New York Times Campaigns for the Indiana Fever to Part with Sophie Cunningham Because of Conservatives

Fair or not, there’s been a longstanding stereotype that liberals and leftists hate sports.

Between the proliferation of pathetic “participation trophy” culture and the way the left had a meltdown over the Washington “Redskins” moniker — which many Native Americans actually preferred to “Commanders” — you can see why all stereotypes begin with a kernel of truth.

But whatever doubts may have lingered that the left hates sports were virtually erased on Tuesday, when a New York Times opinion column for their sports site, The Athletic, published one of the more asinine reasons for wanting a team to cut ties with a player.

From @TheAthletic: If the Indiana Fever ever wants to go back to being a basketball team, Sophie Cunningham has to go, our columnist writes. “Cunningham is too combustible, her takes too turbulent to be paired with Caitlin Clark.” https://t.co/X3eXkxlgDh

— The New York Times (@nytimes) October 6, 2026

The thesis of this opinion piece from Candace Buckner is simple enough to grasp: The WNBA’s Indiana Fever should cut ties with key bench player Sophie Cunningham.

As an actual sports fan, I can, in fact, entertain this particular, initial thought.

Is Cunningham making too much money in a salary capped league for a bench player? Are her shooting splits getting worse as she enters the other side of 30? Is she routinely ignoring her coach and blowing up set plays to freelance?

Those would all be very legitimate reasons to want Cunningham cut from the Fever.

But — surprise, surprise — that’s not at all why Buckner wants Cunningham blacklisted from the WNBA.

After complaining that former NBA players Royce White and Enes Kanter Freedom declared for the WNBA, and dared to show up to WNBA games to highlight the absurdity of a man simply claiming he’s a woman, Buckner pinned the blame for these stunts on Cunningham for daring to take a stand for biological reality.

“They all showed up to be part of a circus, not to enjoy a WNBA game,” Buckner argued. “They attended solely to antagonize and amplify a nonexistent issue in this basketball league. All because of Sophie Cunningham. This was the season when the Fever and even the whole Caitlin Clark experience took a backseat to a bench player with big opinions.”

“So if the Fever ever want to go back to being a basketball team again and follow the lead of rivals openly clashing with the forces trying to hijack their league, then Cunningham has to go.”

Oh, brother. This might be a textbook definition of a strawman argument is.

Nobody said that gender identity was infecting professional women’s basketball. The claim was that it was infecting all of women’s sports at the amateur level. And given that males identifying as females have undoubtedly displaced actual female athletes at lower levels, that absurdity was what White and Freedom were taking a stand against. If an average male sprinter is suddenly allowed to rewrite the female record books, what in the world is an average NBA player going to do in the WNBA? The absurdity was the point.

But again, let me try and be fair. Let’s say, yes, White and Freedom were being performative dunces looking to get some attention. What in the world does that have to do with Cunningham’s stance on biological reality?

“Cunningham is too combustible, her takes too turbulent to be paired with Caitlin Clark,” Bucker wrote. “On the same team, it’s just too much. Clark, by her presence alone, already can’t get through a season without being thrown into gutter debates that pit White against Black; hate that appears even in the DMs of her own teammates.

“Cunningham, with only a few words, introduced new divisions.”

AH. There it is! This writer is mad that Cunningham wanting to discuss transgenderism has taken away from the incessant race-bashing that Cunningham’s teammate, Fever star Caitlin Clark, is subjected to both off and on the court. That makes sense!

(And yes, I’m being exceptionally uncharitable to what she wrote because she’s being rather uncharitable to Cunningham.)

Look, there are real basketball reasons for wanting a 30-year-old bench player averaging 8 points a game off a team. Maybe there’s a talented young rookie. Maybe her on-court skills are atrophying. Maybe she’s just a bad teammate.

But not affirming your LGBT dogma is not a reason for a professional athlete who has earned her place on the team to be kicked to the curb.

Most actual sports fans understand this because they also understand the virtue and value of merit.

This New York Times opinion columnist is proving that liberal sports fans apparently don’t.

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