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Caitlin Clark had a shaky return to WNBA action on Saturday after her season-ending injury last year.
Clark, in her first preseason game for the Indiana Fever, made just two of her 10 field goal attempts in Saturday’s preseason game against the New York Liberty. However, she did hit a three-pointer, made two free throws and had three rebounds with four assists. She played just 17 minutes.
“This isn’t a real game, I understand that, but that’s how we treat it, like a real game,” Clark said before the Fever’s 109-91 win over the New York Liberty. “I think anytime you get to put on your uniform and lace up your shoes you don’t take that for granted, especially after coming off last year when I didn’t get to do that very much.”
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Clark suffered a season-ending injury to her right groin last July, compounded by a bone bruise on her left ankle sustained during a workout in August.
“It’s not like I hurt my knee or tore my Achilles, or something like that, knock on wood,” Clark said, per reporter Tony East in March.. “It was these kind of nagging injuries that would build up and build up, and dealt with one on top of the other.
“I think that … played with my mind even more than knowing I would be out for a set period of time. I was always trying to come back and always trying to come back, and then I’d get hurt in another way.”
Prior to Saturday, Clark also competed for USA Basketball in the FIBA Women’s World Cup Qualifying Tournament in March.
The Fever and WNBA as a whole are depending on Clark in 2026, for a big year. The Fever have championship aspirations after falling just one game shy of the WNBA Finals last year with Clark injured. Meanwhile, the WNBA will be leaning on Clark to keep the league growing in terms of relevance and popularity after it agreed to pay its players much higher salaries with a new collective bargaining agreement with the players’ union in March.
As the league’s most popular player, the WNBA has a lot to gain from Clark staying healthy and playing well.
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Clark was involved in 20 of the 23 WNBA games that drew more than 1 million viewers in 2024. But in 2025, national television viewership for the WNBA saw a significant decline of 55% during a two-week period when Caitlin Clark was sidelined with a quad injury, per Nielsen ratings.
Clark’s Fever teammate Lexie Hull previously told Fox News Digital she noticed a difference in how opposing players started to perform against her team that year, which she credits to the surge in popularity.
“Because of the fans that we’ve gotten since 2024, with the rise in, I think, like, popularity with the Indiana Fever being like a name that people know. … And there’s a million Fever jerseys and Fever shirts. I think, like, as an opposing team, you’d want to win even more because you feel there’s so many people rooting,” Hull said.
“It’s exciting to have that type of following across the country, and I think, like, for other teams, they have great fans and great people that show up for them, and they want to perform for those people, just like we want to perform for ours.”
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When asked if she believes games have gotten more physical as a result, Hull said, “I think just the game itself is physical. I don’t know if it’s gotten any more physical. I think social media amplifies a lot of that.
“I think people want to win. I think people just want to win. … [The games] are all physical. … They all get chippy at times. Calls get made, calls don’t get made. That’s just part of the game.”
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