The Indiana Fever’s first matchup of the season against the Phoenix Mercury was supposed to be competitive basketball. But it turned into a series of technical fouls, physical sequences, and heated exchanges. More than anything, however, another moment from Monday’s fourth-quarter quarrel is polarizing the internet in a different, funnier direction.

Sophie Cunningham kept pointing her finger toward DeWanna Bonner while giving a poker face. After she had managed to give everyone some laughs amid the tense situation, Cunningham finally revealed what it meant.

“She (Caitlin Clark) gets fouled, but (DeWanna Bonner) is the one that did (elbows the air) something extra,” she said in the latest episode of her podcast Show Me Something. “And then Caitlin got the tech, so I walked out there, and I was literally talking to the ref. I was like, ‘Now Caitlin got one, but why didn’t she get one?’ Because if Caitlin’s gonna get one, then she should’ve got one. It shouldn’t have been one or the other.

“I was just kind of pointing, and she’s like, ‘Don’t you point at me.’ I was like, ‘Oh, shouldn’t have said that,’ and I didn’t say a word (points at her screen like she did on Bonner).”

It won’t be wrong to say that Cunningham is one of the more mischievous players on the Indiana roster. And if she finds out that someone doesn’t like something she is doing, well, there’s no end to it. But it also comes from a deeper place.

Ever since she saw the way veterans in the league treated Clark, she has spoken against it. And I’m talking 2024 when Cunningham was still in Phoenix. As she entered Indiana in 2025, things escalated quickly. She was always the one to protect her teammates and side with them, but Cunningham turned into an enforcer in the Fever. Who can forget her takedown foul on Jacy Sheldon after the then-Connecticut Sun player, along with Marina Mabrey, fouled on Clark? Monday night was no different.

“That is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done. I’m telling you, everyone’s like, ‘That is so dumb.’ I think it’s dumb, but it was pissing her off, and I couldn’t help myself. I could not. She was losing her s—, and all I was doing was literally pointing.”

Interestingly, as Myisha Hines-Allen and Cunningham continued to quarrel with Alyssa Thomas and Bonner, respectively, Clark had already sidelined herself and was watching the tension grow from outside the lines.

The whole drama started with less than eight minutes left in their game, when Clark and Bonner got tangled battling for position on the other side of the court during a Phoenix possession, and the refs called a personal foul on Clark.

Cameras caught both players exchanging words as the energy inside the arena completely flipped, while Alyssa Thomas rushed over to defend her fiancée. But before the Mercury forward could stop the two, Fever’s Myisha Hines-Allen also came into play and said something to Thomas. That caused both of them to secure a double technical foul.

While this was going on, Clark was hyping up the crowd to get even louder and clapped in front of Hines-Allen to get her going before she learned about her technical foul call on herself.

“WHAT THE F*** DID I DO?,” she asked the referees, only to learn that it was for “clapping and instigating.”

It was Clark’s fifth tech of the season. She is now three removed from getting her first suspension of the season. So, Sophie Cunningham stepped in and started pointing her finger toward Bonner, which just frustrated the 38-year-old even more.

This incident reached a point that security had to be brought in from both teams to keep the players separated as the refs ended up assessing tech’s to Sophie Cunnigham and Bonner as well. Still, after the game, Cunningham made it clear that she doesn’t view this confrontation as anything out of the ordinary.

“In games, in professional sports, sometimes things get chippy, and that’s okay,” she said in the post-game interview back then. “It’s okay for women to stand their ground a little bit and to have some extracurricular points at times because you have to hold your ground. But we’re not worried about that.

“We need to focus on winning the ball game. We need to focus on what we can do better defensively, moving forward on Wednesday.”

The bad blood between the two sides has been simmering ever since DeWanna Bonner’s brief and controversial stint with the Fever during the early 2025 season. And after what happened on Wednesday night, with Thomas committing a Flagrant 2 foul on Clark and it not being called, things have only worsened. But for Cunningham, it was an even more personal something.

After Bonner left Indy, she did not say goodbye to any of her teammates, something that didn’t sit right with Cunningham after the entire team continued to support her.

So by the time the two teams met this week, there was already plenty of history between them, and what happened in the game just became the latest chapter of an ongoing rivalry.