Bluesky

There is an expression I have heard from young athletes: “getting Kapped.” To get “capped” is slang for being shot and killed. To get “Kapped” is to be blackballed from your sports league for being politically outspoken. The slang derives from San Francisco 49er quarterback Colin Kaepernick who took a knee during the national anthem in protest of racist police violence and subsequently lost his career. Among players, he has become more of a cautionary tale than an enduring inspiration. If he could get “Kapped,” then you could be next.

Enter Natasha Cloud. The free agent guard known across the WNBA universe as Tasha, averaged 10 points and five assists last year with the New York Liberty while also becoming a fan favorite for her charisma and rousing defensive play. She was broadly praised for her leadership on and off the court.

And yet, with the 2026 season about to begin, Cloud finds herself unsigned. Given Cloud’s skillset and championship pedigree, USA Today called her place in free-agent purgatory, “genuinely baffling.” But in the current athletic environment, it is perhaps not that baffling at all. Maybe the beloved Cloud is “getting Kapped.”

Cloud has always aspired to be more than an athlete and use her platform for social good. She has spoken out on a host of issues, but most notably in recent years she has advocated for a free Palestine. In the face of Israel’s genocidal war, the people of Gaza have had few allies in the US sports world quite like Cloud. In May 2024, Cloud told the ESPN site Andscape, “There’s a genocide happening. People are scared to use that word—it is what it is. It’s a genocide. It’s ethnic cleansing. It’s intentional. … We’re not paying attention.”

As Andscape breaks down, Cloud started speaking out for the Palestinian people on October 11 2023, just two days after Israel ordered a “total siege” of Gaza following the Hamas attacks on October 7. She then posted: “Being honest. I haven’t known what to say. And that makes me a hypocrite. Because I am constantly trying to encourage people to speak up for my communities. This situation is not simple in any sense. But what is simple is PEOPLE are not just ‘collateral damage.’”

But Cloud didn’t just talk it. She walked it, joining demonstrations in Washington, D.C., calling for a ceasefire and an end to the siege. She also joined the online group Athletes for a Ceasefire and has been arguably the most prominent active athlete willing to be vocal and take this stance.

Before October 2023, Cloud was already politically active. Her work was rooted in the Black Lives Matter movement against racist police violence. She even sat out the 2020 Covid bubble season following the police murder of George Floyd, saying, “I chose the path that was much greater than myself and much greater than basketball.” At one demonstration, she carried a sign that read, “If you are silent, I don’t fuck with you, period.”

Then, like many public figures inside and outside the sports world, Cloud began to see the similarities between the oppressed social position of Black people in the United States and that of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. And yet unlike most of them, Cloud chose to say something. “We understand the struggle,” Cloud said. “There are so many similarities in the Palestinian struggle and the African American struggle here in the United States. If we can’t see that and if we can’t care about other people, how do we expect people to fight for us when we’re saying Black Lives Matter, right?”

Cloud has also never been shy about asking her league and her teammates to look in the mirror on this question. She even critiqued the NBA’s selective humanity in speaking out for Israeli lives while saying nothing about the Palestinian genocide. She has also called out athletes—male and female, inside and outside the WNBA—for not raising their voices more about Palestine or much else since 2021. Cloud has said that while she understands that players lose endorsements or even their jobs for saying something, “We need collective voices to stand up and say what’s right. We know right and wrong. If your morals and values are not at the top of your list, your top priority, then, man, I don’t know what I can do for you.”

Now many are wondering openly across the WNBA world whether Cloud is “getting Kapped” for the crime of being the conscience of professional sports. One of the great misconceptions in the sports world is that the NBA, which oversees the WNBA, and its commissioner Adam Silver are somehow these secret lefties who encourage their players to be on the political front lines. That’s hogwash. Before 2021, Silver permitted a “PEP” approach aka “progressive except for Palestine.” The message was that players could speak out about racism and voting rights with support of the league but also needed to know that there was a thin, powder-blue line that one should not dare to cross. (Ask Dwight Howard about that.)

In the ensuing years, the political compass of the league has been “NEP” aka “nothing, especially Palestine.” Candid discussions about politics in the NBA are gone. Instead seemingly every player has their own podcast and social media strategy that all produce a great deal of sound and fury while saying nothing of note or political substance. This is what “player empowerment” looks like in 2026: a cacophony of branding. As genocide raged in Gaza, the league’s biggest stars—players who were outspoken on BLM issues—were instead cutting lucrative deals with companies connected to the Israeli security state. 

In this arid landscape, Cloud has stood tall: not just in terms of her solidarity with the Palestinian people but also on the rights of athletes to speak out and be more than robots that do product placements on Instagram. “The least that I can do with this God-given platform—in which I know He intended it to be much more than just going out here and winning games—is to be a servant for my community and others,” she told Andscape.

Cloud has carried the torch in the face of a monsoon of a backlash and that’s why the question demands to be asked: Is she paying the price for speaking her mind? Is she “getting Kapped?” Let’s see if she gets signed in the days and weeks to come. One thing is certain: Any kind of banishment, blackballing, or pariah status won’t change how adored she is among WNBA fans and it won’t change Cloud. “I’ll throw myself in the line of fire anytime,” she once said. “My goal is to protect other innocent people and innocent lives.”