Alyssa Thomas of the Phoenix Mercury delivered a knee to Caitlin Clark's groin and a fist to her throat during Wednesday night's game against the Indiana Fever. No foul was called on either play. Clark left the game in the third quarter.

Then the Mercury's official social media account posted a tweet mocking Clark. Then they deleted it.

Let's walk through this, because the sequence matters. Clark — the player who single-handedly turned the WNBA from background noise into appointment television — gets physically battered on the court by a veteran player. The referees see nothing worth blowing a whistle over. And the offending team's official account decides to take a victory lap about it on social media, posting "There's no template for this kind of production. Alyssa Thomas is her own category" — a pointed dig at Clark's own promotional branding.

The Mercury scrubbed the tweet after backlash, which tells you they knew exactly what they were doing when they posted it. You don't delete something you're proud of.

Indiana Fever coach Stephanie White has been vocal about the targeting Clark endures, but the league's response has been the institutional equivalent of a shrug.

The timing makes it worse. Just one day before the game, on June 24, the WNBA released its 30th anniversary poster. Caitlin Clark — the most-watched, most-discussed, most commercially valuable player in the league — was not on it. The player who filled arenas and drove television ratings that WNBA executives used to brag about in boardrooms was edited out of the league's own history.

Former NFL quarterback Boomer Esiason didn't mince words about the situation. "If I were Caitlin Clark, I would seriously consider going to play overseas," he said. When a football guy is telling your biggest star to leave the country to find fair treatment, your league has a problem that goes beyond bad officiating.

Sports commentator Clay Travis put it more bluntly, as reported by Twitchy: "WNBA players hate Caitlin Clark and cheap shot her because she's white and straight." That's the part nobody in the league office wants to address. The jealousy isn't just professional — it's personal, and it's been obvious since Clark entered the league.

WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert has presided over all of this — the targeting, the non-calls, the anniversary snub, the social media trolling by her own franchises — while simultaneously using Clark's popularity to negotiate bigger television deals. The league markets itself on Clark's face while its players aim for her throat.

There's a version of this story where the WNBA recognized what it had in Clark and built a product around her that lifted every franchise. Higher ratings, bigger arenas, better sponsorships — all boats rising.

Instead, they went with the knee to the groin and the deleted tweet.

The WNBA spent 29 years begging America to watch. America finally showed up. And the league's response has been to assault the reason why, mock her for it, and then pretend it never happened.