America United On One Issue: The Women’s Basketball Olympic Gold Would’ve Been Far Easier With Caitlin Clark On The Team

Matt Fitzgerald·
CULTURESPORTS
·
Team USA basketball
NBC

The women’s USA basketball team has no business not winning the gold medal in any modern iteration of the Summer Olympics. Perhaps it was pettiness from the greater ladies hoops world, preferential treatment to more senior players, or the collective desire to make life harder on themselves.

Whatever the thinking was behind Team USA Olympic brass to leave Caitlin Clark off the roster, anyone with a brain knew right away it was the wrong call. That’s only further proven to be the case as the Paris Summer Games unfolded.

The USA prevailed yet again — barely. France’s Gabby Williams hit a buzzer beater with one foot inside the 3-point arc, or else we’d have gone to overtime.

I didn’t think this would be an evergreen Olympic tweet, but to my surprise — and by “surprise” I most definitely do not mean that — the Americans entered the fourth quarter of Sunday’s Gold Medal Game against France with their starting backcourt making a combined one shot out of seven from the field.

If the goal was to make the outcome of the Olympics more suspenseful, congrats! Mission accomplished! But everyone and their mother agrees: Caitlin Clark would’ve made the march to an inevitable USA gold medal far easier. Dawn Staley tried to say Clark didn’t play well enough up to when the Olympic roster was decided. Isn’t that amazing?

Look at how much it’s come back to bite the U.S. in the international court of public opinion — and in terms of what actually transpired on the hardwood.

The score was 60-59 in favor of the USA with 1:32 left. At that moment, our nation was shooting the same percentage (32.7%) from the field as Clark has shot from 3-point range for the Indiana Fever as a WNBA rookie. That’s with basically zero rest between her run to the national title game at Iowa and a resulting early-season slump as she acclimated to the pros.

Like seriously? The Americans were sixteen-point favorites against France. Maybe this was Team USA’s vision to draw ratings. Cutting it this close without Clark was the only reason anyone was tuning in. In spite of that, I still think the TV ratings will end up paling in comparison to the undeniable draw Clark creates everywhere she goes.

Congrats to our ladies for not blowing their quadrennial cakewalk to the top of the Olympic podium. At least Clark won’t be left off the squad for roughly the next four Summer Games. Can you imagine if they snubbed her again for the home 2028 Olympics in Los Angeles? The mockery would never end.

This is even funnier when you consider what happened to the USA men on Saturday. They watched the player Clark is most often compared to, Steph Curry, can four 3-pointers in just over two minutes to push them past Victor Wembanyama and France.

If only the American ladies squad had somebody with those kind of shooting chops to bail them out of potential embarrassment in far easier fashion…

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