Mulkey’s COVID comments dangerous
After DiJonai Carrington was fouled — and she was fouled — in the closing seconds of a great women’s college basketball game, social media went wild.
… Look at the video! Look at that still photo! What more proof do you need, the Zapruder film? LeBron James, who never cried about a call in his life (insert sarcasm emoji), tweeted it was a foul. Even Swin Cash, our own Swintayla from McKeesport, said it was …
Well, IF it was a foul, Baylor got away with far more non-calls during the game. Hammering Paige Bueckers and all. You would have thought the NCAA let one of those old Pittsburgh Big East men’s teams play in the women’s national tournament. Brutes …
Yep, this entirely civilized, unbiased discussion was going to go on unfiltered and mostly anonymous. Mix in a few dollops of national hate for Geno Auriemma and UConn. Factor in the coverage from the mainstream media, and this had the makings of some all-time screeds. Nothing was going to top it.
That’s when Kim Mulkey, in Twitter parlance, went “Hold my mask.”
And no, this has nothing to do with Mulkey holding up her iPhone and saying she had both still photograph and video poof of one UConn player hitting Carrington in the face and another on the elbow.
shooter DiJonai Carrington in the final second.
“There’s going to be people who answer this question saying there was no foul,” Bird said. “There’s going to be people answering this question saying it was definitely a foul. My take on it? Everybody is talking about it, and that’s what matters. I turned on First Take this morning and they were debating it. You go on Twitter, everybody has an opinion. Having story lines and conversations surrounding women’s basketball, even if it’s a little controversial, even if it gets a little heated, that’s good for the growth of the game. So I’m excited to see that and, you know what, if there’s no call there’s no foul, right?”
Taurasi: “Obviously I have a little bit of a UConn bias. I love the way Baylor played. They played hard. Obviously when DiDi (Richards) got hurt it changed the whole complexion of the game. What Connecticut was able to do in that third quarter, going into the fourth, was pretty amazing. But was it a foul? … I mean, if I was the one shooting I’d be pretty mad right now.”
The national team has won six consecutive gold medals. The Tokyo Olympics were originally scheduled for last summer but pushed back a year due to the pandemic. Bird and Taurasi have won gold together in 2004 under Van Chancellor (Athens), in 2008 under Anne Donovan (Beijing) and in 2012 and 2016 under Auriemma (London, Rio de Janeiro).
“We’re talking about 20 years of USA Basketball, the pressure, the commitment, the time you put into it,” Taurasi said. “Anything can happen and you never know what path that will take you, but just having the opportunity to be here in camp and looking forward a little bit to Tokyo, and hopefully it happens, I think it’s going to be a culmination of a lot of things, all the hard work we’ve put in individually, collectively. Realistically speaking, if we get a chance to go to Tokyo, this is probably the last one.”
Taurasi is the WNBA’s all-time leading scorer and Bird leads the league in career assists.
“It’s hard to put into words what being a fivetime Olympian would mean,” Bird said. “For me and maybe for us, there wasn’t a WNBA growing up. This was the end all, be all, for what a women’s basketball player could do. It was, if you go to college you could go to the Final Four and then the Olympics. That was really it. To achieve it one time, it was like a dream come true. To have a chance to do it five times, it’s continually fulfilling that dream.”