Indiana Fever guard Sophie Cunningham wrote another check to the WNBA office for critical comments she made about the league’s officiating.<\/p>\n
Cunningham said<\/a> on her Show Me Something podcast that she was fined $1,500, thanks to some of her remarks in the show’s premiere.<\/p>\n “If I was a ref, I know I would mess up all the time,” she said in that episode (via Matthew Glenesk<\/a> of the Indianapolis Star). “Like, I’m not saying that your job is easy, but when it is a simple call right in front of your face multiple times, what are you doing? What are you doing? … They’re just so inconsistent, like that’s one thing.”<\/p>\n Cunningham previous drew a $500 fine for a video she posted to social media. Using the lyrics from Sabrina Carpenter’s “Manchild,” she cited a number of negative adjectives to describe WNBA referees.<\/p>\n The seventh-year veteran is far from the only player to voice her displeasure with the state of officiating, and this has been a perceived issue<\/a> for years.<\/p>\n Monty McCutchen, who oversees referee training and development across the NBA’s family of leagues, told Ira Gorawara<\/a> of the Los Angeles Times he’s “very pleased with the work this year.”<\/p>\n It’s not as though the WNBA is unique in having players dissatisfied with the refs, either.<\/p>\n Still, Gorawara pointed to some structural aspects that speak to the W specifically. There’s no central replay center like the NBA’s in Secaucus, New Jersey, and referees who work in the WNBA have jobs in the college game or NBA G League, too.<\/p>\n \u201cYou’re working three very different kinds of basketball,” said Jacob Tingle, director of sport management at Trinity University who is part of a research network for sports referees. “The reason the NBA or MLB works is because that\u2019s all you do \u2014 you’re working the same kind of game only.”<\/p>\n