Britney Griner Plans To Stand For National Anthem After Months In Russian Cage

Brittney Griner will stand for the national anthem this season after spending nearly 10 months locked in a Russian cage.

Griner -- an advocate of "speaking out, standing up, sitting in, taking a knee" -- had a sudden change of heart, claims her agent in a TIMES op-ed.

The article says Griner views the anthem differently since Joe Biden exchanged a Russian arms dealer, named Viktor Bout, for her return to the United States.

"Hearing the national anthem, it definitely hit different ," says Griner.

"'It's like when you go for the Olympics, you're sitting there, about to get gold put on your neck, the flags are going up ... being here today... it means a lot.'"

Brittney Griner will stand for the anthem Friday night in her WNBA return against the Sparks.

It only took Biden freeing "The Merchant of Death," as they call Bout, to bring Griner home for her to appreciate the country.

Talk about a fleece of a trade.

TOPSHOT - US WNBA basketball superstar Brittney Griner sits inside a defendants' cage during a hearing at the Khimki Court in the town of Khimki outside Moscow on July 15, 2022. - Griner, a two-time Olympic gold medallist and WNBA champion, was detained at Moscow airport in February on charges of carrying in her luggage vape cartridges with cannabis oil, which could carry a 10-year prison sentence. (Photo by NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA / AFP) (Photo by NATALIA KOLESNIKOVA/AFP via Getty Images)

What's more, a now-scrubbed NBC News report claimed Biden chose to bring back Griner over former U.S. Marine Paul Whelan, that the Kremlin offered one or the other up for Bout.

Nonetheless, Whelan remains in his cage while the sports world prepares to honor Griner's return to the WNBA.

It would seem America has been quite good to the privileged woman who rails against the fiber of the nation.

Griner, like most athletes, never had a valid reason to take a knee. She saw an opportunity.

She thought a feigning outage over so-called injustices would behoove her. In a way, she was correct. She emerged as the face of the WNBA despite serially abusing her wife.

The press calls her an icon. The New York Times deemed her a trailblazer, recently publishing a headline praising her for "changing" the perception of the WNBA.

In the end, bringing pot to Moscow, spending months in a cage, and being the reason for the freeing of a Russian terrorist have changed Brittney Griner's ways.

She plans to no longer hate the country that saved her.