FIBA Flops And Fabricated Envy: Linda Cohn’s Baseless Attack On A’ja Wilson Exposes The Desperate Campaign To Camouflage Caitlin Clark’s Mediocrity [Op-Ed]

The FIBA Women’s Basketball World Cup traditionally offers WNBA players a rare, phenomenal stage to exhibit their mastery before a global audience, allowing elite athletes to bond with league peers away from domestic rivalries, whether they are playing for Team USA or repping their home countries. 

For American women’s basketball enthusiasts, this tournament was supposed to deliver an unfiltered dose of national pride, an opportunity to watch all our favorite players assemble, and a guarantee of good, competitive basketball. 

Instead, Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark’s presence on Team USA prompted the WNBA industrial complex and its media mouthpieces to carry on an unearned, relentless fixation on an overrated player, while all but ignoring the superior talent sharing the court with her. Commentators broadcasting from Berlin heaped unearned praise on Clark in games, and the narrative manipulation expanded back home in the United States.

Chief among these media sycophants is recently retired ESPN anchor Linda Cohn, who took to the airwaves to pollute coverage and used her voice and platform to launch a baseless critique against the record-setting four-time WNBA MVP A’ja Wilson for electing to bypass the World Cup, citing health reasons. 

Cohn openly questioned the motives of the league’s reigning superstar. “So is there any part of A’ja that didn’t want to spend the next couple of weeks watching the World Cup become the Caitlin Clark show?” Cohn asked her audience. “Could she be thinking, ‘I’m the four-time MVP. I’m the best player in the world. Why does everything have to be about Caitlin Clark?” 

Cohn’s groundless speculation reflects a racialized double bind familiar to Black women far outside of women’s basketball. In corporate and professional spaces, society routinely expects Black women to perform flawlessly at the highest level while simultaneously validation-stamping their white colleagues. Any boundary drawn, or any refusal to assume a subordinate posture, gets immediately weaponized by white onlookers who trot out unhealthy but predictable, tired tropes assuming Black women are jealous, hostile, or intimidated. 

Sociological evaluations of corporate spaces have consistently documented this phenomenon, proving that accusations of envy and anger are routinely manufactured to undermine Black leadership and achievement when white peers fail to perform on a level that commands center stage. This is textbook psychological projection, revealing that the insecurity belongs, in this case, to the media entourage pushing their great white hope. They know Clark has so far proven unable to rise to the very top of the WNBA leaderboards and earn the MVP honor on pure merit or output, so they need to cast the top performer as jealous, unpatriotic, and somehow undeserving. 

This desperate projection lands right before the media vote for MVP, timed to sully Wilson’s name before the first ballots are cast. The data from corporate research proves that Black women are significantly more ambitious and focused on their own trajectory than their white peers, completely detached from any manufactured rivalry from their white counterparts. Because white colleagues are used to getting the top prize without having to earn it, they conveniently recast a Black woman’s undeniable mastery as an act of aggression.

Wilson is dominating the league on pure merit, but a white media establishment accustomed to unearned entitlement views that absolute excellence as a threat. Cohn offered zero evidence that Wilson’s withdrawal had anything to do with Clark, because none exists. No reality exists where Wilson has a reason to be jealous of Clark. 

The motivation behind Cohn’s commentary is clear. With the MVP vote looming, painting Wilson as unpatriotic provides a convenient rationale to discount her historical brilliance and deny her a well-earned fifth MVP title that would further entrench her in the history books. A fifth MVP for Wilson is a statistical certainty. The gap between her and the rest of the league is too wide for anyone else to close.

This pattern of narrative manipulation becomes glaringly obvious when contrasting Wilson’s treatment with the gentle pass handed to Mitchell for skipping the FIBA World Cup entirely. Mitchell explicitly chose to bypass the national team camps to train independently in preparation for the rest of the WNBA season and post-season, yet the conservative fanbase and media establishment have not labeled her unpatriotic, jealous, or not wanting to be in Clark’s shadow.

Because Mitchell shares a backcourt with their golden goose, her absence instead receives grace, while an injured Wilson is painted as an unpatriotic villain. Proximity to the favorite buys protection, for as long as you’re not a threat. 

That protection hasn’t always been given to Mitchell. It vanished temporarily last month when her play overshadowed Clark and exposed her shortcomings in the MVP race. As the MVP conversation intensified and Mitchell earned a higher ranking in the race, the Indiana Fever, fans, and media voices immediately shifted tactics, frantically campaigning for Mitchell and Clark to be named co-MVPs. 

Because the ballot requires voters to rank their top five choices, a coordinated media push can manipulate the down-ballot point system and inflate Clark’s ranking through secondary and tertiary votes even though she sorely lacks first-place merit. 

This desperate attempt to shift the focus to secondary and tertiary points on the ballot highlights a larger truth. Wilson is so far ahead of the competition that Clark fanatics and biased media have to invent character flaws to justify why she shouldn’t be given the award she earned. 

In fact, when Wilson’s primary competition for the award last year came from Minnesota Lynx star Napheesa Collier, the conservative element of the fandom remained silent. They had no reason to manufacture outrage because Clark was sidelined with an injury for most of that season and was not a factor in the race. 

Now that their golden goose is back on the floor, the media establishment relies on a classic workplace trope often weaponized against Black leaders: the participation trophy demands that Black women shrink our excellence to give someone else a turn. This obscures the reality that in sports, sometimes great players, or teams, are locked out of top honors because, while great, they simply aren’t the best. 

When Wayne Gretzky captured a record nine Hart Trophies, including eight straight, it meant that all-time hockey legends like Mike Bossy and Marcel Dionne were locked out of receiving MVP honors. They were generational talents, but they shared an era with the greatest to ever do it. Nobody manufactured a media narrative to hand them a co-MVP title to spare their feelings. That is simply the cost of being great in the presence of the greatest, and it is a reality Clark’s fans and media entourage refuse to accept.

This protectionism of Clark sets up a scenario for their Great White Hope where outcomes get decided by everyone except her performance. If Team USA wins it all and she plays even reasonably well, those commentators will crown her the sole reason, completely ignoring the other talent and a national winning streak for Team USA that stretches back to 2006. If the squad falters, they’ll retroactively shift the blame back to Wilson instead of holding Clark accountable for her international stagnation. 

As Dr. Bernice King noted when calling out this increasingly toxic media landscape and demanding a retraction from Cohn, the campaign to manufacture narratives at the expense of legends is delusional and dangerous. 

Against Italy’s hard-nosed defense in their Sunday matchup, Clark was completely neutralized. She failed to score a single field goal during her extensive minutes on the court, discovering that international referees don’t hand out soft whistles to protect her just because she flops, is a media darling back home, and is playing above her weight class. Her solitary point in that game was made from the free-throw line, a lackluster showing that exposed the massive gulf between media hype and global competency. 

Cohn further illustrated a complete misreading of where the true star power and eyeballs landed when the domestic curation vanished in Berlin, when she opined, “Caitlin Clark walks into a building, and the attention follows her. Could A’ja simply not want to deal with that? Could there be some insecurity, dare I say?” 

With the tournament’s social media accounts refusing to acquiesce to centering her, Clark’s lack of charisma and star power off the court was laid bare. The true media darlings of Berlin have been Paige Bueckers and Angel Reese, whose viral interactions had their moniker “Paigel” trending among adoring fans around the globe. Their organic star power and magnetic energy prove the future of women’s basketball lies in their hands. They represent an elite new generation of athletes who deliver excellence on the court while possessing the natural charisma to command the global stage, and entirely on their own merit.

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