DiJonai Carrington and the Connecticut Sun earned a narrow victory over the Los Angeles Sparks on Tuesday night in front of a packed stadium in Boston.
But that game, the first WNBA game to be played at TD Garden, was limited to WNBA League Pass or WNBA live streaming outside of local markets. In fact, none of Tuesday night’s three WNBA games aired on national television.
On Tuesday morning, Carrington criticized the league for not promoting his historic game in Boston. In his opinion, they treated it like any other game.
Since we have to do our own promotion…
We are playing in the @tdgarden Tonight, tickets sold out, over 19,000. W’s first game here. Historic. It won’t be broadcast on TV, but you can watch it right here on Twitter. @WNBA— dιjonaι carrιngтon♛ (@DijonaiVictoria) August 20, 2024
“I feel like Connecticut, as a franchise, has historically been disrespected,” he said, via SB Nation’s Noa Dalzell. “So sometimes if you want something, you have to go out and do it yourself. So that’s what I did for us.”
“I think there could have been a lot more publicity or promotion from the top. Connecticut had announced that we were going to have this game probably almost a year ago… there was plenty of time to do what was necessary.”
DiJonai Carrington was asked about criticizing the WNBA for not promoting the game enough:
“The match should have been broadcast on national television. There should not be any kind of subscription required to watch such a historic match, in my opinion.” https://t.co/iff6dMBKna image.twitter.com/gA9A4zRTuI
— Noa Dalzell (@NoaDalzell) August 21, 2024
Despite what he considered a lack of hype, more than 19,000 fans packed TD Garden to watch the Suns’ 69-61 win over the Sparks on Tuesday night. Carrington scored a game-high 19 points and helped spark a 14-0 run in the final minutes to seal the victory.
“I guess my tweet worked,” Carrington said.
Carrington also criticized the WNBA for not making the game available on national television. Only 14 of the Sun’s regular-season games were scheduled for national television when the schedule was first released earlier this year. By comparison, the Indiana Fever, thanks in part to the rising popularity of rookie star Caitlin Clark, had all but four of its games on national television.
“The match should have been broadcast on national television,” Carrington said. “There should not be any kind of subscription required to watch such a historic match.”
Carrington is averaging 12.6 points and 5.1 rebounds per game this season, her fourth in the league. The win lifted the Sun to a 20-7 record on the season, which puts them in second place in the league standings just 3.5 games behind the New York Liberty. The Sparks, on the other hand, have now lost five straight and are tied for the worst record in the league at just 6-22.
While it may not have been a high-profile matchup on a national level, fans in Boston, a city that is certainly in a position to land its own franchise in the future, still showed up.
“It was a great atmosphere,” said Sun forward Alyssa Thomas, via The Boston Globe“Women’s basketball, I always say, is going in that direction. I’ve been in Connecticut for a long time and playing in front of a crowd like this gave us another level of energy tonight. It’s exciting to see how far basketball has come and to be in Connecticut for 11 years and have a great fan base there, but at the same time to see the opportunity of what it could be.”