Enes Kanter Freedom. Image via: Joseph Weiser/ Getty Images
Alter said the club would only reconsider “if he’s able to prove to us he’s able to abide by our rules. He later posted on social media that he’d been “kicked out of a WNBA game for supporting WOMEN.” Two days later, Sky owner Michael Alter made it official: Freedom is no longer welcome at Wintrust Arena. That single line drew the hardest boundary of the whole saga: not a suspension, not a warning, but an outright ban from the building.
The former NBA center, who has said he now identifies as a woman for the purpose of entering the WNBA draft, was ejected from a Chicago Sky game on Sunday after a heated exchange with guard Natasha Cloud.
Freedom and fellow former NBA player Royce White have both declared for the WNBA draft on the same grounds, though a person familiar with the league’s thinking told the AP that neither is considered eligible. A few pushed back on the framing entirely, insisting “she wasn’t the one who started it” and demanding people “let her play. He credited Freedom’s history of standing up to the Turkish government but said stepping toward Cloud was “excessive,” adding that the WNBA players themselves “don’t deserve” to be caught in the middle of a fight that belongs with the league, not the roster.
The league itself had reportedly planned to let the incident pass without punishment, since Freedom never actually stepped onto the playing surface. Alter clearly saw it differently. The WNBA’s collective bargaining agreement restricts the league to women but stops short of defining gender identity or sex assigned at birth, which is exactly the loophole both men say they’re testing. Others leaned into mockery: “Now he can go back to begging the boys at the rec center to choose him for a pickup game. Stephen A. Smith weighed in with his usual mix of sympathy and scolding.