Dorktown column: Caitlin Clark is in her own universe (Patreon)

Dorktown has been a lot of things over the years – short videos, long videos, comic books, and all the charts you've seen on social media. Today, our own Alex Rubenstein re-introduces Dorktown as a recurring feature column, loaded with all the charts you know and love.

We’re gathered here today to talk about:

• a former Iowa Hawkeyes athlete

• named Clark

• who wore a jersey number one lower than that worn by Mike Jordan

• who subsequently became a 1st-round draft pick of Indy.

And while it may be high time for some Dallas Clark discourse, alas this is a hoops piece.

Throughout the 2023-24 college basketball campaign, Iowa’s Caitlin Clark crafted the greatest all-time single season of college hoops. Let’s kick off the Clark chartorama (h/t as always to Stathead) by showing, in relation to her Division I peers, the extent to which she stood out:

603 of those points stemmed from 3-pointers, easily the most ever in a single season:

Now let’s isolate just those scoring and passing elements individually, starting with the former.

She reached 35 points in 14 games in a season when no one else did so even half as much, with only Zach Edey and Dalton Knecht doing so even ¼ as much:

In five of ‘em she hit 40, with no one outside JuJu Watkins and Tommy Bruner doing so more than once:

For some broader perspective, Clark’s 1,234 total points in ‘23-’24 beats her closest competition from the last half-century by over 100 points:

As to how her playmaking on its own stands out: her 346 assists as a senior were not only 18.5% more than anyone else that season, but they also comfortably exceed the single-season total of anyone else in the last dozen years, with her junior season self one of her closest challengers:

How ‘bout we throw some high-scoring and high-assist games into the equation? Well, if we look at 30/10 games, she pulled off 11 of ‘em with no one outside of McKenna Hofschild managing to have more than one such game:

Up the scoring threshold to 35 points, and she pretty much monopolizes those games:

If we expand the scope to her entire career in Iowa City, we can provide some perspective using game-level data available going back to the 2010-11 season. Her 20 such games are nearly 7x that of anyone else during this period of time:

And remember, she had 11 just in her senior season, nearly 4x the career total of anyone else since 2011. Let’s close the loop by looking at career 35/10 games:

Once again, remember that she had seven such games in her senior season alone. So as one might surmise (and as alluded to in the legends of a couple prior charts), her final season – the most prolific single campaign by any D1 college hoops player ever – catapulted her to the most prolific career authored by any D1 college hoops player ever by combining the most career assists of anyone in the last 30 years:

…with the most career points of anyone, ever:

And lest you think any of those numbers were hollow or not meaningful, that couldn’t be further from reality. Clark impacted winning on a profound level never before seen by her school. Pre-Clark, the Iowa women’s basketball team had only once in their history gone as far as the Final Four, where they fell to Ohio State in 1993. Clark not only led the Hawkeyes to the Final Four in consecutive seasons to cap her college career, they won both of them to advance to the title game:

Stacking unprecedented scoring on top of near-unprecedented passing and playmaking on top of unprecedented team success – two times over – for her school that she single-handedly put on the map? It boggles the mind. That’s just straight out of a video game. That’s just completely absurd. That’s just ludicrous. That’s just Caitlin Clark.