Sorry, WNBA Players Association
But Reporters get to Follow up on Entanglements that Occur on the Court
I will tell you a secret. A couple weeks ago, when I wrote about Caitlin Clark and the silly attempt by a reporter to get her to endorse a presidential candidate in the middle of a press conference, the reporter whose question I was criticizing, and who I didn’t reveal in the post, was Christine Brennan. Well, Miss Brennan has since caused another stir, and this time I will both use her name and defend her.
Here’s the context. It was a play early in Game 1 of the best-of-three WNBA playoff series between the Connecticut Sun and the Indiana Fever. Clark had the ball, dribbling to the right outside the three-point line. As she flung a pass back over her head to Aliyah Boston, Dijonai Carrington—who was guarding Clark—jumped with her right hand extended in an unsuccessful attempt to block the pass. The follow-through of the extension then came awkwardly forward and one at least one finger appeared to poke Clark’s eye before Clark went down on the floor, clutching her face. Boston’s driving shot did not find the basket, and after the Sun rebounded, the ball got pitched ahead to Carrington who finished the open lay-up for two points. The play was not called anything on the floor and was therefore not reviewable either. The Internet, of course, was a different matter, as those who love to make good guy/bad guy narratives out of everything took their cue.
Here’s where Brennan gets involved. Three days ago, before Game 2 in Connecticut—which the Sun also won to sweep the series before it ever got to Indianapolis—the USA Today reporter asked Carrington, “When you went and kind of swatted at Caitlin, did you intend to hit her in the eye?”
After Carrington said, “I don’t even know why I would intend to hit anybody in the eye, that doesn’t even make sense to me,” Brennan followed up about a laughing interaction she supposedly had with a teammate and asked if that was about Clark having gotten hit. Carrington denied again.
It wasn’t exactly a smooth exchange, and the WNBA Players Association took notice, firing off a statement:
"To unprofessional members of the media like Christine Brennan: You are not fooling anyone. That so-called interview in the name of journalism was a blatant attempt to bait a professional athlete into participating in a narrative that is false and designed to fuel racist, homophobic, and misogynistic vitriol on social media. You cannot hide behind your tenure.
It went on to say:
“You have abused your privileges and do not deserve the credentials issued to you. And you certainly are not entitled to any interviews with members of this union or anyt athlete in sport. Those credentials mean that you can ask anything, but they also mean that you know the difference between what you should and should not. We see you.”
If there’s one potentially-useful part of this, it might the use of the word “bait,” as you could potentially see both what I cried foul about in Brennan’s question a few weeks back about to Clark and what she asked Carrington here as her own subtle skill at driving Internet clicks. That’s behavior we’ve unfortunately incentivized, though; it’s hardly a bar-someone-from-the-profession act in today’s world. USA Today has rightly (in my opinion) defended Brennan, by the way.
What made her question with Carrington better than her question a few weeks ago with Clark? Well, let’s consider what the credentials are for. Brennan has credentials for a women’s professional basketball league. Okay, fine, Brennan saw Clark “like” a prominent (and somewhat controversial) Instagram post, and she followed up. But the public interest in Clark (and Carrington) is largely about basketball (where their entanglement occurred), and if they weren’t professional basketball players, we probably wouldn’t know who they are. Brennan does not have credentials for the voting booth or to stalk the two ladies in their private lives, which doesn’t mean she can’t ask about other things than basketball, but what I’m saying is that the nature of the question to Clark was that she was trying to put her “in a camp” (and therefore, presumably, against many of Clark’s fans, though Clark is too smart to fall for the obvious, well, baiting). I don’t think the question she asked Clark should result in her getting barred from the room, I just think it reveals more about her own agendas than she thinks it does, and that when she leads someone that blatantly only to get redirected by by Clark’s answer, the exchange makes Brennan look bad. She ought to be experienced enough in the profession by now not to do that.
