This is a great article, by one of the best and most respected sportswriters in the business. Sally Jenkins goes out of her way to dismiss the easy media caricatures of Mulkey. Here's the opening paragraph:

quote:
It’s hard to argue that someone who wears boa-feathered cuffs and spangles like smelted doubloons is mis-portrayed. And yet there Kim Mulkey is, her LSU team reconstituted as a serious contender, getting lingering hugs from the benched Angel Reese and looking so much smarter than her mockers and critics, who would have you think she’s an empty pile of garish laundry as opposed to the most rivetingly complex and finessing coach in women’s basketball.

She goes into the media frenzy over Angel Reese's time away from the team.

quote:
We might never know what was up with that war of wills between Mulkey and Reese, the Final Four’s most outstanding player, whom Mulkey benched for 4½ games over “locker room issues,” declining to elaborate. It was rough handling of a star who is said to command $1.7 million in NIL (name, image and likeness) money and has 2.6 million Instagram followers. But apparently Mulkey decided she better get Reese and the rest of her team right, right now. And she did.

Jenkins speculates that the attention Reese got last summer led to a certain sense of entitlement, and that might be the simple, logical reason for her time away from the team.

quote:
Perhaps the issue was as simple as this: Reese spent the summer doing magazine shoots and lucrative appearances, her reward for an MVP season. But as Mulkey said in this preseason, “You’re not entitled to that again unless you work.”

Jenkins also defends Mulkey regarding Brittany Griner and gives numerous examples of how she has helped players and former players over the years.

It's an honest and sympathetic portrait of Mulkey. What more would you want?!