Posted by Mechelle Voepel
INDIANAPOLIS -- As you can imagine, it was really tense and scary and stuff like that Monday as the Indiana and Phoenix players caught sight of each other at Conseco Fieldhouse. All this lingering hostility … especially since the incident in Sunday's game, in which Diana Taurasi head-butted Katie Douglas and got a technical …
Or was it Douglas intentionally getting in Taurasi's way and then dramatically falling over? Or was it completely inadvertent on both parts? Or was it not completely inadvertent? Or was it …
David Sherman/NBAE/Getty Images
Katie Douglas doesn't think Diana Taurasi ran into her on purpose in Game 3. So let's move on, shall we?
Obviously, we're joking around here. There was nothing frightening about Monday's practice/media sessions, especially since Freddy Fever wasn't there loudly clapping his large red "hands" that create a noise that makes ThunderStix sound whispery.
Nobody was mad at anybody. In fact, as Douglas left the court, she high-fived Taurasi, who was walking on.
"I really haven't had the chance to even see it," Douglas said of the incident with about five minutes left in Sunday's game. "I'm more focused on what I can do better, and what we can do better as a team.
"I haven't looked at it, and I'm not going to sit here and speculate. I just think it was one of those freakish things, and that I'm going to put it behind me."
Taurasi said that she did not deliberately try to hit Douglas, and for her part, Douglas believes it.
"I don't have any ill will, and I told her I don't think anything about it," Douglas said. "Going into Game 4, I'm not going to have any kind of concentration or focus on it."
However, fans have varying strong opinions on this incident and anything else that has gone on in these WNBA Finals. Everything from, "Taurasi does this all the time and usually gets away with it!" to "Douglas flopped!" to "Briann January threw her elbow out at Penny Taylor!" to "That was a total accident!" to "The officials are terrible!"
Wait, that last part generally is universal … in all sports.
When asked, Taylor said about the injury that forced her out of Game 2, "From my perspective, I was going up on the layup, and her elbow came out and into my mouth."
At least in talking to me, Taylor was that neutral about it. She didn't call it intentional or unintentional. Of course, January said it wasn't. And as Douglas stated both after Game 3 and again Monday, she didn't think the contact from Taurasi was intentional.
What you will find in talking to most WNBA players is that they feel the "extra-curricular" physical play that is part of basketball is generally not that big of a deal. And that players pretty much police themselves in that regard.
They also tell you that they would guess fans actually get more upset about such things than the players do. The fact that the players cross paths so much over the years between summer-league teams, college, the WNBA and overseas means that they really don't tend to see each other as "enemies" even when they're going head-to-head.
As one player put it, when something too rough does go on during a game, usually there's no time to think much about it because players have to focus on what's occurring at the moment. Players generally understand that things can happen in the emotion of competition, and not because anyone's intentionally trying to hurt someone else.
Then when the game's over, players typically don't hold on to anger over any incidents.
For fans, though … well, that's a whole other story.
Women's Basketball
