Stacey Dales: Caitlin Clark voted 11th-best WNBA guard ‘insulting’ and ‘preposterous’

· Yahoo Sports

Credit: ESPN

The WNBA narrative engine didn’t need any more gas, but it certainly got some when it was revealed that Caitlin Clark finished 11th among guards in player voting for the WNBA All-Star Game.

Visit freshyourfeel.com for more information.

While the reality of the vote is more complicated and intricate than critics want to dig into, that hasn’t stopped it from causing a WNBA hot-take factory explosion, with talking heads and WNBA pundits sharing their sentiments on both Clark and the players who voted that way.

WNBA alum and NFL Network reporter Stacey Dales stopped by First Take on Friday to offer her perspective, explaining how the vote went down and why it’s important to take the results with a grain of salt.

“I will just say this. We have to be very careful about how we look at player voting when it comes to the All-Star vote, right? They comprise 25% of the vote, the media 25%, the fans 50%,” said Dales. ” Now, of a pool of 180 roster players, you’ve got 85 of them voting. So it’s a small sample size.

“So you have players, for instance, guys that are voting for, hey, my teammate, my buddy, I can vote for my entire roster, the team I play on. But I do think you certainly have a pool of players who take this thing seriously. And while some may not take it seriously, it is a small sample size.”

That said, Dales defended Clark from the “insulting” placement, calling out how underappreciated the Indiana Fever star is overall.

“You see 11th with Caitlin Clark and it is insulting. It is preposterous to consider she would be even deemed unworthy of being in a conversation of the 11th best guard in the WNBA,” Dales continued. “And frankly, to further the discourse, to consider the fact that some believe that she’s not even worthy of being in the top 4 or being a starter amongst these All-Star players is, to me, foolishness, because you have to look at the basketball, you have to break down the tape. But it tells me, are you watching the entire game? There are a lot of great players in this league. I could talk to you guys for hours about them.

“Caitlin Clark is exceptional. She is extraordinary. She is elite. She is incredibly difficult to defend. She plays on extraordinary angles, both with and without the basketball. And she is very unpredictable, I would tell you, defensively. Her ability to consistently hit anywhere from a 25 to a 30-foot jump shot from behind the arc, which is roughly 22 and change, is consistent. And even when she’s out there and she’s, you know, getting all this defensive attention, in-her-face attention, she still has to use that gather step to create space. And she still makes those shots.

“And what’s really challenging, I would say to you guys from watching it, is she’s hard to blitz, she’s hard to double team, she’s as good a passer as she is a scorer. And so it makes her a menace to defend. And that’s why you see a lot of the contact. That’s why, frankly, I mean, egos come into play.

“You ain’t getting got by Caitlin Clark when you step in between those lines. And it makes her also very difficult to officiate. So there’s a lot of layers to this. This is a damn good basketball player.”

As he did on Thursday, David Dennis, Jr. added to what Dales had initially said, noting that the 11th spot was a bit of a misnomer given how the vote played out. He also added that the players were tasked with voting for the players who are having the best season, and he felt it made sense that Clark might not crack the Top 4 guards at this moment, despite being a great player overall.

The post Stacey Dales: Caitlin Clark voted 11th-best WNBA guard ‘insulting’ and ‘preposterous’ appeared first on Awful Announcing.

Read full story at source