Canadian WNBAers embracing women's hoopla — the good and bad

From March through September there was palpable, permeable excitement.

Women's basketball, from college through the WNBA and onto the Olympics, seemed to pierce through the noise and become a cultural touch point — for all the (mostly) good and (some) bad that entails.

At the centre of it all was Caitlin Clark, the Iowa superstar whose logo three-pointers vaulted her squad to the national title game before she was drafted first overall to the Indiana Fever and went on to set scoring records while winning WNBA Rookie of the Year.

Clark quickly became a bona fide A-list celebrity, the type who gets top billing at an LPGA Tour pro-am alongside tournament namesake Annika Sorrenstam.

Yet Clark — essentially through no fault of her own — also became the subject of controversy, from her rivalry with LSU product and Chicago Sky forward Angel Reese to some strange media coverage and even a mild beef with the legendary Diana Taurasi.

It wasn't just Clark, either. The WNBA Finals, won by the New York Liberty over the Minnesota Lynx in an instant-classic five-game series, drew significant viewership.

In totality, women's basketball asserted itself as a movement. The WNBA responded by announcing two more expansion teams in addition to the Golden State franchise set to join the league in 2025.

One of those new clubs will be based in Toronto, the other in Portland.

Toronto is a fitting choice — throughout all the year's hoops hoopla, Canadians starred as crucial role players.

Bridget Carleton, of Chatham, Ont., started all five Finals contests for the Lynx and made a pair of victory-clinching free throws in Game 4.

Aaliyah Edwards of Kingston, Ont., entered the league as part of the standout rookie class alongside Clark and Reese after helping UConn reach the Final Four.

Carleton and Edwards featured prominently in some of the most entertaining and most-watched basketball games of the year — and Edwards said she felt the increased attention on the sport.

"I think that's a big thing that we celebrated this season, especially my historic rookie class," Edwards said. "We brought in a lot of new basketball fans and supporters, [and] bigger than that, more people who support women's basketball and more people who respect women's basketball."

Edwards inferred that the growth of Women's March Madness while her age group was going through college enabled her to handle a similar phenomenon at the WNBA level.