Nancy Lieberman, one other of the Big3’s star coaches, gives among the most dear perception into Clark’s potential double obligation within the WNBA and Big3.
Cut up selections
Followers have already seen the connection between Clark and Lieberman.
Throughout every of her final three seasons at Iowa, Clark obtained the Nancy Lieberman award because the nation’s finest level guard in girls’s faculty basketball, a trophy that’s been handed to legends within the recreation, together with just lately retired WNBA participant and Deep Blue company companion Sue Chook, Phoenix Mercury and Group USA veteran Diana Taurasi and Nike ambassador and NBA All-Star three-point challenger Sabrina Ionescu.
Past the namesake {hardware}, Lieberman additionally break up time amongst leagues throughout her profession.
After successful a number of nationwide championships throughout her collegiate profession at Previous Dominion, Lieberman performed within the now-defunct Girls’s Professional Basketball League (WBL) and Girls’s American Basketball Affiliation (WABA) earlier than temporary stints with the WNBA.
Nonetheless, she additionally joined the Los Angeles Lakers summer time league crew beneath coach Pat Riley in 1980. (“I used to be his first level guard, not Magic [Johnson],” Lieberman famous.) She’s performed a number of seasons within the males’s United States Basketball League (USBL) and performed for coach Frank Layden on the Utah Jazz’s summer time league crew.
Named to the Basketball Corridor of Fame in 1996, Lieberman got here to Big3 with the promise that she’d make the identical quantity as contemporaries like Dr. J and Gervin—and obtain the identical Corridor of Fame remedy.
“[Ice Cube] is aware of what that subsequent degree is, and the expectation,” Lieberman mentioned. “We’re not consuming off paper plates. Each time we stroll on the market, we’re at a five-star restaurant … these are former NBA athletes who gave their lives to offer their households generational wealth, and it’s necessary that they’re handled on this subsequent step of their profession with the identical respect that they’d.”
Now an announcer for each the NBA’s Oklahoma Metropolis Thunder and New Orleans Pelicans—additionally just lately teaching within the NCAA’s first girls’s all-star recreation—Lieberman sees the $5 million supply to Clark as an illustration of how the Big3 values girls on the high ranges of its sport. She famous that, in enterprise, leaders sometimes need to know if a prospect could make their firm higher, improve its affect on folks and make everybody more cash alongside the best way.
