John Kopecky, a salesman in Colorado Springs, Colorado, had grand plans for this coming weekend. He paid about $3,000 for flights, hotel rooms and four tickets to take his wife, 14-year-old daughter and her basketball teammate to Caitlin Clark’s game May 30 against the Connecticut Sun in Indianapolis.
On May 26, Kopecky read on social media that Clark had a strained left quadriceps and would be out for at least the next two weeks. He spoke to his wife and they decided right then and there to cancel their flights and hotel rooms, give their tickets to a friend in Indianapolis and look at the Fever’s August schedule for another game to attend.
“Once I found out Caitlin wasn’t playing, it didn’t make sense for us to fly to Indianapolis,” Kopecky said in a phone interview. “We are Caitlin fans before Fever fans. She’s the biggest draw − that’s who the girls want to see. That was the whole point of going to Indy: seeing Caitlin Clark. When she was injured, we thought, ‘Let’s just postpone until August.’”
Kopecky and his family are not alone. Ticket prices for the next four Fever games on the secondary market are plummeting as fans as well as the WNBA itself begin to grapple with the reality that the biggest draw in the history of women’s basketball, and one of the greatest attractions in all of sports, men’s and women’s, will not be around for awhile. It has happening most dramatically with tickets for the June 7 Fever-Sky game at the 23,500-seat United Center in Chicago, where Clark is such an overwhelming draw that ticket prices have fallen more than 300% in less than two days.
I can personally confirm the pronounced change in interest in Fever games without Clark. A week ago, I bought four tickets on StubHub to take my sports-playing nieces to the Fever-Washington Mystics game in Baltimore. Tickets in the same row are now going for less than half of what I paid. I could only imagine what they would cost by game time. Perhaps they’ll be giving them away. And yes, we are still going to the game.