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THE unseemly feud between basketball greats Sheryl Swoopes and Nancy Lieberman has intensified.
The pair, who both cover the Dallas Wings, have clashed this year over the WNBA’s newest superstar Caitlin Clark.
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Since Swoopes came out with inaccurate statistics about Clark’s college career, the pair have been back and forth.
Lieberman appeared on Stephen A. Smith’s podcast to say she called Swoopes following those comments over Clarke’s scoring records.
Lieberman says Swoopes got upset with her about the call and then the pair had a falling out.
“Our relationship pretty much is not happening at this point,” Lieberman said.
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However, Swoopes now insists such a call never took place and instead claims it was her who texted Lieberman.
Swoopes addressed the issue in a Twitter Spaces.
“What I do know didn’t happen was a phone call from her,” Swoopes said.
“Nancy Lieberman decided she was going to be upset that I said it was going to be an adjustment period for Caitlin, Angel, all the rookies, but in particular Caitlin, and that I didn’t think she would come in the league and dominate right away.
“It’s my opinion. So she got upset that I said that.
“So she decided she was going to go to Twitter, which is what people do, she was going to go to Twitter and try to call me out.”
“Don’t say you called me to talk about that when you didn’t. You posted that on Twitter and then I responded to you. I texted you and said, ‘Nancy if you have something to say call me since we’re supposed to be, quote’, friends.’”
Swoopes also made a point of trying to clear up her absence from the booth for Sunday’s game between the Wings and Clark’s Indiana Fever, which many suggested might be deliberate.
“Let me clear up a couple of things,” Swoopes said.
“I was only contracted to do seven games for the Dallas Wings, so everyone thinks that I was replaced for doing the Indiana Fever game when the reality is last week I told a producer that I could not do the Indiana Fever game because of a prior commitment.
“But also, because there’s nothing that I can say that’s going to be right.
“As a commentator and analyst, I gotta be able to speak postiive, good things but I’ve also got to be able to critique because I do that to everybody.”
Meanwhile, NBA legend Charles Barkley has hit out at how a number of people involved with the WNBA have undermined the hype surrounding Clarke.
“These ladies, and I am a WNBA fan, they cannot have f****d this Caitlin Clark thing up any worse if they tried,” Barkley said on The Ringer’s “Bill Simmons Podcast”.
“If you got people in a room, a bunch of dudes in a room, we couldn’t have came up with a masterplan with what these women have done.
“This girl is incredible. What she did in college for women’s basketball, what she’s doing in the WNBA.
“The number of eyeballs she brought from the college to the pros and these women to have this petty jealousness, you say to yourself, ‘What is going on here?’”
