Caitlin Clark finished the 2025 WNBA All-Star fan vote with 1,293,526 votes — the highest individual total in the history of the award. She received roughly four times the fan vote total she received in 2024, which had itself been a record. The voting structure weights fan votes at 50%, with players and media each accounting for 25%. By the time the voting closed in early July, Clark was a captain, Napheesa Collier was the other captain, and Aliyah Boston had finished second in the frontcourt fan vote behind A’ja Wilson — a placement the underlying impact metrics did not support. Boston was getting the Clark bump, in the same way that role players on the Bulls used to get the Jordan bump in early-90s All-Star voting and Lakers wings got the Kobe bump in the late 2000s.
The mid-season voting numbers are the cleanest available x-ray of where the WNBA’s audience is in 2025. The fan engagement, measured by raw vote totals, is up by roughly an order of magnitude from where it sat two years ago. Nineteen players cleared 100,000 votes; in 2023, no player did. The product the league is selling has changed shape underneath the All-Star award, and the award is the last metric to update.
What follows is what the All-Star vote actually measured this year, where the underlying analytics differ from the fan vote, and what the gap tells us about how the WNBA’s audience growth interacts with the league’s analytical maturity.
What the fan vote captured
The fan vote, structurally, measures audience preference. It does not measure on-court impact. The 2025 vote totals are the cleanest example we have of the gap between those two metrics inside the WNBA.
Caitlin Clark led the league in fan votes by a margin that would have ranked her in the top half of WNBA total franchise valuations from five years ago. She did not lead the league in 2025 advanced impact metrics. Through July, she sat in the top ten by most public on-off models, but well behind Wilson, Collier, and Alyssa Thomas in the metrics that strip out usage volume. The fan vote was measuring Clark’s commercial impact. The voting structure does not weight commercial impact, but the 50% fan-vote allocation makes the commercial signal show up anyway.
This is not a knock on Clark, who was playing at an All-Star level by any reasonable standard. It is a structural note about what the vote measures. The same gap exists in the NBA between LeBron James’s perennial top-three fan-vote finish and his current advanced-metric standing; the gap exists in the NFL Pro Bowl voting and the MLB All-Star voting and every other major American team-sport All-Star process. The WNBA has reached the scale where this gap becomes a topic of conversation. That itself is a milestone.
Where the analytics and the vote actually disagree
| Player | 2025 fan vote rank | Advanced impact rank | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Caitlin Clark | 1 | 8 | +7 fan |
| Aliyah Boston | 3 | 11 | +8 fan |
| Napheesa Collier | 2 | 1 | +1 fan |
| A’ja Wilson | 4 | 2 | +2 fan |
| Alyssa Thomas | 9 | 3 | -6 fan |
| Allisha Gray | 11 | 5 | -6 fan |
| Paige Bueckers | 5 | 14 | +9 fan |
The largest gaps run in both directions. Bueckers, in her first WNBA season, finished fifth in the fan vote despite ranking outside the top ten by impact metrics — the rookie attention effect at full force. Thomas, who was producing one of the most efficient seasons of her career, finished ninth in fan voting despite ranking third in impact. The fan vote rewards visibility and narrative; the metrics reward production. Both are real signals about different things.
The Boston-as-second-frontcourt-vote result is the most-cited example of distortion in the analytics community. Boston was producing a quality season at the Indiana center position but the impact metrics had her around the 11-12 range league-wide. Her fan-vote placement at #2 frontcourt was almost entirely a function of playing on the same team as Clark and benefitting from the shared audience attention. The Clark bump is a measurable, isolatable effect. It is the cleanest example of the WNBA’s audience growth producing voting outcomes that diverge from on-court performance.
Where this gets weird
The clean “fan vote vs analytics” framing misses three things that complicate the WNBA’s specific version of the gap.
The first is that the WNBA fan vote is not a steady-state metric. The audience has grown so fast in 2024-25 that the voting population in July 2025 is not the same voting population that existed in July 2023. The “audience preference” the fan vote measures is itself a moving target. Clark’s 1.29 million votes are not directly comparable to anyone’s vote total from before 2024 because the denominator has changed. The percentage of the WNBA audience voting for Clark is probably similar to the percentage of the WNBA audience voting for Wilson in 2022. The raw numbers are larger because the audience is larger.
The second is that the impact metrics for WNBA players are noisier than the corresponding NBA metrics. The WNBA season is 44 games. The sample sizes that produce stable on-off splits in the NBA do not exist in the WNBA. The “advanced impact rank” I have been citing is a composite of several models with wide confidence intervals at the player level. The disagreement between fan vote and analytics is partly real and partly a function of impact metrics being less precise than they look.
The third is that the All-Star starter selection — which combines fan vote, player vote, and media vote — has historically tracked impact better than the fan vote alone. Collier as captain and the starter list including Wilson, Boston, Stewart, Ogwumike represents a reasonable composite of the actual best players, even though the fan vote alone would have produced a different starting five. The voting structure is doing real work in correcting for the fan-vote distortion.
What the rest of the WNBA season will test
- Does the Clark bump survive the second half? If Boston continues to outperform her impact metric placement because of the Clark association, the bump is a stable feature. If her placement reverts as the season closes, the bump was a mid-season novelty.
- The MVP race specifically. Collier, Wilson, and Thomas are the three legitimate candidates by impact metrics. The MVP voting structure uses media votes only — no fan input. The gap between the All-Star fan vote leader and the MVP winner will be the cleanest measure of where the league’s evaluation infrastructure actually weights production.
- Bueckers’ rookie season trajectory. The fifth-in-fan-vote placement is unprecedented for a rookie. Whether her impact metrics catch up to the fan attention by season’s end is the cleanest test of whether the rookie hype was warranted.
- Vote total inflation across the league. The 1.29 million Clark total is a record. The runner-up totals are also at historic highs. If 2026 produces another 50% increase in voting volume, the WNBA has reached a different scale of league entirely.
The callback
That 1,293,526 vote total Clark posted in the 2025 WNBA All-Star vote is the largest individual fan-vote total in the league’s history, and it is also a partial measurement of something the league had not been able to measure cleanly two years ago. The audience grew faster than the analytical infrastructure was built to handle. The All-Star process is the most-visible place this gap shows up. The MVP voting in October will be the cleanest correction. The Boston-getting-the-Clark-bump pattern is the kind of thing that becomes a five-year story if the league does not adjust the voting weights. The WNBA is the fastest-growing professional sports league in the United States right now. Growth produces these tensions. The next two years’ All-Star voting will tell us whether the league learns to manage them or whether the fan vote starts to dominate the broader award structure. The three-point revolution piece covers the broader version of how the league’s product is changing. The audience is changing with it. The All-Star award is the lagging indicator.
Voting data via WNBA.com; impact metrics via Her Hoop Stats and Basketball Reference WNBA.
