The WNBA doesn’t want reporters asking its players hard questions

The WNBA should be celebrating record TV-viewer and butts-in-seats numbers, and its massive new TV deal.

It’s too busy trying to undermine its hard-earned success instead.

“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,” WNBPA Executive Director Terri Carmichael Jackson said in a statement released on Friday.

For some reason, Jackson, on behalf of the players association, is perpetuating a story from Sunday, then Tuesday, over a poke-in-the-eye from Connecticut Sun guard DiJonai Carrington that gave Indiana Fever point guard Caitlin Clark a black eye, and a question in a press gaggle about the poke-in-the-eye.

Instead of moving on, as Clark and the Fever have – Indiana was eliminated from the playoffs in an 87-81 Game 2 loss to Connecticut on Wednesday – we get more self-inflicted bad PR from a league that has proven over the past several months that it can’t get out of its own way.

But since they want us to keep harping on the poke-in-the-eye, here we go.

And let’s be clear on one thing: any other poke-in-the-eye putting a star player on the floor 90 seconds into a playoff opener would get outsized attention, but then, this one involved Clark, who was the focus of rough play from opponents from the opening tip back in May, and hey, it’s not like Carrington is totally innocent here.

Carrington was called for a hard foul on Clark in a June game, then appeared to mock Clark, eliciting a hearty round of boos from her home crowd in the process, and after getting criticism for the foul and her taunting on social media, made the issue to be about race.

Yes, elephant in the room – Clark is white, Carrington is black.

Carrington, in a social media post after that self-inflicted controversy, blasted Clark, after the rookie responded to a reporter’s question about “when people use your name for racism, misogyny, whatever, what is your response to that,” saying:

“I think it’s disappointing. I think, you know, everybody in our world deserves to have the same amount of respect. The women in our league deserve the same amount of respect. People should not be using my name to push those agendas. It’s disappointing, it’s unacceptable. This league is a league I grew up admiring and wanting to be a part of. Some of the women in this league were my biggest idols and role models growing up and helped me want to achieve this moment right here, that I get to play here every single night. Just treating every single woman in this league with the same amount of respect is just, I think, a basic human thing that everybody should do, just be a kind person and treat them like you would want to be treated.”

That response from Clark seems reasonable.

Carrington’s response to Clark’s response was … odd.

“Dawg. How one can not be bothered by their name being used to justify racism, bigotry, misogyny, xenophobia, homophobia & the intersectionalities of them all is nuts. We all see the sh*t. We all have a platform. We all have a voice & they all hold weight. Silence is a luxury.”

Just, again, just plain odd, that response.

Fast-forward to Game 1 of the Sun-Fever first-round playoff series, Carrington pokes Clark in the eye 90 seconds in, it’s going to lead to questions.

That’s where the statement from Jackson, on behalf of the WNBPA, comes into our story.

Jackson is putting on blast in her statement USA Today sportswriter Christine Brennan, whose first rodeo in the journo business was a ways back, because Brennan had asked Carrington in a between-games media gaggle on Tuesday about the poke-in-the-eye.

The question from Brennan: “When you went and kind of swatted at Caitlin, did you intend to hit her in the eye, and if so, could you just, or if not, either way, could you talk about what happened on that play?”

At the moment Brennan asked this question, the poke-in-the-eye had already been the subject of multiple print stories and broadcast segments covering and opining and blustering ad infinitum about the foul, about the previous Carrington-Clark dustups, about issues with race and homophobia and misogyny involving the WNBA.

Which is to say, it was the question on everybody’s mind.

Carrington’s answer: “I don’t even know why I would intend to hit anybody in the eye. That doesn’t even make sense to me. But no, I didn’t. I didn’t know that I hit her, actually. I was trying to make a play on the ball, and I guess I followed through, and I hit her. It’s never intentional, it’s not even, like, the type of player that I am.”

The part here about Carrington saying she didn’t know she had hit Clark isn’t exactly what you’d call believable, given that Clark fell to the floor, writhing in pain, and the game was called to a stop at the next dead ball, but otherwise, fair.

Follow-up question from Brennan: “Did you and Marina (Mabrey) get a laugh about it afterwards? It looked like, later on in the game, they caught you guys laughing about it?”

The follow-up is based on a scene caught on the TV broadcast, and would have been visible to reporters on press row, in which Carrington and Mabrey were laughing at the end of the 93-69 Sun win, in which Clark was held to 11 points on 4-of-17 shooting.

Carrington’s answer: “No, I just told you, I didn’t even know I hit her, so, I can’t laugh about something I didn’t know happened.”

OK, so, again, she knew what had happened, but she answered the question.

Clark, for her part of this, said the poke “wasn’t intentional by any means, just watch the play,” and attributed the loss to “we just played a crappy game.”

Brennan, to be clear, wrote just one column about Game 1, which was published on Sunday, after the game, and that column only referenced Carrington once, in a sentence factually referencing the poke-in-the-eye, as a set-up to Clark talking about how the poke-in-the-eye hadn’t affected her game.

She didn’t write a column castigating Carrington for the hard contact.

She didn’t actually write anything about Game 1 after her Sunday postgame column.

She asked a question, then a follow-up, at a presser, two days later.

Which is what reporters do.

Brennan hasn’t responded to this latest self-inflicted controversy, but her editor, Roxanna Scott, has, saying in a statement:

“Journalists ask questions and seek truth. At USA Today, our mission is to report in an unbiased manner. We reject the notion that the interview perpetuated any narrative other than to get the player’s perspective directly. Christine Brennan is well regarded as an advocate for women and athletes, but first and foremost, she’s a journalist.”

For all that we hear from WNBA players about how they’d prefer that we all focus on what they’re doing on the court, they’re the ones who keep bringing us back to the nonsense.

It’s almost like they don’t want people who weren’t fans before this season to be interested in what they’re doing.

Maybe somebody should ask a question about that at the next WNBA press opportunity, assuming reporters are going to bother covering the league anymore, at the risk of having the head of the players association trying to get them canceled.