Keegan flew the coop. Sacramento selected him with the fourth pick in June.
Kris remained in Iowa City. On Friday, he announced he was entering the 2023 NBA draft.
Yet all along, arguably the best basketball player at Iowa — whom the country, amazingly, appeared just to discover last month, despite a third straight season averaging basically 27 points — never had a choice. Because Caitlin Clark is a woman. And gender is discriminated against in pro basketball.
As LeBron James, who graduated from high school and went straight to the Cleveland Cavaliers without passing through college, tweeted last year at this time: “I’m sitting here after watching the WNBA draft the other day and wondering WHY THE HELL do those young ladies have to stay in school for 4 years before being able to go pro??!!! I’m CONFUSED.”
Candace Buckner: Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark and the moment we’ll all remember
The 2023 WNBA draft is Monday. Here’s the deal: For a woman to be eligible for its draft, she must be at least 22 during the year of the draft. Or have graduated from college, specifically a four-year institution. Or be set to graduate from a four-year institution within three months of the draft. Or have gone to a four-year university where her original class would have met those prerequisites within three months of the draft. Or just be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Men need to be 19 to be eligible for the NBA draft. Even that is too restrictive a rule on labor for me.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/spo...ry-men-or-women/vi-AA198IyI?ocid=winp1taskbar
It long has been time to do away with age requirements for professional basketball. As a short-lived neophyte general manager of the Dallas Mavericks, Frank Zaccanelli, once quipped about putting together an NBA team, “Hey, this isn’t brain surgery.”
But it is particularly galling that the regulations for men and women to monetize their athletic talent as professionals are dissimilar. Just as it was galling during the 2021 NCAA basketball tournaments when women weren’t afforded the same exercise space and equipment as men, something observers realized after Oregon’s Sedona Prince and others posted images of the paltry setup the NCAA provided women.
So although Clark is a junior, like Kris Murray, and is 21, as was Keegan when he turned pro a year ago, she is ineligible to take her talents to the WNBA. With a January birthday, she won’t be allowed to do so until 2024, when she is a senior. That’s ridiculous. Unfair. Inequitable. Straight-up sexist.
Clark hasn’t complained. She even suggested on the “Dan Patrick Show” that she might remain in college a fifth year. “That’s where I want to be [the WNBA], but I have another year here [Iowa] and possibly one more after that just because of covid,” Clark told Patrick in February. “I probably will have to make a decision on that sometime next year. I really have no clue what I’m going to do, stay for an extra year or leave after next year.”
Her newfound rival at champion LSU, Angel Reese — also locked out of the WNBA because of its age and class requirements — said she was in no rush to get to the pros because of this newfangled NIL landscape, which allows college athletes to earn endorsement money selling themselves to sponsors. “I’m chilling right now,” Reese said last week on the “I Am Athlete” podcast. “The money I’m making is more than some of the people that are in the league that might be top players.”
The rookie salary in the WNBA is roughly $72,000 for the top picks. I’ve yet to see a 1099 for what anyone in this new class of college athletes is making, but I’ve heard the numbers, as have you. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, into the millions for some. And sadly, it seems, many of the women’s athletes are having to accept the commodification of their sexuality to score the lucrativeness of these NIL deals.
Sally Jenkins: Beyond the tears, taunts and technical, LSU achieves a sparkling title
But that isn’t the immediate point. Instead, it is that college athletes, be they men or women, still aren’t sharing in the revenue they produce for their coaches, athletic directors and conference commissioners — who have become, or are becoming, millionaires off the unpaid work of those college athletes. More urgently, women in college should have the same opportunity as the men playing on the same courts or fields to leave it behind for the professional ranks.
As much as suddenly minted women’s college basketball fans — who apparently weren’t tuned into Mississippi State’s buzzer-beater in the 2017 tournament to break Connecticut’s 111-game winning streak or Kristi Toliver’s championship-game-tying three-pointer that propelled Maryland to the 2006 title in overtime or countless other thrilling moments in the women’s game — want a rematch of Clark and Reese next season, why not stage it in the WNBA? Like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, drafted after his sophomore year, did in the NBA, a year after they met in the national championship game?
What a boon that would be for a league that continues to struggle for attendance, TV viewership and the revenue and revenue sharing to sustain itself and expand to absorb all the talent the college ranks are honing. Iowa, for example, temporarily suspended its ticket sales for Hawkeyes women’s basketball next season because of the overwhelming demand to witness Clark. The WNBA could use that injection of excitement. And it wouldn’t hurt the college game, which sports media analysts have said is already worth exponentially more than its current valuation.
With Clark and Reese having no choice except to return to their campuses next season, that calculation adds up easily. It’s just that they, or any other women, shouldn’t have to help lift college basketball — at the expense of their pro careers.
