The entrenched pro basketball system fails Caitlin Clark and women athletes -- opinion

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Legendary investor, Bill Gurley, once warned us that incumbents keep out new, innovative, and disruptive competitors by ‘gaming the system’ in their favor. 

It’s an age-old story; those with power often give lip service to change yet shun genuine innovation that threatens their supremacy. The massive business of sports is no different. How many great, cool things have we all been deprived of because of resistance to change? In sports, how many great innovations have been snuffed out because behemoths in charge use their market power to crush anything new? People are deprived of new, fun, amazing things when innovation is killed, and we all suffer when competition is killed.

Recently we witnessed phenomenon Caitlin Clark electrify not just fans of women’s basketball but seemingly captivate the attention and adoration of the entire American populace. While making attendance and ratings history, Catlin made lots of people lots of money and has just begun her journey. Social media posts from countless sports fans now decry the unfair state of women’s basketball that only pays Caitlin $76,535 as a rookie and locks her in at under $100,000 for each of her first four seasons in the WNBA. While I agree many women in the WNBA including Caitlin are pathetically under-compensated, I believe the blame is pointing in the wrong direction.

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Caitlin Clark talks to the media  during the 2024 WNBA Draft on April 14, 2024 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in Brooklyn, New York.  (Catalina Fragoso/NBAE via Getty Images)

Players (labor) and consumers are not a priority to sports’ powerful incumbents