Caitlin Clark will pass a real Plum to become the No. 1 women’s basketball scorer

Caitlin Clark scored 35 points Tuesday at Northwestern in Iowa’s 110-74 blowout women’s basketball win.

She moved into second on the NCAA Division I women’s scoring list, with 3,424 points.

That leaves only Kelsey Plum to catch. Plum scored 3,527 points at Washington from 2013-2017, a total Iowa’s Clark will eclipse in a few games. Recently, I talked to someone who’s a fan of Clark and an even bigger one of Plum.

Kiah Stokes began her basketball career filled with winning at Linn-Mar High, where she’ll be inducted into that school’s Athletic Hall of Fame on Friday night.

She played for three national championship teams at Connecticut, then moved on to the WNBA. Stokes has spent eight years in the WNBA, the last three with the Las Vegas Aces as Plum’s teammate. Last October, the Aces won their second straight championship.

Plum and Stokes are starters for the Aces. Plum averaged 18.7 points in her sixth pro season. Stokes, who has built her career on defense, averaged 5.9 rebounds for the champs.

Stokes agreed this week to a two-year contract to stay with the Aces. She’ll be joined there by Iowa’s former top career scorer, Megan Gustafson, a five-year WNBA veteran who will join the Aces on a two-year deal of her own.

Las Vegas averaged a league-high 9,551 fans per home game in 2023. For the second straight year, the champs were feted with a parade on the Las Vegas Strip. It’s a good place to be an WNBA player.

“We’re going to keep coming back, and everybody hates it,” Plum told fans at the parade.

“We were everywhere (in Las Vegas) for the two weeks after we won the title,” Stokes said. “Our marketing staff did a great job.”

For the first time in the last eight years, she spent her WNBA offseason in the U.S. instead of playing overseas because she broke her foot during the WNBA Finals against her former team, the New York Liberty. Stokes had played in Turkey the last six winters.

Like almost everyone else following women’s basketball, she is watching Clark’s senior season at Iowa.

“That Caitlin is close enough to break (Plum’s record) is incredible,” Stokes said. “Knowing Kelsey, I can’t even imagine what Caitlin has done.”

Plum and Clark are point guards who also are 3-point maestros. Plum saved her best at Washington for last, averaging 31.7 points per game as a senior in 2016-17 and averaging almost five assists.

Entering Wednesday’s game at Northwestern, Clark was averaging a career-best 32.0 points and 7.6 assists.

“Kelsey is super-competitive, really determined,” Stokes said. “She’s always in the gym. She doesn’t stop. I can’t even imagine what she was like in college.”

A lot like Clark, it sounds like.

In her senior season, Plum scored what stands as an NCAA women’s Division I single-season record 1,109 points. So we’ll have that to watch as well as the career mark, since Clark headed into Wednesday’s game with 672 points this season and a minimum of 11 games remaining with as many as nine more possible.

The question that won’t go away until it goes away: Will Clark turn pro after this season? The Indiana Fever have the No. 1 pick in the April 15 WNBA draft.

“We’re curious to see if she’ll enter the draft,” Stokes said, “and definitely excited to see how she’ll adapt to the ‘W.’

“She would do nothing but help (Indiana). I don’t know if she’d get the green light like she does with Lisa Bluder and shoot those logo 3s, but her playing with (2023 Rookie of the Year) Aliyah Boston would be pretty incredible with her overall passing ability.”

The WNBA’s attendance (6,615 per game) was up 16 percent in 2023 compared to the season before. The addition of Clark would bring another big bump, especially since Indiana ranked 11th of the 12 teams with an average crowd of 4,067.

“I love the attention she has brought to women’s basketball in general,” Stokes said. “We want all the support we can get, and she’ll only help us as the ‘W’ grows.”

Oh, here’s something to file away: Plum scored 57 points in her regular-season finale for Washington, at home against Utah.

Iowa’s final regular-season game is March 3, at home against Ohio State, the only Big Ten team to defeat the Hawkeyes this season. If ever Clark wanted to drop 58 on an opponent …

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