During Sunday afternoon’s game against the Seattle Storm, Indiana Fever rookie sensation Caitlin Clark was called for quite a controversial technical foul, and she was not too pleased with the referees after the game.
During the third quarter, Caitlin Clark slapped the padding underneath the basket in frustration, resulting in a technical foul from the referees.
In her postgame press conference, she expressed her displeasure with the call.
“I got a technical for basically being mad at myself because I missed a 3, and then I went and hit the backboard, and he told me it was disrespectful to the game of basketball,” Clark said postgame. “It reminded me of the technical I got in college, where I said ‘damn it,’ where it’s like a personal frustration. Had nothing to do with my team, had nothing to do with the reffing, had nothing to do with the other team. It’s just because I’m a competitor.”
They gave Caitlin Clark a tech for this?? pic.twitter.com/MHtsNuDpAm
— WNBA Rookie Watch (@WNBARookieWatch) August 18, 2024
But it seems like something good came from the technical foul as Clark indicated that the call actually helped motivate her to play harder the rest of the game.
“But I think he fired me up to continue to play a lot harder. I thought we got a lot better after that. I want to thank him for that. But overall, I thought once we got to that media timeout around five minutes in the third quarter, I thought we all kind of took a breath. It was all chaos there for two and a half minutes,” Clark said.
Clark did admit that she could do a better job of managing her emotions during games, though.
“I think I could have done a better job of regaining my cool but that’s like the fire and passion that just gets me going, its just finding a way to channel that, use that, and I think I did a real good job of that at the end of the third quarter, start of the fourth quarter.”
[The Spun]
