There was a way, for a while, to beat Michael Jordan: by beating him up. The Detroit Pistons did it year after year, deploying a defensive scheme that involved trapping him over and over, shoving him through screens, bullying him through picks, sending two or three bodies on him, and knocking him off balance, off his shot, off his cool. They called their strategy the Jordan Rules.

It was smart. Jordan was unquestionably the best player in the league, unstoppable on his own terms, but the Pistons eliminated the Chicago Bulls from the playoffs three years in a row. There was a personal edge to the strategy, too. Jordan was a talent of historic proportions, and the most popular player in the game. But he was also human, with his share (and more) of foibles and appetites, and he pissed off a lot of people—partly by his actions, and partly just by being Michael Jordan. Isiah Thomas, the Pistons’ leader, reportedly organized a plan to keep the ball away from Jordan during the 1985 All-Star Game, when Jordan was a rookie, because the veterans were jealous of all the attention that Jordan was already getting, and wanted to send a message that he had to wait his turn. The Freeze-Out Game, as it came to be known, was probably more of a media concoction than the full truth—Thomas had always denied it—but there’s no question that Jordan used such slights, or his perception of them, as fuel.

The N.B.A. back then was a niche entertainment—beloved by some, but financially tenuous, at times moribund. A few players and rivalries had broken through into the popular consciousness—particularly Magic Johnson and Larry Bird—but, as late as 1986, playoff games were shown on tape delay rather than aired live. Jordan changed everything. By the time the sportswriter Sam Smith published a book about the Bulls’ 1990-91 season, in which Jordan and the Bulls finally broke the Pistons’ stranglehold on the Eastern Conference, Jordan was one of the most famous men on the planet. Smith called his book “The Jordan Rules.” The title alluded not only to the way the Pistons defended him but also to the accommodations that the Bulls made for their star, on account of the special status he had in the league. He was a phenomenon, as unique a cultural figure as the sport has seen. But he couldn’t have done it alone. The Jordan Rules weren’t Jordan’s rules. He didn’t write them.

On Tuesday night, Caitlin Clark was poked in the eye by the Connecticut Sun guard Jacy Sheldon, who crowded Clark as she reeled; she pushed Sheldon, and then was rammed to the ground by Sheldon’s teammate Marina Mabrey. Clark had been shoved and grabbed all night, and had done a little shoving herself; much of it had escaped the censure of the refs, which set the scene for the scrums that followed. By the end of the night, there had been five technical fouls and two flagrant fouls issued, and three players had been ejected. (One of the five technicals was later upgraded to a flagrant foul.) Everyone agreed that the referees should have kept tighter control of the game. The low quality of officiating has been an ongoing problem for the W.N.B.A. But that’s not what triggered the news alerts that followed. It was seeing Clark get pushed around, again.

The image of Clark burying absurd three-pointers off the dribble and on the run—as she did in that game against the Sun, and as she had done three days before in a win against the defending champions, the New York Liberty, who had previously been undefeated—is one of the most inspiring things in all of sports. And the media and online chatter that surrounds Clark is one of the most depressing. A lot of that discussion (a polite word for it) centers on whether Clark is overly targeted by her opponents, and why. Social media is flooded with compilations of her being whacked and hitting the deck.

For longtime fans of the league, and, it seems, for more than a few people in and around it, the context of all that contact is important. The league is “very physical,” these tenured fans explain to the new ones (or “casuals”). Players, especially rookies, get this treatment all the time. And Clark is a very good player—a great one—but she’s not on the level of A’ja Wilson, or Breanna Stewart, or Napheesa Collier, at least not yet. Failing to recognize this context, these fans suggest, is a kind of erasure: it diminishes the history of a league that has long been full of great players, most of them Black and many of them queer.

Even some of Clark’s biggest supporters are careful to consider her as a key figure in the long progression of the sport, rather than as a sui-generis phenomenon. The sports journalist Howard Megdal, founder of the Next, an online outlet that focusses on women’s basketball, recently wrote a book about Clark that goes deep on the history of basketball in Iowa, where she’s from. In Megdal’s telling, Clark—with her charisma, her all-American backstory, her reasonable handling of such fraught circumstances, and yes, her race—is helping to supercharge a surge of interest in women’s basketball that was already well under way. And there’s plenty of evidence to back that view. W.N.B.A. ratings have been rising for years. The sport was succeeding and finding new audiences despite egregious underinvestment. Although Clark is clearly the league’s biggest draw, ratings have been breaking records even when she doesn’t play. The owners of the Golden State Warriors paid a fifty-million-dollar expansion fee to join the league in 2023 before Clark had joined the pros. Just a few years earlier, teams were selling for about a fifth of that. The Golden State Valkyries’ valuation now is projected to be nearly ten times that—in some part because of the attention Clark has brought to the sport, but not because she fills the stands at the Chase Center, in San Francisco, every night. The Valkyries are projected to bring in fifty-five million dollars in revenue from sponsorships and ticket sales this year alone, far more than Clark’s team, the Indiana Fever, raked in last year. They are succeeding because they are resourced and marketed like an actual professional sports team.

