Brittney Griner Expresses Hope for Her Basketball Future, Concern for Americans Still Held Overseas

Griner thanked fans and prominent figures who worked for her release and said she was excited to get back on the basketball court, speaking hopefully of regaining her status as one of the game’s best players when the season begins next month while offering few specifics of her imprisonment.

“You’re going to be faced with adversities throughout your life,” Griner said. “This was a pretty big one.” She said a life of top-level athletics—tough practices and workouts—helped prepare her for the experience. “You find a way to just grind it out. Just put your head down and just keep moving forward.”

The event—attended by reporters, but also by the governor of Arizona and some of the negotiators for her release—saw the usual question-and-answer format interrupted at times by tears and applause. Team officials had said ahead of the media availability that she would not address “her time in Russia” there. Griner has signed a deal to publish a book in the spring of 2024 about her detention, trial and imprisonment.

Asked about the March 29 detention of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich while he was on a reporting trip in the city of Yekaterinburg, Griner didn’t say the imprisoned journalist’s name but offered general words of support. “I would say to everyone that is wrongfully detained right now across the world, stay strong, keep fighting, don’t give up,” Griner said. “Just keep waking up.” Gershkovich is being held on an allegation of espionage that the Journal and the U.S. government vehemently deny.

“If I could have went in and got them out or any of that, of course, I would have,” Griner said when asked another time about Gershkovich and Paul Whelan, the American held in Russia since late 2018, later in the press conference. Like Griner before her release, Whelan and Gershkovich have been designated wrongfully detained by the U.S. government.

Griner conducting a 2023 preseason press conference was hard to imagine this time last year, when she was sitting in pretrial detention outside of Moscow, reported by prison monitors to be reading Dostoevsky and sleeping in a bed too small for her 6-foot-9 frame. 

She had been detained in February 2022 after landing in Moscow with less than a gram of hashish oil that she later said had been prescribed to her in Arizona and packed by mistake as she rushed back to play for the Russian team UMMC Ekaterinburg as she had done for many previous offseasons. 

She faced a long journey through the Russian legal system, almost certain conviction and daunting prospects of being quickly returned through a prisoner exchange amid the worst U.S.-Russia relations since the Cold War following the invasion of Ukraine. 

“I’m never going overseas to play again, unless I’m representing my country at the Olympics,” Griner said Thursday. She emphasized that WNBA players often play in international pro leagues out of necessity, to earn income beyond what a WNBA salary pays. “With as many people in here right now covering this, I hope you continue to cover our league, bring exposure to us,” Griner said. “I hope a lot of these companies start to invest in our craft.”

A swift return to professional basketball for Griner might even have seemed unlikely even in December, when the 32-year-old was handed over on an airport tarmac in Abu Dhabi for a Russian businessman convicted of arms trafficking and flown back to the U.S. to recuperate on a military base. 

At the time of Griner’s return to the U.S., Mercury staff and mental health professionals agreed that any potential comeback for Griner would unfold within circumstances unprecedented in the history of American professional sports. “It’s 100% a matter of her making that decision for herself,” Vince Kozar, the team’s president, said in December of when, or if, Griner would return to the floor. “There’s no timetable, there’s no rush.”

Still, there was a sense of optimism that Griner’s love for the game wouldn’t keep her away for long. Vanessa Nygaard, the Mercury head coach, acknowledged keeping a file of plays on her iPhone “to run when BG returns.” 

Many of the American citizens who have returned to the U.S. after lengthy detentions overseas have kept a low profile in the months and even years that follow. But Griner’s case involved two unfamiliar variables: her celebrity and the schedule of an approaching season.

Within days of her return, her agent had said she had been working out on the military base, and even dunked a basketball. Then Griner announced on social media that she planned to return to the WNBA.

Throughout her nine-year professional career, Griner has been a dominant force in women’s basketball. She has led the WNBA in scoring twice, and on two occasions has won the league’s Defensive Player of the Year award. She won a championship with the Mercury in 2014. In 2021, her last time on a WNBA floor, she helped the team again reach the Finals.

On Thursday, Griner described a daunting return to athletic condition, after long months without access to a basketball. “Coming back from basically doing nothing, not having any gym or anything to be at, getting back into it was hard,” Griner said. “It’s still a process. Just the little things, doing a plank.”

Griner and her wife, Cherelle, have pledged their ongoing support for other Americans held overseas, and Griner reiterated that support on Thursday in broad terms.

“I’m really fortunate to have this platform that I have,” Griner said. “Every chance that I get, if it’s wearing a shirt, saying their names, any interview that I have, you’ll see that theme throughout the season. That’s just bringing awareness to everybody that doesn’t have the platform and the followers and the exposure to everyone, like this right now.”

The exchange deal that freed Griner, in which she was traded for a Russian businessman convicted of arms dealing, Viktor Bout, was criticized by some in the U.S. because it didn’t include Whelan, among other reasons. 

On Thursday, Griner was set to unveil a mural outside of the home arena of the Phoenix Mercury in support of the Bring Our Families Home advocacy group, which had campaigned for Griner and which currently is pushing for the release of 14 Americans held overseas. Those detainees’ faces are featured on the Phoenix mural—as is Griner’s.

Griner was held in the women’s pretrial detention center near Moscow for approximately nine months after flying into the city’s Sheremetyevo airport on Feb. 17, 2022. She remained there for several months after her summer trial, conviction for drug smuggling and possession, and sentencing to serve nine years in a penal colony.

In early November, it was reported that she was being transferred to a colony 350 miles away in Mordovia. That news was accompanied by reports that she could be required to undertake harsh physical labor there and risk contracting infectious respiratory diseases. Even the process of transporting prisoners to penal colonies has been described by families of other detainees as difficult and dangerous, spanning days or even weeks. But Griner’s time in the colony was brief. She was freed Dec. 8. 

Write to Louise Radnofsky at [email protected] and Robert O’Connell at [email protected]