You can’t blame a home team announcer for wanting to pump up their players, but the Golden State Valkyries may have taken it a little too far when talking about Kate Martin and her Iowa teammate Caitlin Clark on Wednesday night.
Martin has been one of the great surprise stories in the WNBA the last couple of seasons. After being drafted in the second round, she became an immediate contributor on a stacked Las Vegas Aces team. That led her to being selected by the Valkyries in the WNBA expansion draft before this season. In Golden State, Martin is averaging 6.7 PPG.
On Wednesday night, she went off for a career-high 21 points in a close loss to the defending champion New York Liberty.
But that wasn’t enough praise for play-by-play announcer Derek Clark.
In the midst of Martin’s great performance, Clark made a curious comment about her time at Iowa where she was famously teammates with the one and only Caitlin Clark.
“Everybody knows Kate Martin because she played with Caitlin Clark at Iowa. But people forget that, you know, some of the games that Caitlin didn’t have it, especially in the tournament which is where Kate Martin really made her name, Kate Martin took over a lot of those games by herself,” Derek Clark said.
Ok, let’s back up the truck for just a minute.
Caitlin Clark may be struggling a bit for her shooting form recently. She’s 13-47 from the field and 1-23 from three-point range in her last three games. But there were incredibly few games at Iowa where the ALL-TIME LEADING SCORER IN COLLEGE BASKETBALL HISTORY “didn’t have it.”
Clark averaged 28.4 PPG throughout her career. She scored less than 20 points just once in her NCAA Tournament career during her sophomore season in a second round loss to Creighton. On the flip side, she scored more than 30 points on eight occasions in NCAA Tournament games.
Kate Martin was a really good player at Iowa. But at no point did she ever take over games by herself from Caitlin Clark. Martin crossed the 20 point mark once in NCAA Tournament games at Iowa, the 2024 Elite 8 victory over LSU, when she scored 21. In that game Clark scored 41 points! Her overall career high at Iowa was a 2023 game against Drake where she scored 25 points and Clark scored 35.
There’s always going to be some wild takes around Caitlin Clark thanks to her starpower and this one is no exception. But if we’re going to use this analogy, we can also now say that Toni Kukoc took over games by himself from Michael Jordan during the Bulls dynasty.