Kris remained in Iowa City. On Friday, he announced he was entering the 2023 NBA draft.
Yet all along, arguably the best basketball player at Iowa — whom the country, amazingly, appeared just to discover last month, despite a third straight season averaging basically 27 points — never had a choice. Because Caitlin Clark is a woman. And gender is discriminated against in pro basketball.
As LeBron James, who graduated from high school and went straight to the Cleveland Cavaliers without passing through college, tweeted last year at this time: “I’m sitting here after watching the WNBA draft the other day and wondering WHY THE HELL do those young ladies have to stay in school for 4 years before being able to go pro??!!! I’m CONFUSED.”
Candace Buckner: Angel Reese, Caitlin Clark and the moment we’ll all remember
The 2023 WNBA draft is Monday. Here’s the deal: For a woman to be eligible for its draft, she must be at least 22 during the year of the draft. Or have graduated from college, specifically a four-year institution. Or be set to graduate from a four-year institution within three months of the draft. Or have gone to a four-year university where her original class would have met those prerequisites within three months of the draft. Or just be faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive and able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.
Men need to be 19 to be eligible for the NBA draft. Even that is too restrictive a rule on labor for me.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/video/spo...ry-men-or-women/vi-AA198IyI?ocid=winp1taskbar
It long has been time to do away with age requirements for professional basketball. As a short-lived neophyte general manager of the Dallas Mavericks, Frank Zaccanelli, once quipped about putting together an NBA team, “Hey, this isn’t brain surgery.”
But it is particularly galling that the regulations for men and women to monetize their athletic talent as professionals are dissimilar. Just as it was galling during the 2021 NCAA basketball tournaments when women weren’t afforded the same exercise space and equipment as men, something observers realized after Oregon’s Sedona Prince and others posted images of the paltry setup the NCAA provided women.
So although Clark is a junior, like Kris Murray, and is 21, as was Keegan when he turned pro a year ago, she is ineligible to take her talents to the WNBA. With a January birthday, she won’t be allowed to do so until 2024, when she is a senior. That’s ridiculous. Unfair. Inequitable. Straight-up sexist.
Clark hasn’t complained. She even suggested on the “Dan Patrick Show” that she might remain in college a fifth year. “That’s where I want to be [the WNBA], but I have another year here [Iowa] and possibly one more after that just because of covid,” Clark told Patrick in February. “I probably will have to make a decision on that sometime next year. I really have no clue what I’m going to do, stay for an extra year or leave after next year.”
Her newfound rival at champion LSU, Angel Reese — also locked out of the WNBA because of its age and class requirements — said she was in no rush to get to the pros because of this newfangled NIL landscape, which allows college athletes to earn endorsement money selling themselves to sponsors. “I’m chilling right now,” Reese said last week on the “I Am Athlete” podcast. “The money I’m making is more than some of the people that are in the league that might be top players.”
The rookie salary in the WNBA is roughly $72,000 for the top picks. I’ve yet to see a 1099 for what anyone in this new class of college athletes is making, but I’ve heard the numbers, as have you. Hundreds of thousands of dollars, into the millions for some. And sadly, it seems, many of the women’s athletes are having to accept the commodification of their sexuality to score the lucrativeness of these NIL deals.
Sally Jenkins: Beyond the tears, taunts and technical, LSU achieves a sparkling title
But that isn’t the immediate point. Instead, it is that college athletes, be they men or women, still aren’t sharing in the revenue they produce for their coaches, athletic directors and conference commissioners — who have become, or are becoming, millionaires off the unpaid work of those college athletes. More urgently, women in college should have the same opportunity as the men playing on the same courts or fields to leave it behind for the professional ranks.
As much as suddenly minted women’s college basketball fans — who apparently weren’t tuned into Mississippi State’s buzzer-beater in the 2017 tournament to break Connecticut’s 111-game winning streak or Kristi Toliver’s championship-game-tying three-pointer that propelled Maryland to the 2006 title in overtime or countless other thrilling moments in the women’s game — want a rematch of Clark and Reese next season, why not stage it in the WNBA? Like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, drafted after his sophomore year, did in the NBA, a year after they met in the national championship game?
What a boon that would be for a league that continues to struggle for attendance, TV viewership and the revenue and revenue sharing to sustain itself and expand to absorb all the talent the college ranks are honing. Iowa, for example, temporarily suspended its ticket sales for Hawkeyes women’s basketball next season because of the overwhelming demand to witness Clark. The WNBA could use that injection of excitement. And it wouldn’t hurt the college game, which sports media analysts have said is already worth exponentially more than its current valuation.
With Clark and Reese having no choice except to return to their campuses next season, that calculation adds up easily. It’s just that they, or any other women, shouldn’t have to help lift college basketball — at the expense of their pro careers.
