The August 8 matchup between the Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky was supposed to be just another regular-season game with the playoffs right around the corner. When DiJonai Carrington was ejected from the match after she committed a hard foul on Sophie Cunningham and made a controversial social media post from the locker room, it quickly became another major point of discourse this season.
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And now, four days later, five-time WNBA All-Star Angel McCoughtry and Ros Gold-Onwude have joined the conversation. While Gold-Onwude pointed out the Sky forward had been “unprofessional” in her behavior, her co-host McCoughtry questioned the very motivation behind everything Carrington did.
“Is this a way to get attention? Because in the WNBA (Kelsey Mitchell), who has 16 straight 20-point games, does not have a million followers,” McCoughtry said on the August 12 episode of Court Vision.
“It seems like the way to get the attention and get the followers so you can get more money outside the WNBA is to create some negative, messy drama. That’s how these girls are getting millions of followers these days. And it’s so backwards, and it’s so wrong.”
DiJonai Carrington has been at the center of massive backlash after what she did and what she said. But the 28-year-old has maintained that the foul “was never intentional” and that her social media post “never once claimed that the assessment of the foul” was the reason behind it.
However, Cunningham had already suggested that Carrington was simply looking for attention.
“She has no reason to be doing any of that,” Cunningham said after the game. “Like, I don’t even know her. She wasn’t even on the team when all that was going on. But I do think when people play the Fever, we’re nationally televised, there’s a lot of eyes on us. People just want attention. And that’s her just trying to get attention.”
So while Cunningham and McCoughtry both pointed toward attention as a possible reason behind DiJonai Carrington’s actions, Gold-Onwude had a different take on the situation.
“I think the behavior in the locker room was unprofessional,” the former basketball player-turned-journalist said, while also adding that Carrington’s actions might not have been intentional when she committed the hard foul against Sophie.
Now, what exactly her post was about will remain a mystery until Carrington herself reveals it. However, after the whole mess, the Sky guard did see a noticeable jump in her social media following.
According to Social Blade, her Instagram account gained approximately 42,000 net new followers over the last 14 days, with 13,633 of them coming since August 8. Meanwhile, on TikTok, DiJonai Carrington gained 11,900 new followers since the controversy.
Although Social Blade data shows that she does get a weekly average of 2,700 new followers on Instagram and 1,7000 on TikTok, she gained more than 5,700 and over 3,300 on Tuesday.
Whether that jump was simply a byproduct of the controversy or the kind of attention McCoughtry was referring to, it’s clear that the incident has brought DiJonai Carrington plenty of eyes beyond the basketball court.