Taking on Wnba

Floor Speech

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Ms. CRAIG. Mr. Speaker, soon, the Minnesota Lynx will play the New York Liberty at home in Minneapolis.

As some Minnesotans may remember, I made a friendly wager with a New York Member of Congress last year at the beginning of the Minnesota Lynx-New York Liberty WNBA final series. That bet included that I would don a Liberty jersey and give a speech congratulating them from here on the House floor if they won the series. I would have, but I won't. Why won't I? Because the truth is that Minnesota didn't lose game five.

I was there in New York. The Liberty didn't win. The WNBA gave it to them.

Let's stop pretending that what happened in game five of the WNBA finals was just a bad call. It wasn't.

The Minnesota Lynx clawed their way through the playoffs. They defied the odds. They outworked every team and every narrative. In the final seconds of a championship game, on the biggest stage, they didn't get outplayed. They got erased.

Even from the House floor, right here in the Chamber, I can hear the New York fans protesting, but I know them well enough from Madison Square Garden that night to know that if this had happened to them, their outrage would be the same with much more colorful language.

A phantom foul, five seconds left, Alanna Smith playing legal defense on Breanna Stewart, who, let's be honest, is the league's marketing golden girl. The contact? It was embellished, marginal at worst, but the whistle blew. The game and the title were handed to New York on a silver platter.

When the Lynx challenged the call, the officials reviewed themselves. The same people who made the call decided to stand by it.

That is not accountability. That is the system protecting itself. That is the fix being called in.

Meanwhile, Napheesa Collier, the heart of the Lynx, an All-Star, a force in the paint, didn't shoot a single free throw the entire game. Now, tell me, how does a player so dominant in the lane never draw contact? Because she was erased from the whistle.

Let me just say it out loud right here from the House Chamber: The WNBA wanted the Liberty to win--a big market team, superstar faces, a tidy storyline for the league office and the league commissioner, who literally wore the New York skyline on her dress that night.

Minnesota? We were the wrong script--too gritty, too real, too inconvenient.

The league talks about fairness. The league talks about lifting women up. Pay them what they deserve if you want to lift women up in the WNBA.

They talk about growing the game with integrity, but when the stakes were high, the WNBA didn't protect the game. They manipulated it. They chose a winner.

Here is the truth: Minnesota didn't lose game five. The WNBA took it from them, and I will be damned if I ever put on a New York Liberty jersey.

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