Despite solely going through off within the NCAA event championship final 12 months, the rivalry of Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese has risen to new heights. With fixed comparisons and debates over who is actually the higher participant, many followers and analysts have begun to match the collegiate rivalry to that of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.
While the 2 collegiate stars are nowhere close to the greatness of Bird and Magic proper now, there are surprising similarities between the duos which are very paying homage to the NBA’s most well-known rivalry. Much like Bird and Johnson, Reese and Clark have the chance to revamp all of ladies’s basketball.
LSU ahead Angel Reese has just lately drawn heavy comparisons to Johnson, although not for the explanations many would assume. Her polarizing play and all-around movie star stardom has been very paying homage to the stardom Johnson reached when main Michigan State on their championship run. Her recent NIL take care of Reebok and numerous product commercials have made her a widely known star exterior of basketball, very similar to the previous Laker guard himself. Despite her being the most effective gamers within the nation, it’s Reese’s charisma and outspoken persona that has drawn many followers to tune into ladies’s school basketball. A feat not completed by many, Reese has discovered herself rising the game of ladies’s basketball and making it must-see TV, almost the precise factor Johnson did for males’s basketball.
Despite shedding to Reese in final 12 months’s NCAA event championship, Clark’s nationwide stardom has solely continued to develop. Regarded because the “home-town hero” in her native state of Iowa, Clark has single-handedly made Iowa ladies’s basketball related on the planet of sports activities information immediately. Eerily just like the times of Bird at Indiana State, her unbelievable capturing capability together with wonderful courtroom imaginative and prescient have made her one of many largest names in all of ladies’s basketball to this point. Clark has grow to be such a draw that in simply an Iowa exhibition sport, the Hawkeyes discovered themselves enjoying in a soccer stadium with over 55,000 people in attendance. A nationwide file for attendance in a ladies’s basketball sport, Clark has single-handedly revived Iowa basketball and has taken the sport to heights by no means earlier than reached.
The rivalry between Clark and Reese has severe potential to take ladies’s basketball to new heights. Much like Bird and Johnson did for the NBA, the 2 collegiate superstars have made the game of ladies’s basketball each related and must-see TV. Their battle in final 12 months’s NCAA Women’s Basketball Tournament drew in about 9.9 million viewers on ABC community, which in itself set a historic viewership file for the feminine sport.
Although it’s totally too early to make sure, the world may very effectively be witnessing the following nice rivalry in sports activities.
