“Everybody’s getting better, except the officials. So we got to find a way to remedy it. I mean, you’ve heard every coach talk about it, so I don’t know what the answer is,” said WNBA Commissioner Cathy Engelbert all the way back in July. Months later, the situation has not improved. Not even in the playoffs. The tensions reached their peak during the recent Game 3 matchup between the Phoenix Mercury and the Minnesota Lynx!
Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve’s anger towards a non-foul call led to events that caused a one-game suspension to be imposed on her. In light of this, a renowned WNBA analyst is calling for the ‘remedy’ now. “We have seen far too many contact injuries this season. And I also tweeted this last night, and I’m also going to stand by this. I said Cathy needs to say something publicly after this,” said Demita. “She cannot keep hiding behind meaningless fines and ignoring the chaos happening daily in her league.”
To further express the point, DeMita played a clip from one of Cathy Englebert’s recent interviews. During the same time, the WNBA commissioner was asked about the steps the league is taking to ensure fair and consistent calls during the playoff games. In response, Englebert said that this issue comes up every year, and “in every sport”. To her, this means that people care. Ouch.
ADVERTISEMENT
Article continues below this ad
Cathy Englebert gave some assurance by stating, “So, as our game evolves, we’ll continue to work hard on, officiating.” Unfortunately, that response didn’t do much to please the WNBA analyst. Because people have seen the fights that happened on the court and the injuries that occur due to bad officiating. Now, it has culminated in Napheesa Collier, who received the second-highest votes for MVP this year, going down with a contact injury and will have to sit out in a crucial decider game.
“I can’t get past that every time it comes up about officiating, she’s like, ‘Well, every sport complains about officiating.’ It’s something that’s so glaring in the WNBA. And a lot of new fans who came into the WNBA are shocked by what goes on in these games,” DeMita added. “The level of physicality, the mantra of, oh, it’s just a physical league.” Mind you, Criticism about the physicality in WNBA games isn’t anything new.
ADVERTISEMENT
Article continues below this ad
From Angel Reese to Sophie Cunningham, everyone has spoken out about the same. If Cheryl Reeve recently got angry, it was only because Phoenix Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas stole the ball from Napheesa Collier and, during the process, caused her lower body to collide with Collier’s left knee, causing the Lynx star’s ankle to roll.
Reeve said during the post-game presser, “When you let the physicality happen, people get hurt. There’s fights, and this is the look our league wants, for some reason. We were trying to play through it.” A few days before Reeve got the chance to air her frustration, Las Vegas Aces head coach Becky Hammon went viral for saying:
Read Top Stories First From EssentiallySports
Click here and check box next to EssentiallySports
“The physicality is out of control, that’s for sure. You can bump and grab a wide receiver in the NFL for those first five yards, but you can do it in the W for the whole half court. You put two hands on somebody, that should be an automatic foul.” There has reportedly been a spike in foul calls. While there were 27 in the opening game of the Aces-Fever Semifinals series, there were 41 in Game 2. Despite this, Hammon maintained that referees were still allowing too much contact.
Given so much backlash, Cathy Engelbert’s WNBA should act, right? Well, things aren’t that easy, as placing restrictions on the usage of physicality can reportedly be bad for business.
Spotlight shines on basketball’s physicality debate led by Becky Hammon
A few days ago, Alicia Jay of CBS touched base on Becky Hammon’s remarks on the “We Need To Talk” podcast. During the same, she highlighted that “To coach Becky’s point, she’s not wrong, but I just think that in order to grow the game and in order to excite new fans from watching it or to bring new fans in and they’re excited to watch it, especially as this league continues to grow with all the expansion teams, I do think that there should be a celebration of physicality, especially in the postseason.”
Storylines related to physicality have gained more popularity over the years. NBA fans talk about the ‘Bad Boys’ Detroit Pistons even today, as the squad often used physical means to throw their rivals off their games, especially the Michael Jordan-led Chicago Bulls. The same was true for women’s basketball, too, when the WNBA first laid its foundation.
After all, as Jordan Robinson once said, “Physicality has always been a WNBA thing. It’s a sports thing! It’s been a women’s basketball thing since the beginning.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Article continues below this ad