When it comes to the face of the WNBA and the player taking the league to new heights, the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham minces no words.
Cunningham says critics of teammate Caitlin Clark don’t just come from the stands or via social media either. There is a resentment from players in the league that the seventh-year guard finds abhorrent.
“It literally pisses me off when people are like, ‘She’s not the face of the league.’ What?” Cunningham said on her new podcast, ‘Show Me Something.’ “There’s really good, well-known people in our league. I’m not discrediting them. We have a lot of badasses in our league. Hell yeah to that. I’m all for that. But when people try to argue that she’s not the face of our league or our league would be where we’re at without her, you’re dumb as s—. You’re literally dumb as f—.”
Cunningham was on the other side with the Phoenix Mercury last season, when Clark was a rookie, and said teammates planned to zero in on the young star player.
“I know the talks Phoenix had in their locker room of, like, ‘We’re gonna show her what the W really is,'” Cunningham said. “I get it to a certain extent. Every rookie coming into the league, that’s how you’re going to treat them. But there’s just more for her. It’s her second year. Now being on her team and seeing it, I’m like, ‘What are people doing?’ It’s just too much.”
Cunningham came to Clark’s defense on the court earlier this season in an incident with the Connecticut Sun’s Jacy Sheldon and Marina Mabrey.
Clark has been limited to just 13 games because of multiple leg injuries and her 16.5 points per game are below her 19.2 mark over 40 games last season when she was named WNBA Rookie of the Year.
But within those 13 games was a matchup with Angel Reese and the Chicago Sky that drew 2.7 million viewers that was the most watched WNBA game in 25 years. Teams in smaller home arenas also move their games to bigger arenas for matchups with Clark and the Fever.
“This is what we’ve always wanted as a league so like, who cares who gets the credit,” Cunningham said. “And if you’re smart (you know) you’re making money off them. … Just be nice. Why can’t people be nice?”
–Field Level Media
