One thing many people don’t know is that Bayless himself admitted he was reluctant to publicly support Caitlin Clark during the height of the racial and cultural conversations surrounding the WNBA. In 2024, he said he intentionally held back because he didn’t want to inflame an already polarized discussion. Over time, Bayless flipped.
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By late 2025 and especially throughout 2026, every major milestone in Clark’s career has only strengthened his stance. Each accolade has become another reason for Bayless to argue that the Fever star isn’t receiving the recognition he believes her performances deserve. And despite another season filled with standout numbers, one result from this year’s All-Star voting still doesn’t sit right with him. That’s exactly the debate he revisited after Clark picked up yet another Eastern Conference Player of the Week honor.
“Somehow the player who finished 11th among guards in All-Star voting by rival players just won her third Eastern Conference Player of the Week award this season. Go figure,” Bayless wrote in his X post.
Clark scored 77 total points across three games, averaging 25.6 points per contest during the award-winning week. She also led the WNBA with 27 assists, averaging nine per game, while recording the fourth triple-double of her career against the Portland Fire. The recognition marked her third Eastern Conference Player of the Week honor of the season and sixth of her career, tying Tamika Catchings for the most such awards in Indiana Fever history.
This wasn’t an isolated hot streak. Even when the All-Star voting results were released in early July, Clark was averaging 21.2 points and 8.2 assists per game, ranking among the league leaders in both categories. At the time, she sat fifth in scoring and second in assists, making her 11th-place finish among guards in the player vote one of the more debated outcomes of the All-Star selection process.
The voting breakdown only added to the discussion. Clark finished second in fan voting with more than 1.02 million votes and third in media voting, comfortably earning a starting spot. It was the player ballot, worth 25% of the final vote, where she slipped to 11th among guards. According to ESPN, fewer than half of the league’s players ultimately submitted ballots, a detail that later fueled questions about how representative the player vote truly was.
Bayless has repeatedly argued throughout the past year that Clark’s on-court production and the respect she receives from around the league don’t always align. Rather than treating this latest award as a standalone achievement, he pointed to it as another example of that disconnect.
Clark’s recent stretch has only strengthened that argument statistically. Before earning this latest weekly honor, she had already been named the WNBA’s Player of the Month for June and helped the Fever establish themselves among the Eastern Conference’s top teams. Alongside fellow All-Star starters Aliyah Boston and Kelsey Mitchell, Indiana has developed one of the league’s most productive trios, with Clark continuing to rank near the top of the WNBA in both scoring and assists.
During one of those Player of the Week performances, Clark delivered perhaps the signature game of her season, a franchise-record 45 points and 10 assists against the Seattle Storm. She became the first player in WNBA or NBA history to record a 45-point, 10-assist game in fewer than 30 minutes, while also setting the Fever’s single-game scoring record and becoming the fastest player in WNBA history to reach 200 career three-pointers.
During the 2026 All-Star Game, Clark scored 17 points, along with five assists and four rebounds. She finished as Team Weatherspoon’s third-leading scorer behind Jonquel Jones and Allisha Gray, with Jones ultimately taking home All-Star MVP honors.
Through 26 games this season, Clark is averaging 21.5 points, eight assists and four rebounds per game. Her all-around production has played a major role in Indiana’s rise into playoff contention, reinforcing the same point Bayless has continued to make throughout the season: regardless of how players viewed her on their All-Star ballots, Clark’s performances have continued to earn recognition on the court.