Following a dominant victory to begin play at the 2026 FIBA Basketball World Cup, Team USA just narrowly avoided near-disaster in their second group-stage matchup on Sunday. Facing Italy, the star-studded Team USA roster was around a 30-point favorite entering the game, but was pushed to the brink, narrowly holding on for a 55-52 victory.
There were plenty of storylines for both teams, but one thing stood true for both sides: shots simply weren't falling. Team USA shot a brutal 29% from the field and 8$ (1-of-12) from three-point range, while Italy wasn't much better at 31% from the field and 13% (2-of-15) from deep. Team USA's two top scorers from the opener, Caitlin Clark and Paige Bueckers, failed to get much going.
In fact, for Clark, Sunday
proved to be an outlier for her entire basketball career, at least spanning back to college and throughout her WNBA career. She finished the game 0-of-6 shooting with one point, and as ESPN Insights highlighted, this marked the first time since she arrived at Iowa that she's failed to make a shot from the field.
Caitlin Clark went 0-6 for 1 point in the United States' 3-point win over Italy at the FIBA Women's World Cup Sunday. She has never gone 0-for in a WNBA or collegiate game.
— ESPN Insights (@ESPNInsights) September 6, 2026
The trio of Clark, Kahleah Cooper and Breanna Stewart combined to go 1-19 in the win. Each player ranks in… pic.twitter.com/25i7sa90TE
To be clear, while this stat is a complete anomaly for Clark, the fact that three of the WNBA's top scorers shot a combined 1-of-19 underscores how rough a game it was for Team USA overall.
While even the best players in the world are going to have an "off game" from time to time, witnessing virtually all of Team USA's best scorers do so in the same game is a wild mixture of bad luck and just one of those unexplainable situations. Fortunately, the favorites to take home the gold medal are still 2-0 and poised to enter the knockout stage unbeaten.
This article originally appeared on For The Win: Caitlin Clark made the worst kind of history in Team USA win over Italy
