No Easy Answers for StingRays

This was last week, before her team had turned the ball over 48 times in losses to Seattle and Columbus, before it had lost three of its last four games.

Coach Maura McHugh was talking about what she liked, what she didn’t like and what she feared most for her Long Beach StingRays.

What she feared most, she said, was the effect of the 44-game schedule on her older starters. Sunday, in the waning minutes of Columbus’ 79-63 victory at Long Beach, it was easy to recall the comment.

There on a trainer’s table, behind the Long Beach bench, sat 32-year-old Beverly Williams, the team’s No. 2 scorer, having a strained thigh muscle wrapped.

“The thing I worry the most about is our older players [Williams, Clarissa Davis-Wrightsil, 30, and Venus Lacy, 30] playing too many minutes on older legs,” McHugh said.

“Maybe that’s why we can’t put a win streak together. Maybe our older players’ legs tighten up late in close games. I’d like to rest people, but I can’t.”

Two weeks from the midway point of the ABL season, the StingRays are at crunch time. They play Western Conference leader Portland tonight at the Pyramid, and are playing their worst basketball of the season.

Lately, Long Beach’s strength, rebounding, is being offset by its turnovers. The team out-rebounded Columbus on Sunday, but threw away that advantage with 23 turnovers.

Seems the team’s perimeter players can’t find the low-post players. Or when they do, they’re telegraphing the passes.

“We have more turnovers than our opponents and a lot of them are silly, unforced errors, like bad passes into the post,” McHugh said.

“And everyone’s guilty. It just has to stop.”

That was last week. After Sunday’s game, McHugh challenged her players.

“The only way we’re going to get past this is if the players decide they’re tired of it, that this isn’t the kind of basketball they want to continue playing,” she said.

Still, McHugh said, the StingRays are a happy team that wants very much to win.

“I’m very big on bonding, getting along,” she said.

“Internal problems are the undoing of a lot of teams, and we really work at avoiding them. I have two good captains [Griffith and Williams] and we sit and talk a lot.

“And on the road, we have a rotating-roommate policy. Everyone rooms with everyone.”

That’s the kind of turnover she likes.

SPARKS UPDATE

Indications are, this could be the week Julie Rousseau gets to erase the “interim” title as the L.A. Spark coach.

Negotiations quickened last week and lawyers for both were drawing up a contract, Johnny Buss, president of the WNBA club, said.