DiJonai Carrington’s foul on Sophie Cunningham got exactly the review it deserved. Flagrant 1 on the floor, upgraded to flagrant 2 on second look, ejection. That part of Saturday night was never actually in dispute, which makes everything that happened after it that much dumber.
The play itself was ugly in the way flagrant fouls usually are. First quarter of a game the Indiana Fever would eventually win 90-86 over the Chicago Sky, Cunningham broke away for a layup and Carrington swiped her left arm down across Cunningham’s face and neck. Cunningham hit the floor without getting a hand down to break the fall.
Crew chief Maj Forsberg’s pool report, via ESPN, called the contact “unnecessary and excessive to a player in a vulnerable position.” That’s the whole case for the ejection, and it’s a complete one.
Cunningham got up and went straight at Carrington before Makayla Timpson and arena security separated them. Carrington, five games back from a foot sprain, had been productive off the bench — 8 points in 4 minutes — before the review ended her night.
Fever coach Stephanie White said afterward she didn’t think Carrington intentionally targeted the neck. Sky coach Tyler Marsh called Carrington “passionate” and pointed to a team just trying to win games, per CBS Sports. Neither coach disputed the call. Nobody did.
Cunningham, postgame, said she thought the foul was intentional. “I think that’s why she did it because she wants attention,” she said, adding she’d never spoken to Carrington and has no issue with her personally. Sharp, a little uncharitable, but still a conversation about a foul.
Then Carrington posted “WHITE PRIVILEGE” on Threads and tagged the Fever, and the conversation left the building entirely. Cunningham responded that the ejection “has nothing to do with race,” noting she’d been ejected for a nearly identical play last season, NBC News reported. Whatever you make of that exchange, watch what it did: it moved the entire story off the arm swipe and onto a subject the WNBA didn’t ask for and doesn’t control.
https://x.com/espn/status/2086180972282658923
I’ve watched the Mercury get whistled for the exact same play a dozen times over the years, and this wasn’t a borderline call anyone needed to relitigate. The league has spent this whole season trying to get taken seriously as a physical, well-officiated sport rather than a stage other people talk over. A clean, defensible ejection was the best advertisement for that case all week. Instead it became a two-day argument that has nothing to do with basketball, and everyone who doesn’t watch the WNBA got to feel like an expert on it anyway.
Carrington had a real grievance available to her — a flagrant call and an early exit from a game she was playing well in. She traded it for a different fight, and the different fight is the only one anyone’s still having. The Sky and Fever play again August 23.
The foul will be old news by then. The rest of it won’t be.
A clean call got buried under a fight nobody needed to start.
