Former NBA center Enes Kanter Freedom has taken a shot at the sports columnist Candace Buckner of The Athletic recently in a magazine article arguing the Indiana Fever could move past guard Sophie Cunningham.
Cunningham will enter the 2027 WNBA season as an unrestricted free agent. Cunningham, who garnered national attention this week after a feature in ESPN, made comments about biological standards and transgender players in women’s sports.
In her recent column, Buckner had maintained that by making public comments off the floor, Cunningham had become a distraction in the media for the team and that Fever should refuse to re-sign her.
Freedom Accuses Media of Double Standard
Sharing his thoughts on Twitter X, Freedom denounced the push to get Cunningham kicked out as an assault on free speech in women’s athletics by Buckner’s blog post.
“An insult to the woman on the attack for defending women,”Freedom wrote. “All Sophie Cunningham did was call it for what it is & say that men with penises shouldn’t participate in women’s sports & she told the truth – how dare she?”
(Freedom also maintained that male athletes and coaches in the spotlight – like Colin Kaepernick, Stephen Curry, Steve Kerr, and LeBron James – regularly receive favorable coverage in the sports media when they utilize their platforms for political activism.)
“Now she’s exercising her First Amendment rights and she might be blackballed by the WNBA,” Freedom said. “That double standard is right there in the open.”
Current Debate Over Gender Norms for the WNBA
Freedom’s backing of Cunningham comes after his own tumultuous run-in with the league. The veteran Oklahoma City Thunder center previously made headlines for declaring his own admission to the 2027 WNBA draft – and attending a Chicago Sky-Indiana Fever game earlier this season.
On his trip to the Windy City, Freedom sported a “woman” shirt and ended up embroiled in a court-adjacent battle with Sky guard Natasha Cloud that remains unresolved with Wintrust Arena officials.
Freedom has routinely and vehemently reprimanded the WNBA leadership to implement clear, updated gender eligibility policies.
Cunningham has largely been absent from the noise in her public commentary, although she did speak in September about the publicity from outside Freedom’s protest. “I just like to stick to playing basketball and let ’em do what they do,” she said at the time.
