transform it from a game to an Event the way Clark has reshaped Iowa’s women’s basketball games.
To the above point about having an opinion on Caitlin Clark: I have not recently spoken with a random person with no skin in the game about the merits of Reed Sheppard.