When you’re Caitlin Clark, WNBA drama just happens.
Right now, Clark, 23, is trying to find her footing amid the Indiana Fever’s slow start to the 2025 season. She missed part of the season with a quad injury and went 3-of-20 during the Fever’s 89-81 loss to the Las Vegas Aces on June 22. It’s the Fever’s second consecutive loss, putting them in the middle of the WNBA with a very mid-6-7 record.
Considering that the WNBA team’s season is only 44 games long, it’s safe to say that the last thing Clark is worried about is a head coach in a completely different conference beefing with a journalist over something that happened last season.
And as ridiculous as that sounds, it’s just another day in the life of Caitlin Clark.
Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark caught in clash over 2024 Olympic team selection
Christine Brennan—a USA Today sports writer, trailblazing journalist, and author of the forthcoming book, "On Her Game: Caitlin Clark and the Revolution in Women’s Sports"—seems to have a longstanding feud with Minnesota Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve.
The beef started in 2024, when Reeve was the coach of the USA Women’s Basketball team at the Paris Olympics. Reeve was in charge of the roster, and Clark’s absence from Team USA raised a few eyebrows. The former Iowa point guard had a strong rookie season, averaging 19.2 points per game. Plus, she was one of the biggest basketball stars in the country at the time.
Brennan claimed that Reeve had a hand in keeping Clark off the team. The USA Today writer resurfaced a pair of tweets from June 2024, in which Reeve agreed that the WNBA wasn’t televising a Minnesota Lynx/Chicago Sky game because the league “only cares about Caitlin.”
Here are Cheryl Reeve’s May 3 posts on X referencing and singling out Caitlin Clark. I have been trying since Sunday to ask her why she posted anything about a candidate for the US Olympic team during the selection process. So far, no luck getting any answers. pic.twitter.com/vRjZqumo5d
— Christine Brennan (@cbrennansports) June 13, 2024
Michael Terry, spokesperson for USA Basketball, told Brennan that Reeve “does not have an official role in picking the 12.” Brennan argued that Reeve did, in that she was “in the run-up to the Olympics, including gathering information on players in phone calls and also speaking at the Team USA Media Summit in mid-April in New York.”
Earlier this month—nearly a year after the controversy—Brennan went on "The Adam Gold Show" on Raleigh, North Carolina's 99.9 The Fan ESPN Radio, and doubled down on her belief. “How on earth is that okay with the Olympic and Paralympic Committee and USA basketball, that its coach is actively tweeting and going on social media about someone who is in the selection pool?” said Brennan.
Coach Reeve Responds
Days after Brennan’s appearance, Reeve appeared on FanDuel Sports Network's "Golic & Golic" show to deny she had any hand in keeping Clark off the roster.
“What she wrote is fiction,” Reeve said of Brennan’s story in USA Today. “If she were paying attention, one of the things I have done for years is held the league accountable for their missteps, their mishaps, their lack of representation of all teams."
“What she wrote is fiction.”
— FanDuel Sports Network (@FanDuelSN) June 19, 2025
Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve isn’t holding back in response to negative comments made by Christine Brennan. pic.twitter.com/NKVVBGyxb3
"So, that particular situation had nothing to do with Caitlin Clark,” Reeve continued. “It had everything to do with a WNBA social media post that promoted one preseason game and not all preseason games. And so I simply said that, ‘by the way, the Minnesota Lynx are playing the Chicago Sky’—which also had a popular player in Angel Reese that people were interested in.”
“If Christine Brennan were being thorough and a legitimate reporter in this situation, she would have gotten full context,” said Reeve. “But it didn’t fit the narrative. Christine Brennan likes to have a villain in her storytelling. I am Christine Brennan’s villain, that’s the sword she’s going to die on.”
Did Team USA have it out for Caitlin Clark?
In an excerpt from Brennan’s book shared by People, the journalist takes Team USA to task for giving one of the 12 roster spots to 42-year-old Diana Taurasi as a “going-away present” to her career, rather than giving it to Clark.
“At the 2024 Summer Olympics, the U.S. women’s basketball team earned its eighth consecutive Olympic gold medal, winning all but one game by at least 13 points. That one was the last one, the gold medal game against France in which the United States trailed by as many as 10 points in the third quarter before coming back to escape with a ragged 67–66 victory.
In that gold medal game, Diana Taurasi and Caitlin Clark played the same number of minutes and scored the same number of points: zero and zero. One was courtside, sitting on the team bench. The other was in the United States, 4,000 miles away.”