To others, any effort to downplay Clark’s individual appeal is preposterous. “As the most promising day in the history of the WNBA arrives, the American cultural spotlight shines brighter than it ever has on a female athlete in a team sport, and on the possibility she brings to lift basketball and all women’s sports to a place they have never been,” the USA Today columnist Christine Brennan wrote, ahead of Clark’s league début. “But the glare of that bright and sometimes harsh light hasn’t fixed on the magical Caitlin Clark alone. Over the past couple of weeks, it has focused on the players who have come before her, some of whom strangely appear to be having trouble accepting and dealing with her fame, even as they will benefit greatly from it.” Brennan, whose book about Clark, “On Her Game,” will be published in early July, believes that the W.N.B.A. is fumbling the ball by not more aggressively promoting Clark. After the scuffles between the Fever and the Sun on Tuesday, Brennan suggested that the W.N.B.A. needed to protect its most popular player. “This happened last night to the most important audience magnet and TV and corporate draw in the history of a business (WNBA) that is desperately trying to advance and succeed in a very crowded, male-dominated sports marketplace,” she wrote on X, quote-tweeting a video of the altercation captioned “This league treats her like a punching bag.”

Brennan has been writing about women’s sports for decades, and, like Megdal, she tries to place Clark’s ascendance in context. But her history highlights the success of Title IX and of the U.S. women’s soccer team, along with Iowa, and her argument is that Clark is a singular figure. In this view, Clark is a living revolution, a rupture in the history of women’s basketball and maybe in all of women’s sports. And there’s evidence to support this view, too. Twice as many people watched the W.N.B.A. draft last year, when Clark was drafted, compared with this year, for instance. Ratings and attendance when Clark plays are significantly higher than when she does not. (Her games averaged more than a million viewers last season; the league’s other games averaged less than half that.) No other player in the history of women’s basketball comes remotely close to her celebrity. It’s hard to think of an analogue who drives such a high percentage of interest in attention in any other team sport. “When will these ladies realize, accept, and appreciate @CaitlinClark22 is the best thing that ever happened to women’s basketball,” the tennis legend Chris Evert wrote on X, quoting one of Brennan’s tweets.

“Yeah, she gets targeted,” the former Celtics player and N.B.A. Hall of Famer Paul Pierce said, on Kevin Garnett’s podcast, after the matchup between the Fever and the Sun. “It’s like Jordan got targeted,” he went on. “The ‘Jordan Rules.’ They had the ‘Jordan Rules.’ When you’re so good, yeah, you’re gonna get targeted. It just is what it is.”

It’s an obvious comp, even if Clark hasn’t yet achieved the kind of success that Jordan eventually achieved. And the comparison can be extended, giving us another way to think about Clark. Was Jordan inevitable, or was he sui generis? Does he deserve the credit for the explosion of interest in the N.B.A. around the world, or was he a talented player in the right place at the right time? It’s an interesting question, but it’s one that, thirty years later—and in the wake of reports that the Los Angeles Lakers are being sold at a valuation of ten billion dollars, months after the Boston Celtics sold for six billion, which had been a high-water mark for any team sale in the United States—seems very much beside the point. The league became a juggernaut. No star could quite match Jordan, but that hardly mattered. They burned bright enough. And the idea that the Pistons, or any of his opponents, should have thanked Jordan at the time is more than ridiculous. For one thing, Jordan wouldn’t have become Jordan without their spite.

Clark has lately been bulking up, as Jordan once did. She spent the off-season in the weight room, doing single-leg plyometrics so that she couldn’t be knocked off balance as easily. Her arms are jacked now. She knows the game plan against her. Her own coach, Stephanie White, helped to write it—she coached the Sun last year, when the team knocked the Fever out of the playoffs, before coming to the Fever in the off-season.

There is a Midwestern wholesomeness to Clark; it’s part of her broad appeal. But she can be ornery and just as competitive as Jordan was (even if the stories about her compulsions—so far, at least—involve Halloween candy rather than gambling). Along with those videos of Clark getting mauled on the court, there are popular online clips decoding her trash talk. We don’t yet know if the animus that Clark faces—whether it’s professional or personal, whether it’s race-related or not—will activate her. All that bumping and bruising puts her at a higher risk of injury and exhaustion. Playing against the Valkyries, on Thursday night, two days after the Sun game, she was held to two points in the first half, and missed all seven of her three-point-shot attempts. But she has also shown an electric ability to turn defeat, and doubt, into motivation. After Clark was left off the U.S. Olympic team—an omission that Brennan holds up as evidence that the old guard is out to get her—her scoring and playmaking exploded, and she dragged the Fever, which had lost nine of its first eleven games, into the playoffs. As Megdal writes, when U.S.A. Basketball left Clark off the team, “The best possible thing happened for Clark and the Fever.” She seems to take special pleasure not only in scoring but in making a show of her dominance, and of proving herself.

One of the themes of Smith’s “Jordan Rules” is that Jordan needed his teammates to win. The Bulls needed to exploit the space that all the attention on Jordan left open. But Jordan also needed the Pistons; he needed the doubters to drive him, and he needed the bumps to make him strong. I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up saying the same of Clark. They are both, as the former N.B.A. commissioner David Stern said of Jordan, “at once credible and incredible,” both tied to this earth and seemingly transcending it, part of history and engaged, thrillingly, in its disruption. ♦