Kathy Goodman: best-laid plans

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Back at the end of June, when I agreed to write a blog after every game, it seemed like such a good idea. I always liked a good postmortem—discussing ad nauseum the pros and cons of what just transpired — who played well, who needed to be subbed out sooner, what we would have differently, what was a stroke of genius. This just meant I would do that same thing in writing and someone from the L.A. Times would correct my spelling and punctuation. How hard could that be? So here I am, contemplating my 15th blog of the season and I am pretty much at a loss for words. I watched our game Friday night against the Sacramento Monarchs, and I looked at all the stats and I am still not entirely sure I know what happened, other than the final score meant we didn’t win.

We out-rebounded the Monarchs 39-32. We had more assists than turnovers for a change. We had more free-throw attempts than Sacramento and made more than they did. We had more blocks (Lisa Leslie reached the 800 career block milestone in the game.) Four of our players scored in double digits. But we didn’t win.

A win against Sacramento Friday night would have put us in a virtual dead heat with San Antonio for fourth place. Back-to-back wins against the Monarchs (Friday and Saturday) would have locked us in fourth, battling for third. But we didn’t win.

We started so slowly, letting Sacramento get out to an 11-point lead in the first four minutes of the game. Then Betty Lennox got a steal halfway through the first quarter and Leslie started to go to work. Leslie scored five consecutive baskets, including a three-pointer, to try to close the gap, but the Monarchs kept responding. The quarter mercifully ended as an offensive shootout, with the Sparks shooting a whopping 61.5% field goal percentage and the Monarchs besting us with a 73.7% shooting percentage (and ahead by 12 points). Leslie had scored 11 points in 10 minutes, but Nicole Powell had almost matched her with 10 first-quarter points.

The second quarter made up for the first. We stopped turning the ball over (one turnover in the second quarter compared to the seven turnovers in the first) and had six assists in the quarter. Lisa added four points in five minutes and Noelle Quinn picked up the slack off the bench, scoring seven points on 75% shooting and recording four assists in her 10 minutes. We went into the locker room at halftime down by only a single point. That was the Sparks team I had planned to see all season long.

Third quarter was a dogfight. Both teams started playing some defense and neither team shot over 30% for the quarter. We slowed down Powell, who after scoring 10 points in the first quarter scored only two points through the second and third quarters. But we let Rebekkah Brunson score five points in 31/2 minutes of court time. Still, by the end of the third quarter, we had finally taken the lead for the first time in the game and the last 10 minutes started with the Sparks up by two.

There’s just enough time during a quarter break to ponder which Sparks team is going to hit the floor for the final 10 minutes. Would it be the back-on-their-heels Sparks that let Sacramento run up a 12-point lead in the first quarter, or the hard-working second-quarter Sparks, who clamped down on defense and outscored the Monarchs by 10? At first, it was hard to tell. Sacramento came out strong, but we responded, keeping the score close. At the four-minute mark in the fourth, we were up by two, Leslie had established a season high in points scored and the Monarchs’ Hamchetou Maiga-Ba had picked up her fifth foul, sending her to the bench. There was reason to think this might be the second-quarter Sparks. But that hope died young. Sacramento went on a bit of a run, seemingly scoring at will, and built up a nine-point lead in three minutes. We could not return the favor in the last three minutes. Quinn scored the next three baskets for the Sparks, cutting the lead to three with a little over a minute left in the game. But that was as close as we got. Overall for the quarter, we shot just 28% from the field, while Sacramento made almost 70% of their attempts. Another loss for the Sparks.

I remember when I agreed to write this blog, I thought the games would be a lot easier to write about. Oh well, you know what they say about the best-laid plans...

Kathy Goodman is co-owner of the Sparks