Brittney Griner will miss a Phoenix Mercury road trip “to focus on her mental health,” the organisation stated on Saturday. The WNBA star will miss at least two games this week as her team travels to Chicago and Indiana, while the Mercury stated it is still finalising “a timeline for her return” to the court.
“Mercury centre Brittney Griner will miss the team’s upcoming two-game road trip to Chicago and Indiana (July 30-August 1) in order to focus on her mental health.” The Mercury team “fully supports Brittney and we will continue to collaborate on a timeline for her return,” the club said on social media Saturday afternoon.
Griner, an Olympic gold medalist and veteran WNBA player, returned to the league earlier this year after being freed from Russian detention. The elite athlete had been held in Russian prisons for about ten months on drug accusations before being released last December in a high-profile prisoner exchange for an arms dealer previously imprisoned in the United States.
Griner re-signed with the Phoenix Mercury, the team she had played for years before to her arrest, in the months after her return home. In May, she made her first official game-time debut for the Mercury against the Los Angeles Sparks. Griner participated in her first All-Star game since her comeback about a month later.
“It meant everything to me,” Griner told the fans after the All-Star game, according to CNN. “I honestly didn’t expect to be here today, but everyone was writing notes, sending love, and posting. To this day, I can see everything that everyone did. It meant a lot to me since it gave me hope and made me not want to give up for anything, therefore it was this league that helped me.”
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