The WNBA has all of our attention, but now I just want to look away. The league of powerful women — Caitlin Clark exploring the boundaries of the game like an abstract painter, Olivia Miles personifying the rebirth of slick, Breanna Stewart pulling out new tricks from her offensive arsenal, A’ja Wilson shapeshifting nightly into a GOAT — feels less like a sport and more like a societal powder keg.It has spiraled into a rinse-and-repeat drama.A Black player clotheslines a White player, and it’s time to flinch. An ejection ensues, and the banished player, unfortunately, finds her phone and straightaway posts on Threads, and we cringe. Then the predictable rants trend on social media apps and morning shows.The WNBA has proved it can hold our eyeballs ever since “the Caitlin Clark effect” introduced a new audience to the game and generated blockbuster ratings. However, with more and more moments like Saturday’s meltdown between the Indiana Fever and Chicago Sky, it’s becoming exasperating.And what is “it”?It’s every politician shilling for votes off the jet stream of Clark’s fame, every troll who couldn’t tell the difference between Chelsea Gray and Allisha Gray but suddenly has hot takes about the league. It’s the conversation, a trap, really, that hasn’t grown past Black versus White, conservative versus liberal, straight versus gay.More than any other sports fanbase, the new and broader audience that consumes the WNBA craves the simple and salacious. That nature to wallow in mud might never change as long as people rule this planet. But while there are enough factions clashing against the country’s most popular and prosperous women’s professional sports league, the players of the W — the ones who should be safeguarding their commodity — are falling into the trap. Sometimes, willingly.It’s Fever guard Sophie Cunningham choosing to weigh in on a divisive topic of transgender athletes in women’s sports, a grossly exaggerated “issue,” and opening the door for a flood of agitators to defile the discussion.It’s also Sky guard DiJonai Carrington, packing matches and carelessly tossing them onto the already incendiary discourse of race by posting “WHITE PRIVILEGE” after being ejected for her flagrant foul on Cunningham.It’s Phoenix Mercury forward Alyssa Thomas’s fist to Clark’s neck, Seattle Storm co-owner Celeste Keaton’s F-bomb directed at two teenage fans. It’s the piling on whenever anything like these events happen.