Snub or no?

 USA Basketball left Caitlin Clark off the U.S. women's Olympic basketball team, and if some people think this means USA Basketball has dryer lint for brains, other people think it means USA Basketball has dryer lint, dust bunnies and grass clippings for brains. 

I get where they're coming from, sort of. But I also get where USA Basketball is coming from, sort of.

I get that Caitlin Clark is the biggest draw in women's basketball since, like, forever, and that putting her on the Olympic team would have thrown not just a national but an international spotlight on women's Olympic basketball in general -- which veteran journalists who've covered Olympic women's basketball for decades say has been routinely, and shamefully, ignored. 

Put Clark on the U.S. team, they argue, and she'd be one of the three biggest names at the Paris Games. And maybe the international media and viewing public would finally realize there's more to women's Olympic sports than pocket-sized gymnasts and the occasional lung-capacity-monster swimmer.

For those folks, it's not about whether Clark has done enough yet to deserve a spot on the team, or whether she's the best women's basketball player ever. She's not, at least yet. She's not even the best player in the WNBA, nor even close to it.

She is, however, the biggest draw in women's basketball history. That's not even debatable for anyone with an ounce of cognition, and that is what it's about for the pro-Clark folks.

Also, putting Clark on the Olympic team as something of an outlier would hardly have been without precedent. Steve Alford made the 1984 U.S. Olympic team after his freshman year at Indiana largely because Bob Knight was the Olympic coach that year. And Christian Laettner made the 1992 Dream Team because the selectors apparently decided they needed a Designated College Guy for appearance sake.

On the other hand ...

On the other hand, USA Basketball is tasked with putting a team on the floor to win a gold medal, the key word being "team." It's the reason their supporters have given for past snubs, some of them far more egregious than Clark's snub-or-no. As Jemele Hill pointed out the other day on the Magic Twitter Thingy, one year they left the WNBA's MVP (Nneka Ogwumike) off the roster. Another time they left off two-time Olympic gold medalist and former MVP Candace Parker. 

Clark has nothing like those on-court credentials yet. So ...

So, here we are.

With a roster put together to maximize experience, which is why 41-year-old Diana Taurasi is on it and 22-year-old WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark is not. 

With a roster so stuffed with talent -- veteran talent -- it's hard to conceive whom you'd leave off it to make way for Clark, accomplished and uber-celebrated though she may be. 

With a roster that will almost surely win a ninth consecutive gold medal, and that USA Basketball figures will draw millions of viewers worldwide even without Caitlin Clark, because it's, you know, the Olympics. Who doesn't watch the Olympics?

All of that said, one of USA Basketball's reported reasons for leaving Clark off the roster was because it didn't want to deal with a storm of online blowback from Caitlin Maniacs if she wasn't getting the minutes the Maniacs thought she should. If true, that's just damn silly. And kinda gutless.

What might not be so silly?

That Clark's celebrity might in some way prove disruptive to USA Basketball's concept of team.

 Now, I may be all wet here, but if you send Clark to Paris, yes, she'd bring unprecedented attention to women's Olympic basketball. But the attention would primarily be about her. How long before some of her Team USA mates, professionals though they are, would weary of Caitlin Clark constantly being the focus even if she's playing, like, 12 minutes a game? Would the world really discover the awesome talents of A'ja Wilson or Breanna Stewart or Jewell Lloyd because of the spotlight on Clark, or would that spotlight only further obscure them?

I could see it going either way. Which is why, in perhaps a too-close-to-call finish, I tend to come down on the side of USA Basketball here.

Clark eventually will get her shot at Olympic gold, just as Olympic newbies Kahleah Copper, Sabrina Ionescu and Alyssa Thomas will get theirs this year after putting in their time. And they'll get more pub than ever even without Clark, because the very fact she won't be in Paris already has put them front and center in a way they've never before been.

Or perhaps you remember all the headlines about the release of the women's Olympic roster from four years or eight years or 16 years ago. Yeah, me, either.