Caitlin mania

 She didn't ask for any of this. Let's understand that straightaway.

Caitlin Clark is a basketball player with impeccable skills and a shooting range that invites comparison to Steph Curry, but she didn't ask for what came with that.

She didn't ask for the Iowa women to become the hottest ticket in town everywhere they went this season because of her. She didn't ask for the TV numbers for the women's March Madness to zoom past the men's numbers largely because of her, or for more viewers to tune into the women's championship game that tuned in for any game of the World Series last fall or of the NBA Finals last June.

And now it really gets crazy.

Now the Indiana Fever has done what was expected of it and made her the No. 1 pick in the WNBA draft, and already the teevees have slotted in 36 Fever games for the coming season. Tickets for Fever games in other WNBA cities are going for 10 times face value. In some WNBA markets, games involving the Fever are even being moved to larger venues.

And the company marketing WNBA jerseys (Fanatics)?

In an hour last night, it sold out of every size but small in Clark's No. 22 Fever jersey.

Caitlin Clark didn't ask for any of that. And she didn't ask for what some people are inferring from it, which is that she's some sort of savior for the WNBA.

She herself has never said that, and never would presume to. But some of the women who built the WNBA brand, and who continue to build it, are rightly torqued about it.  

Diana Taurasi, for one, all but warned Clark she's a marked woman now. And you just know, given the competitiveness and skill level of the current WNBA stars, that they're lining up to welcome the rook to the league in the most unwelcome way possible.

Everyone's gonna take her shot, in other words. Everyone wants to be the first one to swat one of her logo threes to Saturn, or to knock her into next week when she slaloms to the iron, or to turn the "savior" into just an ordinary underpaid WNBA grunt.

With heightened expectation comes heightened motivation for the opposition. And if it's true Clark herself created those expectations by turning herself into something of a basketball savant,  she didn't ask for them to reach the absurd levels they have reached.

But they have, and now Clark faces the impossible task of living up to it all. If she doesn't do superhuman things -- if she doesn't dunk over Brittney Griner or splash every three-ball or  dish 20 dimes a game to Fever teammate and 2023 WNBA Rookie of the Year Aliyah Boston  -- she'll get the dreaded All Hype tag. It's virtually inevitable.

Best example of this off the top of my head would be Pete Maravich, who surfed into the NBA on a Caitlin Clark level of  hype. The Pistol was a dazzling NBA player with a skill set years ahead of its time, but he never averaged 44 points per game the way he did in college, never jumped over the moon, never, I don't know, made himself disappear and then reappear in the middle of a fastbreak. And he'd have had to do all of that live up to the ridiculous expectations with which he was burdened.

Undoubtedly, Clark already knows this. She's weathered that particular storm pretty much flawlessly so far, and even had some fun with it. It's going to get harder to do that now, but she's a savvy young woman in more ways than one. A single-minded focus on basketball is what got her here;  that same focus, the Blob suspects, will keep her from trying to be Wonder Woman instead of just Caitlin Clark.

Which will be more than enough, it says here. And ought to be.