From the article:
Like Staley, Mulkey coaches in the Southeastern Conference. It’s a 14-hour drive from Baton Rouge to Iowa City. And still she was compelled to take a passively aggressive shot at Clark’s surging popularity and broadening respect.
In the very public forum of a pregame press conference, Mulkey surreptitiously submarined Clark with this comment: “We don’t have any players shooting 40 times a game, like you see around the country. That’s not us.”
There couldn’t have been anyone inside the sport, or adjacent to it, who failed to recognize the comment was aimed at Clark, even though it lacked any basis in fact. Clark leads the nation in scoring at 32.1 points per game. She has attempted 560 field goals in 25 games, an average of 22.4. That’s barely half of 40. That’s more shots than anyone else in the sport is taking, but she converts 47.3 percent.
Mulkey’s implication is Clark represents what George Costanza famously referred to in “Seinfeld” as a “chucker”: a player who shoots without regard to game situations, time and score, propriety and, most of all, teammates. In my neighborhood, we called such a player a “gunner”. Whatever they labeled such a player where Mulkey grew up in Louisiana, she honestly should know better than to place Clark anywhere near that pejorative.
