While there’s a belief among several fans that Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever aren’t the needle movers in the WNBA, the latest social media engagement statistics from “Zoomph” suggest otherwise. On Friday, the AI-powered platform used for measuring sponsorship performance suggested that the Fever had 42,121,218 engagements on their social media platforms.
It was nearly four times more than the Dallas Wings in second, who had 11,429,052 engagements. The Minnesota Lynx, Las Vegas Aces and New York Liberty were third, fourth and fifth, respectively, with around five million or fewer engagements.
Given the Fever’s dominance in this metric, the team’s fans rallied behind the conversations around Clark being the face of the league. Some also dissed her rivals, raising questions around their popularity.
“Lol now I seriously doubt Paige won the fan vote lol,” one fan said.
For context, Paige Bueckers led the WNBA’s fan voting for this year’s All-Star game with 1,045,051 votes, and Caitlin Clark was second with 1,023,321 votes.
Here are other reactions to Zoomph’s results.
Caitlin Clark slams questionable media coverage around her name
Caitlin Clark spoke up about the media’s coverage around her on Friday in a sit-down with ESPN’s Malika Andrews. The Indiana Fever superstar called out certain media members for “making accusations” against her character without even knowing her personally.
“There’s like a false characterizing of who I am sometimes,” Clark said. And I get it, as a reporter or a blogger, like, you can write an opinion piece and that’s your job and whatever, but at the same time, like, you don’t know me; we never had a conversation. I get people have a job to do, but at the same time, like, don’t make accusations about my character and who I am when you don’t know me.”
Most of that scrutiny against Clark erupted after her incident with Alyssa Thomas on Jun. 24. Thomas put her fist on Clark’s neck. The referees didn’t review the issue, but later, the WNBA did and suspended Thomas for a game, while upgrading the non-call to a Flagrant 2. Thomas shared that she received death threats from fans in her first address to the media.
After that, Congress sent a letter to the WNBA in Clark’s defense. The Fever said they had no conversations with the lawmakers, but their involvement had many questioning Clark’s morals and character.
The scrutiny around Clark continued to increase and reached a new peak on Wednesday when USA Today columnist Nancy Armour wrote an article to criticize the Fever star’s arguments with the referees and the broader implications of that. Armour mentioned the 1955 Emmett Till case and had to delete the article after severe backlash.
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