Warriors’ Steve Kerr Compares Caitlin Clark to Stephen Curry

While Caitlin Clark has been having an interesting time acclimating to WNBA basketball, she’s still received compliments from several notable personalities in basketball, the latest being the Golden State Warriors’ head coach, Steve Kerr.

Kerr is a nine-time NBA champion, winning five titles as a player with the Chicago Bulls and San Antonio Spurs, and four as a coach with the Warriors.

As a player who’s been around the NBA as a player, executive and coach, Kerr taking a liking to a certain professional player is not something to scoff at, and his newest fixation comes from the WNBA with Clark. Even though the Indiana Fever has not started the season as well as they wanted, Clark has shown promise as an individual.

Her best games, such as when she scored a career-high 30 points against the Washington Mystics on June 7, have been mixed in with some forgettable efforts, like her three-point, 10 percent shooting night from the field against the New York Liberty in her previous game on June 2.

One of the reasons Kerr talked with NBC Sports Bay Area about Clark was that he felt as though she reminded him of a young Stephen Curry, mentioning that, like Clark, Curry had to continue to work to adjust to the professional ranks. In an episode of ‘The 11th Hour’ with MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle, Kerr gave an explanation as to how he viewed Clark’s treatment in the WNBA, and why he is reminded so much of Curry through Clark.

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There are plenty of obvious similarities between Clark and Curry that are to be noticed after watching both play, namely their unlimited three-point range and lightning-fast release time. Other than that, we see that the two star guards are defended in very similar ways in their respective leagues, as their opponents try desperately to make anyone else on both Clark and Curry’s teams beat them.

The main difference, though, is that Clark is seeing this kind of treatment much earlier in her career than Curry.

As we know Stephen Curry now, he is one of, if not the most efficient jump-shooters the game has ever seen, as he has the ability to knock down three-pointers both off the catch and off the dribble. To counter this, teams like to throw plenty of bodies at Curry, offering to double-team and even triple-team him at a moment’s notice.

However, Curry didn’t begin to receive this kind of treatment until after winning two league MVP awards and an NBA championship. On the other hand, Clark has been seeing constant double-teams and traps from her opponents from the moment she took the floor for the first time as a rookie.

While this has led to a dip in efficiency, she’s also the one with the ball in her hands for the majority of every game her team plays.

Thanks to Clark’s incredible fame coming into the league after breaking the NCAA’s all-time scoring record for collegiate basketball, she was immediately targeted by every great defender in the WNBA. Since Clark entered her professional career as a phenom in college, she received the kind of defensive attention that an MVP-caliber player in the league would, because she was viewed and highly touted as a generational player that would change the league forever.

Now that she has seen the kind of defense that will be played against her throughout her career, it could only lead to a positive change in her game, as she recognizes that every team will game-plan to contain her first.

If anything, Clark got a head-start in terms of her development because if she can still average over 16 points per game while being covered by every opponent’s best defender, the sky is the limit for what she can do after a season or two of progression.

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