By: Iris Shen

Last Thursday, the Phoenix Mercury were set to play the Connecticut Sun at 7 pm, and Coach Vanessa Nygaard’s players were supposed to be on the court going through their normal pregame warm-up, but no one showed up. Instead, she and her coaching staff stood in the empty Mohegan Sun arena, puzzled and in disbelief.

The players were back in the locker room, eyes glued to the television screen as they watched their teammate Brittney Griner be convicted and sentenced on drug smuggling and possession charges earlier that day in a Russian court.

“It was like you’re waiting for a bomb to drop,” said Diamond DeShields, Mercury’s guard.

They watched with tear-filled eyes as Griner pleaded with a Russian court not to “end her life” for an “honest mistake.” Griner was sentenced to nine years in a Russian prison and fined 1 million rubles (about 16,000 dollars).

“And we’re still supposed to play this game,” Mercury guard Skylar Diggins-Smith said after the game. “Nobody even wanted to play today. How are we even supposed to approach the game and approach the court with a clear mind when the whole group is crying before the game?”

Griner has been detained in Russia since February 17 after customs officials said they found hashish oil, a cannabis derivative, in Griner’s belongings at an airport near Moscow when she was traveling to the country to play for a professional women’s basketball team called UMMC Yekaterinburg. Griner said, during her trial on drug charges, that the hashish oil, in a vape pen, had been packed by mistake. In May, the U.S. State Department said that it had determined that Griner was “wrongfully detained.”

The Mercury lost the game 77-64, with an 18-0 Sun run in the third and fourth. But for both sides, the numbers didn’t really matter anymore. “We’ll wake up tomorrow, and BG will still be in a Russian jail,” Coach Nygaard said. “It’s day 169 or something tomorrow, and the clock continues, and we just want her to come home.”

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