Sophie Cunningham discourse epitomizes basketball fans’ nostalgic hypocrisy

Sophie Cunningham captured a lot of attention this week when she shoved the Sun's Jacy Sheldon to the ground and instigated a brawl in the final minute of the Fever's game against the Sun Tuesday. Sheldon, her teammate Lindsay Allen, and Cunningham were all ejected from the game, and Sheldon and Cunningham were fined for their role in what went down. And that's all well and good — basketball is basketball is basketball — but the reactions some are having to what is just another day in the WNBA are pretty surprising.

As much as basketball fans (NBA and WNBA alike) love to harp on the good ole days of the 1980s and 1990s, which were about as physical as you can get, there's an awful lot of hand-wringing when a player actually plays that way — or at least there is when that player happens to be a woman.

🚨🚨🚨: Women play aggressive basketball, too

Cunningham's foul on Sheldon isn't the first time fans of the WNBA have been shocked to learn women play aggressively and hard this season (see also: Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese's on-court dispute in mid-May, and Tina Charles pulling Reese's hair this week). It's a little difficult to understand why this fact remains shocking, considering we all still live in a world in which Diana Taurasi very much walks among us, and DT only retired from basketball this year (did you guys ever actually see her play?).

You could almost come away with one of two conclusions, maybe three: people still can't believe women can play aggressive basketball, people are just pretending they enjoyed the NBA of the 1980s and 1990s, or... a very loud but small group of people on the internet are stirring the pot for engagement and not much else, and everyone else is eating it up without a single second of critical analysis. As always, it's entirely possible the truth is the scariest of all: a combination of all three.

The NBA of the 1980s and 90s was a very different world

While the concept of an enforcer didn't necessarily exist in the WNBA's infancy (the league's first season was in 1997), the NBA has had plenty of athletes step up and fill the shoes of Bob Brannum and Maurice Lucas. This was certainly true in the 1990s, when guys like Anthony Mason, Charles Oakley, and Bill Laimbeer ruled the floor.

Laimbeer is perhaps best remembered for the fearlessness with which he'd take down anyone, at any point, from the guy rocking the bench all game to Michael Jordan. The pair had a memorable exchange in 1988, and Laimbeer later said he couldn't even remember Jordan's punch during the Eastern Conference Semifinals that year because all he cared about was the fact that the Pistons won.

There were also athletes who were enforcer-esque, primarily because they were unafraid of taking a hard foul. One of the more enthralling of the bunch was Allen Iverson (who is hopefully still the first thing called to mind when you hear the initials AI) — and I don't see anyone complaining about his tactics.

Maybe the best thing we can all do is chill out and let the women play, even if that means they get a tooth knocked out or their hair pulled or shoved to the ground. It's a physical sport that sometimes produces physical results and complaining about it won't do anything bit start drama on the internet and detract from the always-excellent basketball being played on the floor.

In other words: calm down. It's just basketball.