Alyssa Thomas is playing some of the best basketball of her career right now, dishing assists at a rate few forwards in league history can match.
It started Monday, when Jason Whitlock reacted to a fan post claiming Thomas has “stopped shooting” to pad her assist totals, matching Caitlin Clark, while Minnesota rookie Olivia Miles is doing the reverse, chasing a scoring record at the expense of setting up teammates. Whitlock didn’t just agree. He widened the target to the whole league.
“This is true,” Whitlock wrote on X. “The entire WNBA, including CC & KM, chase stats. No league in history has been more stat-centric than the WNBA. I don’t blame the players. Social media demands new stats/records on a daily basis. The first to reach this combination, the first to do this, blah, blah.”
This is true. The entire WNBA, including CC & KM, chase stats. No league in history has been more stat-centric than the W. I don’t blame the players. Social media demands new stats/records on a daily. The first to reach this combination, the first to do this, blah, blah… https://t.co/ur4wdTITZK
— Jason Whitlock (@jasonwhitlock) August 31, 2026
CC and KM are Caitlin Clark and Kelsey Mitchell, the Indiana Fever’s star backcourt. Naming them directly turned a debate about one player’s playmaking into a shot at the league’s two biggest names in Indiana.
Thomas’ numbers are hard to ignore either way. She entered the week tied with Clark atop the league in assists per game at 8.4, and in a 101-69 rout of Toronto on Saturday, she logged 12 assists in only three quarters while attempting just five shots.
Miles, meanwhile, continues to lead all rookies with 6.0 assists per game while averaging 19.7 points, numbers that hardly scream a player who abandoned playmaking for volume scoring. Whitlock’s broader point wasn’t really about either player’s box score. It was about incentives.
He expanded on that argument days earlier on his podcast, Fearless with Jason Whitlock, framing the stat obsession as a financial strategy rather than a basketball one.
“If I want to make the most money, I should come on and pretend like only points and assists are the only stats that matter,” Whitlock said. “In this era of analytics and these advanced stats, everybody knows that’s not true. There’s a deeper way to look at these.”
Whitlock pointed to advanced metrics like win shares as proof the surface-level numbers don’t tell the full story, and he didn’t spare Clark from that comparison either. He’s noted elsewhere that her win shares rank outside the league’s top 15, while Mitchell sits near the very top of that list.
None of that makes Clark’s season any less productive. She’s averaging a career-high 22.5 points per game and remains one of three players scoring more than 22 a night. But Whitlock’s argument isn’t really about talent. It’s about what gets rewarded, and social media rewards counting stats far more than winning basketball.
Why Alyssa Thomas Chasing Caitlin Clark Numbers Became The League-Wide Argument
Thomas has been at the center of this exact debate before this week even started. A separate podcast host accused her of passing up open layups specifically to keep pace with Clark’s assist total, a claim Thomas has never publicly addressed but one that fans have run with regardless.
Whitlock’s take reframes that criticism entirely. If everyone in the league is chasing numbers, singling out Thomas for doing what the incentives reward starts to look less like an indictment of her character and more like a symptom of how the sport is being covered.
The WNBA’s growth has been built in part on exactly the kind of record-chasing Whitlock is criticizing. Every milestone becomes a moment, and every moment becomes content. Whether that trade-off is worth it for the league’s long-term integrity is a question that isn’t going away anytime soon, and Thomas’ stat line this week made sure of that.
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