Next month will mark three years since Russian despot Vladimir Putin took Phoenix Mercury star Brittney Griner hostage and a week later launched the biggest land war in Europe since World War II.

It will also be three years since a chorus of analysts, sports writers and athletes blamed the WNBA and the women’s pay gap for Griner’s plight.

According to their logic, Griner was forced to moonlight in far-flung Russia in the off-season to supplement her paltry WNBA salary, thus making her easy prey for the Russian strongman.

She was now his captive and bargaining chip.

Griner herself wrote in “Coming Home,” her chronicle of that 10-month ordeal, that the “pay gap is why I was in Russia in the first place.”

Her Mercury teammate, Diana Taurasi, had once put it this way: “We had to go to a communist country to get paid like capitalists, which is so backward to everything that was in the history books in sixth grade.”

My, how times have changed.

And for the better.

Listen to Brittney Griner just this week talking about moonlighting — playing professional basketball in the WNBA off-season — to supplement her income.

“I (felt) like something was missing in my offseason, anyway. I was used........

© Arizona Republic