Long before he became a fixture on the basketball podcast circuit, Olden Polynice had a credential tied to the WNBA. He called games for it. In 1997, while still an active NBA center for the Sacramento Kings, Polynice also worked as a color commentator for the Sacramento Monarchs, one of the WNBA’s eight charter franchises. That is why he said: “I’ve been here since the inception of this league, and I’ve seen everything about it cuz I’m a fan. But they missed the mark with Caitlin Clark.” However, he, too, got one thing wrong while making his case on the TFU Podcast.

“You cannot bring this young lady in who was doing what she did in college because she’s recognized in college even though she didn’t win a title. She was a lightning rod. She moved the needle. You cannot have her play her first two games against the top two defenses if you’re trying to get fans, you know, and that’s what they did. Her first two scheduled games her rookie year were against number one and number two defenses in the WNBA. You know, they missed that one,” the former Clippers player began his argument.

Olden Polynice has been one of Clark’s most vocal defenders since her rookie season. He previously called her the WNBA’s “golden egg” and argued that the league needed to do more to protect its biggest new attraction. Now, he is revisiting the way the WNBA handled Clark’s introduction to professional basketball.

But Clark’s rookie season didn’t open with two rough games. It opened with four, against exactly two opponents. On May 14, 2024, she made her professional debut on the road against Connecticut, a Sun roster that had reached the previous year’s semifinals. They dismantled her, 92-71, forcing 10 turnovers on the way to 20 points, which marked the most turnovers in a career debut in WNBA history.

Two nights later, in front of a sellout crowd at her actual home opener, the reigning Eastern Conference champion New York Liberty routed the Fever 102–66, holding Clark to nine points on 2-for-8 shooting. Indiana then flew to Brooklyn for an immediate rematch, losing again, 91-80, in what was nonetheless Clark’s most efficient game of her young career: 22 points with eight assists.

The stretch closed with Connecticut coming to Indianapolis and escaping with an 88-84 win. Four games, zero wins, two opponents. And according to Basketball-Reference’s strength-of-schedule data, no team in the league faced tougher opponents over its first three weeks than Indiana did.

Per Her Hoop Stats’ final ratings, by the season’s end, Connecticut finished with a 92.4 defensive rating and New York at 93.9. Earlier in that same season, ESPN had Connecticut sitting alone atop its power rankings, unbeaten at 8-0, with the best defensive rating in the WNBA at 89.1. New York, fresh off a Finals run with its whole starting five returning, was never far off. Whatever the exact ranking order, Clark’s first four opponents came from the top of the league, not the bottom.

However, the Fever’s actual dates and opponents were locked in and released by the league in December 2023, months before Clark had even declared for the draft. Some of the crunch was structural. With the season squeezed around a midsummer break for the Paris Olympics, Indiana opened with 11 games in 20 days, and a young roster with little continuity simply happened to draw two Eastern Conference rivals four times in a row.

To Polynice, that sort of a schedule still doesn’t make sense. After all, thanks to Clark, before she ever checked into a WNBA game, Iowa’s 2023 championship-game appearance against LSU drew 9.9 million viewers. A year later, the Hawkeyes’ rematch with the television spotlight grew even larger: 18.9 million watched South Carolina defeat Iowa in the 2024 national championship game, making it the most-watched women’s college basketball game on record at that point. Clark’s draft then became another ratings event, with 2.45 million viewers watching the Fever select her first overall.

What the league unambiguously did control was the spotlight. Indiana’s national broadcasts jumped from 22 games in 2023, only one on ESPN and none on ABC, to 36 of 40 games in 2024. That decision paid off even in defeat, as Clark’s debut against Connecticut pulled in 2.1 million viewers on ESPN2, the largest audience for a WNBA game in 23 years, and her May 18 rematch with the Liberty set the league’s all-time ABC viewership record with 1.71 million viewers. So, throwing her into the deep end of the league with millions of people watching didn’t sit well with Polynice.

“All of a sudden they do they negotiate the contract, and they getting airplanes and nicer hotels, and that’s the Caitlin Clark effect to a certain extent. Of course, I’m not going to be disrespectful to A’ja or Napheesa Collier or none of those players because they’ve had a hand in this as well. But when it’s hot, you got to milk it. I don’t care where it’s coming from. You got to milk it for the totality of the league. And so I think she’s a big part of it,” Polynice added.

What Polynice pointed to here happened almost immediately around Clark’s arrival, although it would be misleading to attribute every league improvement to her alone. That is why Wilson, the Aces’ back-to-back MVP, and Collier, the Lynx forward who’s been one of the league’s loudest advocates for better travel, are the players Polynice is careful not to consign to oblivion. Still, the receipts on the charters back his larger point.

Three weeks after Clark’s draft, commissioner Cathy Engelbert announced that the WNBA would commit $50 million over two seasons to provide full-time charter flights for every team, citing both league growth and player safety. Players had pushed for it for years. Clark’s arrival coincided so well, with the big projected numbers left and right, that it seemed to be what finally made the last puzzle piece of the numbers work.

That said, another leg of Polynice’s argument is that if the goal was to “milk” Clark’s popularity for the benefit of the entire league, there was an opportunity to use her as an introduction to teams and players that a new audience might not otherwise have encountered. Seattle, for example, created a five-game ticket package that included both of its Fever games alongside matchups involving Las Vegas, New York, and Atlanta. The strategy was simple: Clark could be the reason someone bought the package, while the rest of the schedule gave that fan a reason to discover the league beyond her.