Rebecca Lobo, Jay Williams debate whether Caitlin Clark should take Ice Cube's $5 million offer
News broke Wednesday that Big3 founder Ice Cube has made a $5 million offer to Caitlin Clark to play in the Big3.
The highest-paid WNBA player makes less than $250,000 per year, according to spotrack, and Ice Cube’s offer obviously blows that number out of the water.
ESPN analysts Jay Williams and Rebecca Lobo spoke on ESPN First Take on Thursday about whether or not Caitlin Clark should accept the offer from Ice Cube.
“My advice to my children would be, if someone offers you $5 million to do something that you love, and it’s legal, you should at least consider it,” Rebecca Lobo said. “I think we all kind of look at this as a bit of a publicity stunt. You have to understand that the WNBA’s CBA prohibits a player from playing in two leagues during the WNBA season, so it’s not like Caitlin could play for the Indiana Fever on a Thursday and then go play in the Big3 on the weekend. She would have to make a choice.
“But certainly she has more leverage than we’ve ever seen a player coming out of college have, because of the way she’s driving ticket sales, because of the way she’s driving viewer ratings and TV ratings.”
Jay Williams added that he would not take the $5 million offer and play in the Big3 if he was Caitlin Clark, but he agrees with Lobo that the offer should be used as leverage.
Williams added that perhaps it would be worth playing in the Big3, at least for a few years.
“Now that this has leaked, it does lead me to a bigger question. If I am Caitlin Clark’s team, I am really considering saying, ‘OK, the first offer that leaked is for $5 million. The first offer. That means that I have leverage.’ Now we’ve seen deals like this before. We’ve seen Messi get rev share of the MLS with Apple. So the way that I’d come back at this is say, ‘OK, I’ll consider it. But how about $7 million and how about a portion of rev share of your media rights deal with CBS? If we can talk that way, then maybe we can think for a two or three year contract,'” Williams explained.
“I get what it does to her basketball wise. I get playing with grown men, that’s a publicity stunt, what that can do for ticket sales. But if there’s a way to get true rev share for packing out every single stadium for two to three years, and by building marketing campaigns around that, to then leverage coming back into the WNBA… If you can get a deal like that on the table, then we’re talking.”
Ultimately, both Lobo and Williams expect Caitlin Clark to pass on the offer from the Big3 and instead play in the WNBA. However, the amount of money she could make with the Big3 does at least make it worth discussing.
The WNBA certainly hopes that Caitlin Clark will be playing in that league for years to come, particularly with the media rights deal being up soon.
“I certainly expect Caitlin Clark to be playing in the WNBA this season. It’s one of the reasons she didn’t take her fifth year at Iowa. She wants to try her game at the next level against the best players in the league,” Lobo said. “I don’t really think it’s a serious consideration for her to play there, but obviously this gives a different kind of leverage, and again, we cannot understate the timing of this with the media rights deal being up next year, how she has completely driven eyeballs to the women’s game this year, not only for Iowa games, but we’ve seen it across the women’s college landscape.
“She is vitally important in a way that no other player in the women’s game has ever been coming out of college. So certainly instead of just coming in and saying, ‘Alright, I’ll take my $70,000 rookie salary.’ Her agents can make this a broader conversation.”