Red Panda Suffers Injury During WNBA Halftime Show, Exits in Wheelchair

The halftime performance during Tuesday's WNBA Commissioner's Cup title game between the Indiana Fever and Minnesota Lynx took an unfortunate turn.

Michael Voepel of ESPN reported performer Red Panda fell from her famous unicycle and suffered an injury before being taken off the court on a wheelchair.

Fever insider Scott Agness noted she was holding her left wrist after the fall:

After Indiana won the game, Caitlin Clark and other members of the Fever wished Red Panda the best:

NBA insider Jake Fischer profiled Rong Niu, who is better known as Red Panda, in 2019 and called her the NBA's "most popular intermission entertainment."

She is a regular halftime performer in the NBA, WNBA and college basketball games and is consistently met with enthusiasm in every arena. She balances dishes on her foot and then flips them into a stack above her head all while maintaining her position on a unicycle. 

Fischer noted her first performance for an NBA game came in 1993 when the Los Angeles Clippers needed a replacement. After she wowed the crowd there, she had more than 40 NBA outings during the 1994-95 campaign.

The rest was history, and she remains a mainstay at basketball courts across the country.

Tuesday's performance came during intermission of the WNBA Commissioner's Cup title game at Target Center in Minnesota. The game lost some of its star power when Clark was ruled out with injury, but it still featured headliners in Napheesa Collier and Aliyah Boston.

Red Panda was another headliner, although her performance did not go as planned.