Linda Cohn spent part of her show defending the Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese rivalry from the people who keep asking women's basketball to tone it down, and she boiled her position into three words: that's the mission. I don't have the full segment in front of me beyond that, but the argument doesn't need much dressing up. The noise is not a bug in this thing. It is the engine.
Here is the part the critics keep skipping. Rivalries are how basketball has always recruited new fans, and this one arrived fully formed. The 2023 national championship went LSU 102, Iowa 85, complete with the hand-wave heard around the country and a week of takes about who was allowed to celebrate and how. The 2024 rematch in the Elite Eight went the other way, Iowa 94, LSU 87, and by then you could not find a bar in America not showing it. Two months later Clark went first overall to Indiana and Reese went in the same draft class to Chicago, and the league they walked into stopped being a niche overnight. Bigger buildings, bigger broadcast windows, arguments in group chats that had never hosted a women's basketball argument in their lives.
Cohn has been at this long enough to remember when the sport got covered like a chore. So when she says the friction is the mission, she is not cheerleading. She is pointing at the mechanism.
The honest counterpoint: rivalry coverage can eat the sport it feeds. Sixty other players are having real seasons, and the discourse can flatten two complicated pros into cartoon characters, which nobody signed up for and neither of them deserves. Cohn's framing survives that, I think, as long as the cameras occasionally pan.
What comes next is the interesting part. Clark and Reese are now several years into careers that will be measured by rings and All-WNBA nods, not by one hand gesture in 2023. The rivalry graduates or it curdles. My money, figuratively, is on graduates, because both of them keep showing up.
What I'm watching: whether the next chapter of this gets covered as basketball first. That is the actual test.