“It’s extremely hard to see what he’s going through,” said Jayson Tatum.
More than a hundred days have passed since the arrest of the WNBA player
The boston celtics used this Saturday their training and press conference in the NBA Finals to Demand the release and return to the US of Brittney Grinerwho has been detained in Russia for more than 100 days accused of carrying drugs in her luggage when she was going to take a plane.
With T-shirts with the slogan “We Are BG” (“We are BG”, by the initials of Griner), Jayson Tatum and company showed their support for the figure of the WNBA one day before the second game of the Finals against the Golden State Warriors (0-1 for the Celtics) is played at the Chase Center in San Francisco.
“It’s extremely hard see what he’s going through,” Tatum told the media.
“I know that everyone understands and I feel that and obviously we are all together in support and try to bring her back to her family,” he said.
For his part, Jaylen Brown explained that the idea for the jerseys came from the NBA Players Union (NBPA) and had his partner Grant Williams as the main coordinator.
But as a collective we wanted to come out and show our support for Brittney Griner. We feel that enough is enough,” he said in relation to the player’s prolonged detention in Russia.
#FreeBrittneyGriner ? https://t.co/NilQSP8giS pic.twitter.com/6tw5S3dwAL
— Boston Celtics (@celtics) June 4, 2022
Brown also showed supporter of using “the platform” of the NBA to draw attention to issues that concern them.
“We’re not here just to entertain. We also have a voice”assured.
This show of solidarity from the Celtics comes two days after the NBA commissioner, Adam Silver, also joined the efforts to get Griner back.
“For more than 100 days she has been illegally detained. We are working with the US government to release her as soon as possible,” he said of a pressure campaign in recent weeks that has brought the WNBA and the NBA together.
The keys to his arrest
Although her arrest was not made public until March 5, Griner was arrested at a Russian airport on February 17 and was accused of having cartridges with hashish oil in her luggage to vape
Griner was arrested for drug smuggling, He has been in pre-trial detention ever since. -at least until next June 18-, and could be sentenced to up to 10 years in prison.
In May it became known that Russia and the United States They negotiate the exchange of the player for the Russian arms dealer Víktor Butknown as the “merchant of death” and serving a sentence in an American prison.
The US Department of State “determined” that Griner is “unfairly detained” in Russia.
Griner, 31, is with Diana Taurasi the main reference of the Phoenix Mercurywith which he won the WNBA in 2014.
Regarded as one of the most dominant centers in the league, Griner has been elected seven times to the WNBA All-Star and also has two Olympic gold medals with the US team.
Like other American players, Griner took advantage of the months when there is no WNBA competition to play in Russia, where his salary at UMMC Ekaterinburg (more than a million dollars per season) is more than four times higher than the maximum that can be received by agreement in the WNBA (228,094 dollars as a cap for this course).