Brittney Griner misses next two Phoenix Mercury games to focus on her mental health – seven months after release from Russian penal colony

Phoenix Mercury center Brittney Griner will miss an upcoming two-game road trip to focus on her mental health, the team said Saturday.

Griner will miss Sunday’s game against the Chicago Sky and Tuesday’s contest at the Indiana Fever.

Griner, 32, was detained for nearly 10 months in Russia in 2022. She returned to the Mercury this season and has been open about how the ordeal affected her mental health.

‘The Mercury fully support Brittney, and we will continue to work together on a timeline for her return,’ the team said on social media.

Griner was released last December in a deal with Russia that saw the United States send Viktor Bout – a weapons dealer nicknamed ‘The Merchant of Death’ – back to Russia. He was serving a 25-year sentence in a US prison.

Brittney Griner will miss the next two Phoenix Mercury games to focus on her mental health

Griner was arrested in Russia in February 2022 at an airport because she was carrying vape canisters with cannabis oil.

Her status as an openly gay black woman, locked up in a country where authorities have been hostile to the LBGTQ community, injected racial, gender and social dynamics into her legal saga and brought unprecedented attention to the population of wrongful detainees in Russia. 

Before her conviction, the U.S. State Department declared Griner to be ‘wrongfully detained’ – a charge that Russia sharply rejected.

Following Griner’s arrest at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in February, she pleaded guilty in July but still faced trial because admitting guilt in Russia’s judicial system does not automatically end a case.

She acknowledged in court that she possessed canisters with cannabis oil but said she had no criminal intent and she accidentally packed them. Her defense team presented written statements that she had been prescribed cannabis to treat pain.

Weeks before she was eventually released, Griner was moved to a Russian penal colony in Mordovia roughly 300 miles southeast of Moscow.

The notorious penal colony is known as a rat-infested sweatshop for prisoners, some of whom have lost fingers during long hours at their sewing machines. 

To deal with the rat population, the guards enlisted stray cats, which were later discarded into furnaces to keep their numbers down.

But Griner’s release was eventually secured in early December and she went straight back into the WNBA this year. 

Griner is averaging 18.2 points, 6.7 rebounds and has blocked 34 shots in 20 games this season for Phoenix (6-17). 

She was named to the All-Star team for the eighth time in her 10-season career.

The Mercury’s next home game is Thursday against the Atlanta Dream.