A select group of NBA pensioners are sitting around these days saying, “Yeah, I played against Larry in ’84,” or “I played with Magic back then.” WNBAers eventually will say the same of Caitlin Clark, as soon as her rivals get over their elbow-swinging resentments of her. They will even boast about sharing the court with her, once they realize they haven’t been playing in her shadow but rather she has thrown light on their game

Now that Clark and the Indiana Fever are out of the WNBA playoffs, barely beaten by the more mature Connecticut Sun, an appraisal of her asteroid-strike rookie year seems fitting. She cratered the court with new statistical records — setting the WNBA single-season mark for assists, along with a rookie scoring record — and commanded a TV viewership in the millions, even on NFL Sundays.

But numbers don’t really describe; they only circumscribe. In puzzling out Clark’s shock-effect on audiences and why she drew so much attention, go beyond stats and ratings and use your eyes. Clark always found a way to play in space — and thus stand apart.

You couldn’t take your eyes off her for a good reason, and it had little to do with being a ponytailed media darling from the middle of the country. It had to do with her sheer visibility: Clark’s style of play created a sense of new openings all around her. Those in the audience had to watch her because they knew in any fractional moment, something flickeringly, gaspingly unexpected was liable to happen, whether with a slice up the court and a leading pass that etches a fresh angle or a stop-and-elevate frictionless bomb from near midcourt.

In a league that can seem cluttered and obscured by too much physicality and blighted by poor officiating, Clark somehow was able to consistently separate, even on just an extra foot of flooring. Take her quick slither to the left and pogo-launch of a three-pointer that noiselessly netted Wednesday night to give the Fever a 71-70 lead with less than four minutes left against the Sun. Indiana had trailed by 11. First there was no breathing space — and then there was.

The sense that Clark was able to part the crowds and create new pathways extended throughout the franchise. She not only flipped a team that started 1-8 into a playoff contender, she helped it become the highest-scoring outfit in the league after the Olympic break by collaborating with Kelsey Mitchell and Aliyah Boston.

“This team won five games three years ago,” Clark said. “So we’re a young group, a pretty inexperienced group, but we came together and had a lot of fun playing with one another. That’s sometimes the worst part of it is you feel like you’re playing your best basketball and then it has to end.”

Of course, at times she has felt like a full eclipse, and you couldn’t blame long-suffering veterans for being bothered by that. Undoubtedly the game’s decorated longtime players are sick of hearing about her, as if she’s the only great who ever lived, when in fact Sheryl Swoopes and Cheryl Miller commanded TV audiences of millions back in the 1980s and ’90s. But they weren’t sustained. Not like this.

The season of Caitlin Clark actually has lasted nearly two years now — going all the way back to the 2023 NCAA Final Four, when she made the collective audience’s necks whip around by laying 41 points on Dawn Staley’s No. 1 South Carolina. In 2024 she broke Pete Maravich’s career collegiate scoring record, and in the NCAA tourney, the audience grew weekly — to 12 million, then 14 million and then 23 million. Clark went right from that without a breather into her WNBA rookie campaign and promptly elevated the Fever’s national TV audience higher than that for some NBA teams, including the San Antonio Spurs and Victor Wembanyama, according to Sports Media Watch.

The parallels with Larry Bird and Magic Johnson are too irresistible to ignore. Their arrival in the NBA in 1979 broke TV records, too. And the reason was they created space and changed concepts for scoring with their pass-and-shoot skills. They broke templates and ushered in a new age — and it made everyone who came after them strive to be more versatile and creative. That’s Clark’s influence, too, as Johnson acknowledged with a post on X this season

“Larry and I heightened the NBA’s overall popularity,” he wrote. “… The WNBA is now in a position to negotiate higher TV contracts and increase salaries for all of the talented players.”

Clark will raise standards for everyone in the league — and they still need raising, better conditions and privileges for all players. It was a mistake to view Clark as blotting out other worthies in the WNBA. Along with her phenomenon was more exposure for her opponents, and only myopic fans didn’t develop unexpected new affinities for other players they hadn’t watched closely before.

Anyone who tuned in to Clark against Connecticut on Wednesday night couldn’t help but notice that the timeliest dagger-shooter on the floor was not her but the Sun’s Marina Mabrey. Or admire the brilliant midrange floaters of Alyssa Thomas, who had 19 points and 13 assists. You learned intriguing things about players you didn’t know before, such as that the Sun’s stalwart DeWanna Bonner, the 37-year-old mother of twins, now has played in a record-tying 82 playoff games.

With Clark and the Fever’s exit from the playoffs, other teams and players will come to the fore. The audience may decrease — but it will be interesting to see by how much. The floor will seem a little more vacant without her, but hopefully, she has left plenty of interest in other players behind, and they will be seen in the new light.