Sparks Ready to Hire Cooper
The Sparks are expected today to name Michael Cooper their fourth head coach in three seasons.
The 12-year Laker veteran was Orlando Woolridge’s assistant coach last season and became the logical candidate to succeed Woolridge, who, in a stunning move, was fired Sept. 30 by club president Johnny Buss.
It also was learned that Buss and his father, Laker owner Jerry Buss, are close to renewing their commitment to the league to run the Sparks for 10 years. Jerry Buss, and all other WNBA franchise operators, signed three-year deals in 1996.
Cooper inherits a talented team that extended the eventual champion Houston Comets to a third and deciding game in the Western Conference finals after a 20-12 regular season. The Sparks’ impressive turnaround, following a 12-18 season in 1998, made the L.A. franchise one of only two teams to reach the 20-victory benchmark in 1999.
But Cooper, along with other WNBA coaches, must deal in the coming months with the troublesome task of deciding which players to protect in the expansion draft. The WNBA grows from 12 teams to 16 next summer.
If the protected list is as low as five, then the Sparks may have to expose players such as 6-foot-3 La’Keshia Frett, a defensive stopper, and 6-5 Clarisse Machanguana and 5-9 Allison Feaster.
Cooper, 43, was the “defensive chief of police” for Woolridge last season, planning and implementing the Sparks’ defensive schemes.
It was at Cooper’s urging that Frett, the Sparks’ fourth-round pick in the 1999 draft, quickly became a premier defender.
Frett was languishing on the bench until July 7, when she got a season-high 25 minutes at Phoenix and shined defensively.
“We saw on the tape that she guarded everyone on the floor, switched off really nice and effectively guarded small players as well as big players,” Cooper said.
Cooper was a defensive star in his Laker career, from the 1978-1979 season to 1989-1990. In nine of those 12 seasons, he played in 80 or more games.
He grew up in the Altadena/Pasadena area, attended Pasadena High and Pasadena City College. He went from there to the University of New Mexico, where coach Norm Ellenberger saw in the lean, quick Cooper the makings of a premier defender.
“He said to me he wanted me to be the defensive stopper, to guard the best offensive players we’d play,” Cooper said.
“He told me: ‘If you’ll do that for me, that will get you in the NBA.’
“I figured he was right when I started seeing Jerry West at our games.”
The Lakers drafted Cooper in the third round in 1978, and he ended up playing on five of the franchise’s NBA championship teams.
Spark Notes
Sources said Wednesday WNBA president Val Ackerman is insisting the Sparks play “a half-dozen or eight” games at Staples Center next summer, as part of the club’s 10-year renewal agreement. . . . Woolridge, who was fired by Johnny Buss for unspecified “philosophical differences,” is a candidate to become the head coach at Cleveland, the only remaining WNBA team without a coach.