Drama in Phoenix tonight:
PHOENIX(AP) —New York’s Cappie Pondexter was ejected for smacking former teammate Penny Taylor in the face during the Liberty’s game against the Phoenix Mercury on Saturday night.
Pondexter, who won the WNBA title with the Mercury last season, struck Taylor as she drove to the basket for a layup. Taylor got up and looked as if she would retaliate, but players and officials got in between the two.
Pondexter was assessed a flagrant 2 foul and Taylor received a technical with 9:06 left in the third quarter.
Pondexter, who played her first three seasons in Phoenix and was the most valuable player of the 2007 WNBA Finals, was part of a three-team trade that sent her to New York and Chicagos Candice Dupree to Phoenix.
Sounds like some issues never got resolved when that trade went down.
Update: game photos of the fight. It looks like though Taylor was fouled, it was Taurasi who was ready to fight. The older and more mature Taj McWilliams-Franklin was working damned hard to stop it.
What a mess.
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5 comments:
sass, the photos are misleading. i hope you can find the actual footage to watch.
here's what it looked like from my perspective. everything happened so fast and without an overview shot (only 2 angles), it was kinda hard to piece together the actual sequence. but one thing is sure, cappie was the catalyst for it all.
it was clearly cappie who put a very hard swinging foul to pt's neck as she was going for a lay-up. cappie was behind and no chance of getting the ball. penny went down, cappie walked away. penny gets off the deck and starts towards cappie.
dee goes to get over to penny and has to go through a picket line of libs. cappie must've thought dee was coming after her (gee, i wonder why) cuz cappie pushed dee. dee was like wtf? but did nothing but stare in what i could only describe as wonderment as to wth was up with cappie.
penny sees what's going and tries to get to dee. a couple libs were already pulling dee back as dee was being pulled back from cappie, cappie shoots out a fist at dee. that's when that picture was snapped and why it looks like dee was the one wanting to fight. she was totally pissed, but did maintain. or was held back till she could be calmed down.
thankfully, cappie didn't connect cuz i doubt any number of people would've been able to hold her back.
cappie got a flagrant 2 and automatic ejection; penny got a t for charging at cappie.
and pp was nowhere to be seen. LOL
i will say that the foul was very reminiscent of the flagrant 1 dee put on svet a few games ago.
the libs were totally in the game up to that point, but things quickly went south for them.
scullyfu
Thanks for that, Scully. Wish I could have seen it for myself. I'll say the same thing I said last night: what underlying, unresolved issued provoked all that? All I remember is a smiling championship team last year. Jeez.
sass, you can see for yourself what transpired. go here (yes, bite the bullet, its on rebkell):
http://boards.rebkell.net/viewtopic.php?t=58668&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=210
you can see some really good screen shots that show what happened. and you can see why dee was so pissed...a forearm from cappie to dee's face, then another shot at her as she was going backward.
also, the game is now up and the 'action' starts at about 1 hour, 7 minutes.
scullyfu
I tried to find the game so I could see the video myself, but unable to locate it. If anyone has a link, holla.
here's the link to the highlight film:
http://www.wnba.com/video/
here's the game:
http://www.wnba.com/games/live.jsp?gameid=1021000097
on the screen shots, scroll down to sportsfanswhine's post, about halfway down the page.
scullyfu
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