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The WNBA might not be so enraptured by Caitlin Clark anymore.
As Clark enters her third WNBA season, the Indiana Fever's star point guard has had to contend with a lower-than-anticipated ranking in ESPN's list of the 50 top players in the league. Granted, Clark's ranking of 10th is nothing to sneeze at, especially after she played in only 13 games last season due to various injuries.
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But what also might hurt Clark's pride is the sentiment that executives around the WNBA are valuing Dallas Wings star Paige Bueckers more than her.
A new poll of the league's general managers conducted by The Athletic revealed that Bueckers is the player that the majority of those executives would take to start a team from the ground up.
It's a marked shift away from Clark, who entered the WNBA with unprecedented hype in 2024 following a historic NCAA career at Iowa. Bueckers though has been on fans' radar for years too -- she was the top-rated recruit in Clark's class of 2020, and she won a national championship at UConn, something Clark never was able to enjoy despite setting the NCAA's all-time points scored record.
Clark and the Fever could perceive this as a disrespectful slight, eight months after injury-wracked Indiana reached the WNBA semifinals and lost out to the eventual champion Las Vegas Aces.
No longer viewed as the league's "most fun team to watch," the Fever -- with their three All-Stars healthy again -- will look not only to reclaim that mantle, but reach the WNBA Finals for the first time since 2015.
The first chance to do so is on Saturday, when Clark and the Fever host Bueckers and the Wings at Gainbridge Fieldhouse in Indiana to begin the 2026 season.
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