Sheryl Swoopes was mysteriously absent from Sunday’s broadcast of the Indiana Fever’s win over the Dallas Wings, and sports commentator Stephen A. Smith thinks he knows why.
Swoopes is usually a broadcast commentator for the Dallas Wings, but when Caitlin Clark and the Indiana Fever came to her home court, fans found that Nancy Lieberman was at the mic instead of Swoopes.
Now, on the latest episode of his Stephen A. Smith Show, Smith is claiming that Swoopes was booted because she has been unfair and unprofessional in her comments about Clark.
“What incriminates, in my opinion – it’s just my opinion – but what incriminates somebody like Sheryl Swoopes even more who, by the way, was supposed to be calling the game with y’all yesterday, and she did not call the game,” Smith said.
“And no doubt it had something to do with the fact that, when Caitlin Clark had performed early in the week, she didn’t want to talk about it at all,” he continued, citing Clark’s 32 points and 12 assists during last week’s 100-81 Fever victory against the Chicago Sky.
Smith added that it seems clear to him that Swoopes’ bosses think her “personal feelings” are “infiltrating the proceedings and compromising your position as a professional.”
The sports talker added that it seems obvious that Swoopes dislikes Clark and that her personal feelings are ruining her professionalism.
“But I think in the case of Sheryl Swoopes, and I’m not going to belabor this point, but it’s important to be made that Sheryl Swoopes is a winner. She was great, and she’s a phenomenal basketball mind,” Smith explained.
“What she’s not realizing is that when she doesn’t state the obvious, it’s automatically going to be assumed that it’s something personal because we know you know the basketball game, the game of basketball too well to ignore the kind of things that she’s ignoring when it comes to Caitlin Clark,” he concluded.
It is hard to fault Smith for his points about Swoopes because the former WNBA star has been making untoward comments about Clark for two years, discounting her obvious lead status in the league and ignoring her stats while pumping up lesser players.
In January, for instance, despite the clear evidence that Clark is constantly fouled on the court and is an obvious target of physical assaults during games, Swoopes absurdly turned the tables and insisted that Clark is the “bully.”
Then, in a recent episode of her Queens of the Court podcast, Swoopes listed all the reasons the Fever is excelling this season and praised the team’s Aliyah Boston, Kelsey Mitchell, and Lexie Hull. But she utterly failed to mention Caitlyn Clark at all, even though she leads the team in most stats, Fox Sports noted.
Swoopes also received criticism for lying about Clark’s college career. She said that Clark played for five seasons in college, artificially boosted her stats, and took more than 40 shots in every game. But the truth is, Clark played for only four seasons and averaged 27.7 shots per game.
Swoopes later delivered a half-hearted apology and blamed COVID for confusing her about the college seasons.
Finally, in the face of accusations that she is a racist who hates Clark only because Clark is white, Swoopes broke out the age-old canard that “black people can’t be racists” by dint of being black.
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