Whipped Cream Difficulties

But when it does, I can’t miss commenting on it.

Friday night, the Las Vegas Aces were scheduled to play a WNBA game against the Washington Mystics.

But things happened along the way. I can’t find specific details, but the general summary is that it took the Aces 26 hours to get from Las Vegas to Washington, D.C. They arrived around 3:45 PM on Friday. The game was scheduled to start at 8 PM Friday, so they’d been travelling all that time and had about four hours to rest and get ready for the game.

The team thought this was unacceptable. The Aces had already been in contact with the player’s union throughout the whole travel fiasco, trying to get the game delayed: but the WNBA schedule is so tight at the moment the league didn’t feel like they could delay.

So the Aces just refused to play.

“We just really felt like after a full day at the airport, a night of no sleep, no proper nutrition, we were really putting ourselves at risk to go play very high-level, competitive basketball,” Aces center Carolyn Swords said. “It was a very difficult decision because we love what we do. We love the opportunity to compete in front of WNBA fans no matter what city we’re in.”

The Aces felt like they could trust the league to make a decision. And the league decided today.

It was a forfeit.

There was little precedent for the decision because the WNBA has never before canceled a game. There have been only a handful of instances over the past few decades in major sports in which teams have had to forfeit.
Most of those occurred because of fan involvement, notably the Chicago White Sox’s infamous Disco Demolition Night in 1979, when the field was so damaged the second game of a doubleheader could not be played.

As far as I can tell, while there is a Wikipedia page on forfeits in sport, and a seperate one for baseball specifically, I can’t tell if any basketball game – NCAA, NBA, or WNBA – has been forfeited before now. (The NCAA has voided wins, but that’s different.)

The National Football League rulebook has a provision for forfeiture but has never used it (there was at least one alleged “forfeit” in the 1921 NFL season, but because league schedules were so fluid in the 1920s and it was never clear who was at fault for the game not being played, the league now considers it a cancellation, which was very common at the time). Former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle noted that he had never used the league’s forfeit provisions and would never change the result of a game after the fact, a stance that prevented the result of the Snowplow Game, a game that had been decided on an acknowledged but unpunished unfair act, from being forfeited. It was briefly discussed as a potential punishment during Spygate but never implemented.

The last forfeit I know of in NCAA football – or in any other sport before now – was the Grambling State-Jackson State game in 2013. I welcome correction if anybody has a more recent example.

Edited to add: Ooops. Missed that California University of Pennsylvania forfeited one in 2014 after five players were charged with assault.

(“Don’t WNBA teams fly charter?” I think that’s covered in one of the links, but the short answer is: no, the league ordinarily doesn’t allow charter flights in order to keep a level playing field, since some teams have more resources than others. The league did give special permission to the Aces to arrange a charter while all of this was going on, but the team wasn’t able to arrange one on short notice.)

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 7th, 2018 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Sports. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.