punch heard around the world. Alyssa Thomas puts a knee in Caitlin Clark’s groin, puts a fist in Caitlin Clark’s throat, and then uses her as a stepping stool uh as leverage trying to get up, putting all 215 lb of Alyssa Thomas on Caitlin Clark. Again, in the game, no foul. In the game, not a flagrant. In the game, no Caitlin Clark was on the ground. Not from a hard foul. Not from an aggressive box out. She was flat on the court, already down, and Alyssa Thomas walked over to her, drove her closed fist into Clark’s throat, and then stepped over her like she was a speed bump. Like she was nothing. Like Clark was not the most valuable, most watched, most talked about player in the history of women’s professional basketball. And the referees? They saw nothing. They called nothing. They blew no whistle.
The game just kept moving. And it was not until the league reviewed the footage the next morning that anyone in an official capacity said a word. WNBA issued a statement upon postgame review. Uh the Phoenix Mercury’s Alyssa Thomas has received a flagrant foul two penalty and a one-game suspension. If they was going to suspend her for one game, it’s like doing nothing. Like this is This league is a joke. This league is a joke. How do you get a one-game suspension for that? You need to make a statement. You need to protect your players. Uh she should have been suspended for at least I would say five games. Five games suspension would have sufficed for me. That would have sent, you know, a pretty stern message. Uh but one game is like literally a slap on the wrist. One game.
That is the punishment the WNBA handed down for a fist to the throat. One game. Alyssa Thomas will miss one game against the Toronto Tempo, and then she is right back on the floor like none of this ever happened. The league called it a non-basketball act. They upgraded it to a flagrant two. They suspended her for one game. And with that, they closed the case. No further action. No additional fine made public. No acknowledgement of the fact that officials were standing right there and somehow missed a fist going into a player’s throat. One game. That is what the WNBA decided the throat of Caitlin Clark is worth. You know, if I were Caitlin Clark, I would seriously consider going to play overseas somewhere and get and get the royal treatment. And get real money. From the Saudis, from somewhere.
I mean, there’s international go to the Saudis. Well, she can’t go to the Russians either as we saw that, you know, Brittney Griner got stuck there. She did well, yeah, in jail. Right. So, Can’t take that money from PIF. But a lot of the women but a lot of the women actually do play, you know, in European leagues cuz they they Let’s be real. If Caitlin Clark played in Russia, and Alyssa Thomas was over there playing like that and she put a fist in her throat, Putin would have her thrown in the gulag. Do you get me? And I’m not kidding you. And the moment that announcement dropped, the internet did not slowly warm up to the story. It went off like a grenade. Fans were furious. Commentators were stunned.
People who cover this league for a living were sitting in front of cameras shaking their heads, struggling to explain how you put your fist into someone’s throat during a live game and walk away with one game off. Christine Brennan wrote it plainly. A fist to the throat deserves far more than that. Sports journalists across every major outlet were saying the same thing in different words. This was not a group of fringe fans being dramatic. This was the mainstream sports world across platforms and networks looking at the WNBA’s decision and saying out loud that it does not make sense. Now, let’s get to the UFC move. Watch this. She’s crossing up. She ends up falling. And watch this knee, man. Watch this knee right here. Goes right into the groin, dog. Oh my goodness. Look at this, man.
And when you go back, you see Stephanie why this yelling something. I don’t know what she’s yelling. Look at this. I I don’t know what she’s yelling, man, but nobody’s paying attention to the dirty work being put on her. We saw the fist to the throat, right? The knee to the groin. Look, everybody head is Here is exactly what happened because the details matter. It was the second quarter. 6 minutes and 52 seconds left. Clark drove into the lane and fell following contact with Phoenix defender Lexie Held. She was already on the ground. The ball was loose. And in the scramble that followed, Thomas apparently struck Clark in the groin area with her knee multiple times. And then, when Clark was still lying there trying to recover, Thomas pressed her closed fist directly into Clark’s neck. Then she stood up and stepped over her.
No foul was called in the moment. None of it was flagged live. The referees looked right at that floor and let the game continue. Think about that. You do not accidentally press your closed fist into someone’s throat. A fist to the throat is not a scramble collision. That is a choice. coming out of the woodwork because this is unacceptable. I know people don’t like Caitlin Clark. I know they don’t want to ever acknowledge what she’s done for the WNBA. I know women in the WNBA, black women as a whole want to act like she’s just irrelevant, act like any old person off the street that can dribble a basketball can waltz into the WNBA and do what Caitlin Clark did. I know that’s the narrative surrounding her, but I need more people to to to to to speak up about this. This is not sports.
This is not why we get into sports. This is not sportsmanship behavior. This is not the mentality that we want to see on our screen. This is not what we’re trying to teach our young women who want to get into basketball, who want to play sports. I need more people to speak up and to be more vocal about this. This is the face of women’s sports in its entirety. No one has made the impact on women’s sports that Caitlin Clark has made in a very, very, very Thomas is not fighting for the ball at this point. The ball is already gone. Clark is on the floor, and Thomas plants her fist deliberately. Then she gets up and steps right over the player she just hit. She does not check if Clark is okay. She does not step around her.
