Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham must be so proud. Her bigoted antics are getting her the attention she so dearly craves, attention she would never get as a basketball player, because she is extremely mid. But she seems happy to try to drag the WNBA down with her. Thanks to Cunningham, many of the worst conservatives are fixated on the league.
First up is the laughable Riley Gaines, clearly the person Cunningham one day aspires to be—a grifty little presence on Fox News and at anti-trans White House executive order signings. In 2022, Gaines swam for the University of Kentucky and experienced the sheer horror of tying for fifth place with Lia Thomas, a trans woman swimming for the University of Pennsylvania. Penn, in a “settlement” with the Trump administration, agreed to block trans women from playing women’s sports and revoke all of Thomas’ records.
Now, Gaines is helping Cunningham poison the WNBA as well.
On Saturday, the Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington, who is Black, fouled Cunningham hard while going for a block, hitting her in the face. Carrington was assessed a flagrant foul and thrown out of the game, which she described on Threads as an act of “white privilege,” and she’s honestly not wrong.
Chicago Sky’s DiJonai Carrington walks off the court ejected from the game for committing a foul against Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham a WNBA game in Chicago on Aug. 8.AP
But Gaines decided she had something important to say, and if you were wondering if she would make this racist as shit, she did: “I would actually say that this is Black privilege, to be totally honest with you, because her posting this white racist comment right after assaulting Sophie Cunningham on the court is actually black privilege because she knows the WNBA won’t do a single thing of significance about it.”
Carrington was literally ejected from the game. Not sure what it is that Gaines thinks should happen in addition to that, but let’s face it: The unsubtle message here is that Black players should somehow be banned from touching precious Sophie.
Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier is even threatening to charge WNBA players with assault if they were to, say, hurt precious Sophie. The notion that a foul is somehow an assault is laughable, but Uthmeier’s attack is serious and a threat to the league.
If Cunningham cared about the WNBA, she’d make a statement defending it and disavowing the gross anti-trans rallies that now accompany her everywhere. She’d also stop having Gaines pop onto the court for meet-and-greets with Cunningham’s bigoted fans.
Instead, Cunningham is keeping mum even as washed-up former NBA stars like failed Senate candidate Royce White and the laughable Enes Kanter Freedom supposedly declare for the WNBA draft. Neither White nor Mr. Freedom are trans, of course. They’re just gross conservative men who want to screw with the WNBA and have bought a stupid conspiracy theory that the WNBA is somehow a haven for giant men hell-bent on harming precious tiny ladies like Sophie Cunningham, who happens to stand 6’1”.
Anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, shown in March.AP
There are, of course, no trans players currently in the WNBA. But this baseless moral panic is getting results for conservatives, with the league announcing it will address trans athlete eligibility in the wake of the antics by White and Freedom.
Meanwhile, White is bragging he got his first wig, which he seems to think is sufficient to qualify him as a trans player who gets to join the WNBA. Much more likely, any attempt to join a women’s league would require White and Freedom to, say, suppress their testosterone for at least a year and live as a woman in all aspects of their lives, not just dumb stunts. Somehow, I don’t see either of these guys doing that.
Also, even if White somehow underwent a full transition, his NBA performance is not exactly the sort of thing that would persuade the WNBA to take him. He played in three NBA games—total—12 years ago and never scored a point.
The fault for all of this ultimately lies with Cunningham, who seems eager to wreck the WNBA as part of her quest to become a bog-standard blonde MAGA lady on the teevee. She doesn’t have much of a future as a player, with a career average of 8 points. In exchange for that extremely meh level of performance, the Fever gets a bigoted monster who craves fame specifically as a bigoted monster.
What’s the benefit of Cunningham to any team in the league? In the game against the Sky, her plus/minus stat—a measurement of how many points the Fever scored while Cunningham was on the floor—was a shockingly low -28. That means the Sky outscored the Fever by 28 points in the mere 17 minutes Cunningham came off the bench.
There are any number of players who can step in and put up those crappy stats without being a liability. The WNBA should throw this bum out.
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