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Following a brief stint with the team, former Phoenix Mercury interim head coach Nikki Blue filed a lawsuit against the team, according to the Associated Press.
Blue's representatives state that she is alleging unequal treatment based on race and gender, unequal pay based on race, and that her employment was terminated in retaliation for complaints about unequal treatment.
Some of those discrepancies involved the former interim coach's pay. When Mercury fired Vanessa Nygaard and named Blue as the interim, the latter received a salary lower than that of her previous counterpart.
Nygaard made $375,000, while Blue made $250,000. Not to mention, as Phoenix hired Nate Tibbetts to be the next head coach, he received a salary of roughly $1 million.
Furthermore, both Nygaard and Tibbetts are white, further justifying Blue's lawsuit.
However, the interim didn't have much to work with. An aging Diana Taurasi and Brittney Griner in her first season back in the WNBA didn't make matters easier.
As a result, she went 7-21 during her time as acting head coach. Despite players advocating for her to have the permanent role, the franchise went in another direction.
Nikki Blue isn't the first lawsuit the Mercury organization have had
As the Phoenix Suns and Mercury are intertwined, it's led to a plethora of investigations. Most notably, Mercury CEO Josh Bartelstein was under investigation for allegedly having an affair with former player Sophie Cunningham.
Despite those claims, they were nullified, and the case was never taken to court. Coincidentally, one of the lawyers spearheading Blue's lawsuit is Sheree Wright. The latter was involved in Bartelstein's investigation.
“This is the fifth lawsuit brought against the organization by Sheree Wright, an attorney who has been disciplined twice by the Supreme Court of Arizona for committing numerous violations of the rules of professional conduct — including making false and unsupported allegations of racial bias against a judge,” Suns and Mercury senior vice president of communications Stacey Mitch said in a statement.
“Like Ms. Wright's other cases, this case is completely meritless. Ms. Blue was interviewed and considered for the head coach position, but didn't get the position based on her performance as interim head coach, as well as her limited professional coaching experience.”
As mentioned above, Blue's only head coaching experience was in that interim role. Before that, she had been an assistant with Arizona State and Grand Canyon University for over a decade.
The case was filed on Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Arizona.
