Parity Dulls Spark Dominance
As she tried to explain her team’s-first round playoff loss to Sacramento, Lisa Leslie was asked how far the Sparks were from again being a championship team.
“I don’t think we’re that far away,” Leslie said. “I would say we fought hard. I can’t say we were lacking anything. We were the best team in the WNBA, and we can’t walk away from that, questioning ourselves, because we lost this series. We still feel we’re one of the best teams.”
One of the best.
The Sparks have had a tremendous five-year run, going 130-34. They have won five Western Conference regular-season championships, three Western Conference playoff championships, went to three consecutive WNBA finals and won two championships.
But their days of dominating the league are past.
The league is more competitive, thanks to dispersal drafts, which followed the dissolution of the Portland and Cleveland franchises, and the talent-rich 2004 college draft. The playoffs were considered wide open, and turned out to be so. Proof? The finalists from 2003, Los Angeles and defending-champion Detroit, are already gone.
Will the Sparks now go the way of Houston? The Comets won the first four WNBA championships, 1997 through 2000, but haven’t made it past the first round of the playoffs since. This year, the Comets had their first losing season (13-21), missing the playoffs.
The Sparks have the off-season to figure out how to avoid a similar fate.
“I think we ... have to work on being more consistent,” Co-Coach Karleen Thompson said. “That includes practice and games. It’s been a roller-coaster ride for ... us this year. At some point, you have to take responsibility and go out and fight. For some reason ... the fight wasn’t there.
“I did see character. In many ways, the team did come together and played against anything and everything. When DeLisha [Milton-Jones] went down, when [former coach Michael] Cooper stepped down, it showed its character. They have heart, but we did hit a wall.”
So where do they go?
The Sparks still have a great starting lineup, when intact. Leslie had a slow start but finished as the league’s defensive player of the year and is a leading candidate for MVP. Mwadi Mabika, Tamecka Dixon and Nikki Teasley work well as unit. And the Sparks were the league’s highest-scoring team, averaging 73.4 points.
But the loss of Milton-Jones to a knee injury was devastating. Not only is she the league’s premier defender, she is also a good rebounder and dependable scorer. She has vowed to come back stronger next year.
The bench was a mixed bag.
Among the rookies, Christi Thomas had a strong second half and showed promise as a center or power forward. Guard Doneeka Hodges was asked to back Teasley at the point and, with 16 assists and 17 turnovers in 24 games, that apparently is not her strength. She is going to play in Greece this off-season and should report to training camp next year prepared to challenge Dixon for the shooting-guard slot. Italian imports Laura Macchi and Raffaella Masciadri showed enough to be brought back.
The tough decisions probably involve veterans Teresa Weatherspoon and Tamika Whitmore, who rarely lived up to the expectations Spark officials had for them. There is no guarantee either will be around in 2005.
Thompson and Ryan Weisenberg operating as co-coaches after Cooper’s departure to the NBA worked for half a season but the situation is under review, with an eye toward a single head coach. General Manager Penny Toler has indicated she and team President Johnny Buss don’t expect to a decision until the end of the year. Whatever else happens, the Sparks have to determine if the playoff loss to the Monarchs was an aberration, in that Sacramento was the one team equipped to beat the Sparks, or if the Monarchs’ pressure defense was a blueprint for the rest of the league to use against Los Angeles. Leslie considered the first option the viable one.
“The Monarchs were the team that matched up against us the best,” she said. “They give us the hardest problems because of their three big guards and big front line.”
So now, the Sparks will see if those problems can be solved, or if they have just begun to multiply.