The mayhem of this year’s WNBA season isn’t slowing down — though some of the fallout is increasingly concerning. On Wednesday night, players for the Chicago Sky said they were harassed outside their hotel in Washington, D.C., by a man who put a camera in a player’s face, the Athletic reports.
“This really is outta control and needs to stop,” rookie Angel Reese wrote on X. Sky forward Isabelle Harrison wrote, “My teammate being harassed at our hotel is insane. Couldn’t even step off the bus.” Forward Michaela Onyenwere added, “Getting harassed at our hotel is where the line needs to be drawn. Some ‘fans’ have no chill.”
Although neither Reese nor Harrison clarified which player was at the center of the incident, the Chicago Sun-Times reports that a man targeted Chennedy Carter. Carter has been at the center of debates about race and privilege in the WNBA since her flagrant foul against Caitlin Clark on Saturday — a move that Reese, Clark’s college rival, appeared to meet with cheers. After the game, Clark said Carter’s foul was “just not a basketball play, but that’s what basketball is about at this level.” Meanwhile, Carter told reporters on Monday that fans and players misunderstood her. “I’m just saying, don’t form an opinion off of one little clip. And you didn’t even see the whole game and/or the play that led to that,” she said.
A video making rounds on X and TikTok shows Carter walking away from the team bus as a man repeatedly asks her: “Have you gotten a chance to reach out to Caitlin?” On X, people debated whether the video was edited to exclude bits where the man prevented Carter from getting off the bus, as Harrison described. Onyenwere said that the video excluded racist insults that the man hurled at the team.
Sky general manager Jeff Pagliocca told the Sun-Times that police weren’t called because the team’s security de-escalated the situation, saying, “It was over as fast as it started.” Brianna Turner, a forward for the team, wrote on X that she wasn’t present during the incident, “but what occurred isn’t acceptable. Didn’t realize that when we said ‘grow the game’ that would be interpreted as harassing players at hotels.” Turner seemed to attribute the incident to the “absurd headlines recently” that “created an unstable environment for our safety.”