If Brennan was baiting Carrington (and others who might watch the interview), or if there was a problem with her tone toward Carrington, the player union’s tone toward Brennan was worse. I don’t know how you read the words as anything but a threat. Meanwhile, Clark has also been asked about getting hit by Carrington, and she sides with Carrington, saying the play’s result wasn’t intentional, though I don’t think this actually means very much for two reasons: 1) Clark tries pretty damn hard (and usually admirably) to douse the flames of situations like this one, and more importantly 2) there’s no way Clark could possibly know what Carrington did or did not intend.
“Just watch the play,” Clark said as her own rationale for why the hit supposedly wasn’t intentional. But that’s the problem. I did watch the play. And so have many others who conclude what I conclude: it’s not even close to obvious that the hit wasn’t intentional. The view from the front of Clark is especially questionable. I will also say in an attempt to be honest that it’s not obvious that the move was intentional either.
It is precisely the kind of play that occurs on the floor during a basketball game that deserves to be followed up on by media with the players who were involved in the exchange. Brennan, then, was simply doing her job. Could she have been a bit more tactful in her presentation of the questions? Probably. But the asking of the questions was necessary, and it’s shameful as hell for the players union to have brought up racism, homophobia, and misogyny as having a damn thing to do with Brennan’s question.
A few weeks back, it was pointed out that Clark has been flagrantly fouled more than any other player in the WNBA season in 2024. One of the responses to that statistic by the old guard seems to have been something like: ‘yeah, it’s a competitive league, welcome to the fold, these things happen.’ Okay, fine, but this is where the contemporary progressive look is always contradicting itself in ways that reveal its fundamental lack of sincerity.
For starters, I don’t for one second think that the union statement necessarily represents what most or even all WNBA players think. But more importantly, let’s say that instead of Carrington, the offending player was Ben or Rasheed Wallace, Dennis Rodman or Bill Laimbeer, or Draymond Green. Are we to believe they wouldn’t be asked about the eye poke? Or that even considering doing so was some sort of deep insult? Please.
As many of the activists of old seemed to understand a lot better than current ones, equality in any real sense has benefits, to be sure—but it also has not-so-fun parts that amount to responsibilities. Carrington was perfectly capable of handling the questions Brennan asked, and it’s a literal insult to her to suggest that no one should ever insinuate that she’s capable of malice on a basketball court.
That is not to say that Carrington is the female equivalent of any of the aforementioned current or past NBA players, but it is a mark of respect that we see her as perfectly capable of choosing to poke an absolute star in the eye in an important basketball court. Grayson Allen, while playing for Duke, was suspended and stripped of his captaincy for tripping opponents on the court. Can you imagine if some union had come out at the time and feigned all this indignation that anyone would ever suggest a basketball player was capable of intentionally tripping someone on a basketball court?
Which doesn’t mean Carrington or anyone else should have to put up with e-mails that say that some person hopes she gets raped while calling her the n-word. That calls for investigation, too, though probably more by the league than by Brennan. But nor should an ugly screenshot somehow be extrapolated to represent the average WNBA fan, new or old, or be blamed on Clark. If a fan calls a WNBA player an n-word during a game and gets caught, that person ought to immediately be escorted to the exits. If you can figure out who wrote the e-mail, maybe you ban that person from ever being able to buy tickets from the league. You find a way, in other words, to substantively (rather than symbolically!) protect the player.
The screenshotted e-mail has next to nothing to do with Carrington’s play on the court with Clark, and they ought to be treated that way, as separate events. The eye poke was part of the thing and playing out right in front of us. The slur was fringe and hidden. Doesn’t mean the first is important and the second isn’t, but the first you can do something about, whereas the second will probably hard to track down.
Anyway, the subtle argument keeps getting made that the WNBA has always been this morally-pure league or something. It’s absurd in its relationship to the truth, but more importantly it’s doing real work—it’s a power move!—for anyone who wants to get away with something. It’s an ugly attempt at putting players as beyond reproach. Colorado football coach Deion Sanders does a bit of this with team as well, and it’s just as gross.
Do you want to be treated with kiddy gloves or not? If the answer is no, then we’re going to keep seeing you as human competitors who may just try to get away with something in the heat of otherwise-healthy competition.