She steps over her, like she was making a statement, like she wanted everyone watching to understand exactly what had just happened and who was in control. The referees who were there in person with court-level views caught nothing. It took a postgame review of the footage to even get the call upgraded to a flagrant at all. We’ve seen Alyssa Thomas do this. We saw what she did to Napheesa Collier. We saw We’ve seen her over the years. She’s a She’s a plays like a goon. So, I I just think a one-game suspension is literally a joke. In my opinion, it’s literally a joke. Here is the real problem with one game. It sends a message. And the message it sends is not the right one. What the WNBA has essentially communicated to every player in that league is this:
If you want to put Caitlin Clark on the ground and press your fist into her throat, the cost is one game. One. That is a voluntary choice any player can make at any point in any game and decide the trade-off is worth it. That is not deterrence. That is a price list. A five-game suspension changes how players think. A A 10-game suspension gets people’s attention. One game against the Toronto Tempo, a team the Mercury beat anyway, does not change anyone’s behavior. It does not make any player in that locker room think twice. It does not make the next person who considers going too far with Clark recalculate. It just tells them the door is open. And here is what makes it even harder to accept. This is not Alyssa Thomas’s first moment of rough play against Clark. The pattern exists.
Players have been taking liberties with Clark in ways that would not be tolerated against other stars in this league. And the league has been inconsistent at every turn in how it responds. So, when the WNBA finally does act, finally steps in and says this crossed the line, and the punishment they hand down is one game, it starts to feel less like accountability and more like optics. Less like the league genuinely protecting its players, and more like the league doing the minimum required to avoid a bigger news cycle. The suspension is one conversation. While the Indiana Fever lose tonight, and I’ve got video to show you here, that’s Alyssa Thomas, and that over there is Caitlin Clark, and that right there is a fist into her neck. Let’s watch the video. There’s a couple things I don’t like about this.
First, Caitlin does fall um by herself here. The hand right into the neck to kind of hold Caitlin down, then the step over. Alyssa Thomas, watch her. She noticed the ball goes back behind her, still steps right over here. After the game she was interviewed. Alyssa Thomas was and was like, “Congratulations on a clean win. ” Yeah, good win. No foul here, nothing at all. Clapping, pointing, foul. Fist to the neck. I didn’t see anything. But there is a second conversation running right alongside it that is equally important. And it starts with the officials who were on that floor. There was no call, not a delayed whistle, not a quick review, Not a conference between referees. Play continued. A player put her fist into another player’s throat on a professional basketball court, and the officials on the scene determined in real time that nothing had happened.
That is a flagrant two foul by the WNBA’s own assessment issued the very next morning. That means the standard for a flagrant two ejection was met. The league confirmed it met that standard. And none of that was recognized live. Fans were furious on two separate fronts. First, that Thomas was not immediately ejected, because had the referees caught the play live, it would have been an automatic ejection under flagrant foul rules. Second, that WNBA officiating continues to have a real, documented, ongoing problem around physical play involving Clark specifically. The no call was not just an error. For people who have been watching this situation develop over multiple seasons, it felt like confirmation of something they had been saying for a long time. The referees are not applying the rules equally when Caitlin Clark is the one on the receiving end.
And then, It was better, but offensively you guys were getting shots. Yeah, offensively we know we can attack them however we want. Um, that’s that’s one of the the key emphasis when when you play them. Um, just moving them and and and trying to get to the basket. Um, yeah. I think when we do that and attack them and get to the free throw line, it it’s a different game. As if the incident itself was not enough, the Phoenix Mercury’s social media account posted a meme mocking Caitlin Clark after their narrow 111 to 109 win. They put it out publicly. And when the backlash hit, they deleted it. But the internet does not forget. Screenshots spread everywhere immediately. And the story that had already been burning about Thomas’s suspension suddenly had another layer attached to it.
This was not just one player crossing a line on the floor. This was an organization, a franchise in the WNBA, appearing to celebrate what had happened. Or at minimum using it as content. That deleted post told you something. Not just about the Mercury’s social media team, but about the temperature inside that situation. When an organization feels comfortable enough to mock the player their teammate just put on the ground, even briefly, it tells you that the culture around how Clark is treated has not been taken seriously enough. It tells you the league’s messaging has not landed. It tells you that consequences are seen as light enough that nobody felt the need to exercise restraint. And the fact that the post was deleted does not undo the fact that it existed. It was put up. Someone decided it was fine. Well, this isn’t about competitiveness.
