Stacey Dales on Caitlin Clark & How WNBA Can Improve Inconsistent Officiating

Caitlin Clark picked up her seventh technical foul, which puts her one away from a one-game suspension, and Stacey Dales thinks the story is not really about Clark at all.

Clark was asked about it after the game and gave the answer that has defined her.

"I'm never going to back down," Clark said. "That intensity and that fire is what makes me me. But also, knowing my team needs me and finding a good balance of that."

She also said she does not intend to play with the suspension count in the back of her head, because that would hinder her.

Dales, who was heading to Women's Sports Now later that day to break the topic down with Colleen Wolf, reacted to the technical itself with a laugh and then a description that says plenty about the current officiating climate. As she told it, an opposing player had informed Clark she was locking her down. Clark had 27 points. The scoreboard read 123.

Clark's entire response, per Dales, was one word.

"Scoreboard."

That is what drew the technical, and Dales was not evaluating whether Clark deserved it so much as whether the system around it is working.

"I don't care what player this is," she said.

The show pushed the obvious question. Are women officiated differently than the men in the NBA, or is this specific to one player? Dales did not take the bait on either framing. She went at the infrastructure instead, and she was careful to separate the people from the process.

"The officials are not bad. They're not bad people," Dales said. "But the league needs to elevate the officiating in the WNBA."

Her fixes were specific. First, officials need to be full-time salaried employees. Second, the league needs a replay center, the way the NBA runs one out of Secaucus, New Jersey, which Dales said has helped that game immensely. Third, the messaging has to improve, meaning how quickly and how clearly the league responds to support both players and referees when a controversial moment happens.

The connective tissue in all three is money.

"These are the best players in the world," Dales said. "They don't want to make bad calls, but in order to have more consistency, you have to invest more. They need more confidence. The players need more confidence in them."

The timing makes this urgent rather than academic. The All-Star break is here, and the Fever are just hitting their stride heading toward the playoffs. Clark is one card away from sitting out at the exact moment her team needs her most, and as the desk pointed out, the trigger could be almost anything at this point. Blow a kiss at the wrong opponent and that is the yellow card.

Dales was clear that Clark talks a lot and is one of the most competitive players she has ever seen. She was equally clear that competitiveness is not the problem, and she used A'ja Wilson to make the point. Wilson is a beast, can hurt you inside and outside, will probably be MVP again this year, and shows you exactly how she feels with her body language.

"You have to let athletes do that," Dales said.

Whether officials have simply gotten tired of Clark's gestures is a question Dales would not answer definitively. What she would say is that the WNBA is polarizing right now, Clark sits at the forefront of it because she is an extraordinary basketball player, and social media is doing the rest.

"The officiating needs to be improved," she said. "It's worthy of discussion."