NEW YORK, Sept 25 (Reuters) – Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark said she has only scratched the surface of what she can accomplish after her record-breaking rookie season ended in the first round of the WNBA playoffs on Wednesday.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Rookie of the Year led the Fever to their first postseason appearance since 2016 and while they exited the playoffs with a 87-81 defeat by the Connecticut Sun on the road Clark assured fans that bigger things are on the way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“I feel like I had a solid year but for me the fun part is I feel like I’m just scratching the surface,” she told reporters. “I feel like I can continue to get a lot better.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Clark took some time to get going but once she gelled with her team mates, including two-time All Star Kelsey Mitchell and last year’s rookie of the year Aliyah Boston, she put up extraordinary numbers in her debut year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The 22-year-old broke the single-season assists record (337), smashed the rookie scoring record with 769 points and in July became the first WNBA rookie to score a triple double.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
“We came together and had a lot of fun playing with one another,” said Clark. “That’s sometimes the worst part of it – it’s like you feel like you’re playing your best basketball and then it has to end.”<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It was exactly the kind of run that the WNBA had hoped for, as they worked to capitalize on the “Clark effect” that saw\u00a0television ratings<\/a>\u00a0shattered in her wake in her\u00a0record-breaking<\/a>\u00a0final collegiate season with Iowa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The six-foot sharpshooter became appointment viewing in college thanks to her dazzling three-pointers and she had her best weapon on display in the WNBA, recording the most with 122 of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Viewership of WNBA games on Ion more than doubled from 2023, the network said. Seven games had more than 1 million viewers – all of them Fever games.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The Fever’s final regular-season game brought in a WNBA record crowd of 20,711 to Capital One Arena, where the home team Washington Mystics won 92-91.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Clark had scarcely a week between her final college game and the WNBA Draft, where a television audience of 2.45 million, a record for the event, tuned in to watch her go first overall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While some WNBA players head overseas in the off-season to supplement their income, Clark, who has already signed a host of lucrative endorsement deals, appears unlikely to follow suit.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “I feel like basketball has really consumed my life for a year,” she said. “I feel like taking some time to myself and really enjoying that and reflecting back and, you know, it was special.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" NEW YORK, Sept 25 (Reuters) – Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark said she has only scratched the surface of what she can accomplish after her record-breaking rookie season ended in the first round of the WNBA playoffs on Wednesday. The Rookie of the Year led the Fever to their first […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":283570,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-287210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=287210"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287210\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":287213,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/287210\/revisions\/287213"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/283570"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=287210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=287210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/csinewsnow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=287210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}