This isn’t about winning, spirit, and fire, and passion. This isn’t about any of this. This is about an irrelevant ass named Alyssa Thomas who was trying to get her lick back. The ball’s rolling in the complete opposite direction. She sticks her knee into her groin, and then she jams her fist into her throat with two other surrounding Phoenix Mercury players around her so she can do what the she want like a coward ass I appreciate Stacey Dales for speaking up about this. I think Alyssa Thomas needs to be suspended indefinitely. Caitlin Clark came out and said that some ref named Gerda gave Caitlin Clark a tech for clapping. I think this deserves three technicals. Alyssa Thomas, something something needs to be done. I need more people speaking out about this. This is not okay. That is the story. This is not just happening online.
Fans have been showing up and making themselves heard outside arenas, in comment sections with millions of replies, across every platform this story has touched. People are not watching quietly and moving on. They are protesting the league’s decision because they believe one game is an insult to what happened on that court, and they are not wrong to feel that way. When the public makes this much noise, when this many people across this many demographics are this consistently angry, it is not a moment to be managed with a brief press release. The WNBA is looking at a credibility problem, and the fans are the ones holding up the mirror. The interesting thing about this particular wave of outrage is who is part of it. It is not just Clark’s core fan base. Longtime WNBA fans who have watched this league for years are frustrated.
Casual sports fans who started following women’s basketball specifically because of Clark are frustrated. Sports journalists at major outlets are frustrated. Even people who are not Clark supporters are looking at a one-game suspension for a fist to the throat and saying that the math does not add up. When a decision manages to upset that wide a coalition of people, the league needs to understand that the problem is not the messengers. The WNBA is playing a dangerous game with Caitlin Clark. She goes down to the floor, Alyssa Thomas’s forearm and fist end up right across her throat and neck, and somehow nothing. No technical, no flagrant, not even a review. I’m sorry, but if this happened to Steph Curry, LeBron, or Luka, the refs are not just standing there like, “Anyway, Mercury ball. ” That’s the problem.
The WNBA wants Caitlin Clark’s ratings, her sold-out arenas, her jersey sales, her headlines, but when she’s taking contact to the neck, now suddenly it’s physical basketball? No. Physical is fighting through screens. Physical is taking a charge. Physical is not someone’s arm across your throat while you’re on the floor. And I’m not saying Caitlin needs special treatment. I’m saying she needs the same protection any franchise-level star would get in any other league. The problem is the decision. And now the question that nobody wants to say out loud is being said out loud. Should Caitlin Clark just leave? Not forever. Not in a dramatic burned bridges way. But the conversation is happening and it is serious. Clark has other options. She has leverage that no women’s basketball player in history has ever had. The arenas fill because of her. The television ratings move because of her.
The sponsorship world revolves around her right now. She does not have to absorb fists to the throat and one-game suspensions and deleted mocking posts from the organizations of the players who put her on the floor. She does not have to keep proving her toughness as a substitute for the league’s accountability. But here is the thing about Caitlin Clark. She is not the kind of person who walks away from a fight. She kept running the offense with her neck freshly hit and the world watching. She is not built to leave anything unfinished. And honestly, and this is a hard thing to say, if Clark leaves, the WNBA feels that immediately in ways they will not be able to talk their way out of. The league is carrying her more than she is carrying the league right now.
Every empty seat that fills because of her, every television deal that gets done in her shadow, every conversation about women’s basketball that exists right now, it is hers. And the league continues to repay that with one-game suspensions and missed calls and social media posts that mock her while she is still getting up off the floor. The WNBA needs to understand something with complete clarity. Look, if you keep this stuff, there won’t be no WNBA. Wow. I’m just saying. that’s the non-overreaction. Yo, if Caitlin Clark said, “You know what, man? I’m done, y’all. I’mma take my rich, successful self somewhere else. ” It’ll be a wrap. What would they do? What would they do? If Caitlin Clark say, “You know what? Today, I’m done with the WNBA. ” Where would the WNBA be? It’d be over.
Fan, you know you know how it goes when she don’t play. Attendance drops, viewership drops, money going drop. All I’m saying is when Michael Jordan was the man, the NBA made sure, all right, hey, oh, we can’t be doing the Pistons, y’all can’t be doing that to him no more. Give me another star, LeBron. Right? They made this whole big thing about him going to different teams, all that. Oh, hey, oh, it’s the king. Let’s put that underneath the rug. So, when you got a star player like that, I I go even better. Quarterbacks in the NFL. They hurt Tom Brady’s knee. Oh, for now on, yo, no more you can’t tackle quarterbacks by their knees. That’s dead. Bro, if you don’t take care of the young goat, what the hell’s going to happen to the WNBA?
You do not get to keep building on the foundation Caitlin Clark is providing while also failing to protect the person laying it. You do not get to count her ratings while ignoring her safety. You do not get to grow this league on her back and then hand out one-game suspensions when someone puts their fist into her throat. The fans are watching everything. They are documenting everything. They are not forgetting a single play, and they are getting louder every single game. The league has a window to get this right, to show players, fans, and the watching world that what happened to Clark on that floor will not be tolerated and will not be repeated. That window is not going to stay open forever. And right now, they are standing at it doing almost nothing.
