2003/13 - Shock 97, Dream 76

These are the posts I don't like writing about, Y'AAL. (*) It usually takes a few days for me to sort out in my head what I want to write down, much less overcome the depression associated with the actual loss. God knows if any posting will happen at all in the first week of July, where we play three home games.

So as Coach Meadors had no team practice on Monday, I took a day off, too.

1) We got two turnovers off Detroit early in the first quarter. If I'm right, they were in the first couple of minutes.

Result: nothing. After a while, you stop being astonished.

2) Alexis Hornbuckle took a nasty headbump in the first quarter, although some fans complained that she was looking for an Oscar nomination. At least, it gave Atlanta some breathing room.

3) Overall, our shooting was very good. Ivory Latta hit a couple of nasty three-pointers and we were shooting forty percent at the end of the first quarter. Unfortunately, we have no fastbreak game and the Shock scored the last seven points of the quarter, leading 26-14.

And in the second quarter, it all went to hell....

4) I swear to goodness that whenever Katie Feenstra gets a rebound, other teams will just simply yank the ball right out of her hands. I also swear that she made an own goal on the Detroit end of the court trying to grab a rebound. (I suspect that the official scorer had mercy and gave the shot to Cheryl Ford.)

5) Detroit went on another 7-0 run and led by 23 points at one point in the game. By this time, Jennifer Lacy had three fouls on her. Betty Lennox had hurt herself in a collision in the first half and was on her way to a scoring zero points at halftime.

6) Rebounding and the utter lack of a fast break game killed us. We had one friggin' offensive rebound in the first half. Detroit must have been licking its chops thinking about how much punishment they were going to dish out under the boards. I could swear I saw Cheryl Ford doing pushups and kissing her biceps near the bench. Bill Laimbeer was snapping photos. Rick Mahorn was calling his friends on his "five". Even Charles Barkley knew all about our crappy rebounding.

7) At the very least, the Dream had some sign holders. The crowd was in the game from the opening tip off to the final buzzer, something incredible for an 0-13 team. No paper bags over anyone's head. No booing. It's absolutely true, the Dream have the greatest fans in the WNBA.

7b) Tasha Humphrey, she of the 20 points, also had some sign holders. We'll ignore those.

8) Today's player spotlight was on Kristen Mann. I learned absolutely nothing interesting about her. Mann rose to the occasion, scoring one point in six minutes.

9) At one point, the on-screen camera focused on Katie Feenstra's size 16 shoes, a concession to the foot fetishists in the crowd. (Myself, I know that they're size 17, but concessions have to be made to Kit's vanity.)

10) By the end third quarter, B-Money had four personal fouls and zero (0) points. She also only played about a couple of minutes, it seemed.

11) Stacey Lovelace also had zero points after three quarters of play. Wisely, Coach Meadors kept her oh-fer ass on the bench for the entire fourth quarter.

12) Latta was on fire. Her 26 points and 10 rebounds were both career highs, her first double double in the WNBA. Unfortunately, a team is not just one player. We lost by 21 points, 97-76. Not having B-Money out there hurt us.

13) Latta got interviewed at courtside after the game. She talked with the announcer about how she watches Chris Paul and Steve Nash to improve the facets of her game. Paul is about 6'0", Nash is 6'3". (I assume both are actually two inches shorter.) Both are relatively small for NBA players. Maybe Latta can have an MVP season of her own, just like those guys have/will have.


Yes, I tell a few (very few) jokes, but the loss hurts. When, oh when, will Nike (the Greek Goddess, not the shoe) smile on the Dream and grant us a win? Will it be against our arch enemies the Sun? How long must we wander in the WNBA wilderness?


(* * *)

(*) Y'AAL -- Yet Another Atlanta Loss.

The Versatility of Kasha Terry

Okay, stop laughing.

I'm going to look at a metric called "versatility". Versatility is a very simple formula: [(points per game)*(assists per game)*(rebounds per game)]^(1/3). It's basically the cube root of the product of those per-game stats.

What versatility does is give us a "power-speed" number. It rewards players who can do a lot of things well and penalizes players that are one-dimensional.

Here are the leaders in Versatility in the WNBA as of June 23, 2008

LAS Candace Parker 8.69
CON Lindsay Whalen 7.76
PHX Cappie Pondexter 7.76
PHX Diana Taurasi 7.25
LAS Lisa Leslie 7.02
HOU Tina Thompson 6.97
DET Deanna Nolan 6.84
IND Katie Douglas 6.56
CHI Candice Dupree 6.43
WAS Alana Beard 6.31

Those numbers are exactly what we think they should be. Note that Candace Parker is a quantum leap among WNBA players in terms of versatility.

Now let's take a look at Kasha Terry and the player that she replaced, Camille Little. We won't look at their WNBA statistics, but look at their college statistics.

My arguments are that their statistics are comparible. Both played in the Atlantic Coast Conference: Terry for Georgia Tech and Little for North Carolina. Let's look at their senior year versatility statistics.

Camille Little: 6.02
Kasha Terry: 2.52

Egad. Certainly, Terry's 0.4 assists per game in her senior year hurt her, as compared to Little's 2.1. As a matter of fact, Little's stats were better than Terry's across the board. I suspect that the versatility stat doesn't account for pace, but the top three players on Little's and Terry's respective teams (Little was a top three scorer at UNC, Kerry was #5) scored roughly the same number of points.

This year, Little's versatility is only 2.17. Her game has taken a hit moving to the WNBA. Terry's stats are 1.36, which isn't much of a drop. The problem is that Little has a lot more potential upside than Terry does.

I suspect that the signing of Terry has only one point -- to put asses in seats. Terry is an Atlanta girl from Georgia Tech, and maybe her circle of friends (and Georgia Tech fans) will come to see her.

Is Terry going to improve the Dream? I sincerely doubt it. She can't hurt the Dream -- we can finish last just as easily with Terry as with Little. And we do get an extra second round draft pick. But don't fool yourself -- I doubt that Terry does much to solve the Dream's multitude of problems.

Dream Sign Free Agent Kasha Terry

According to Rebkell, the Atlanta Dream just signed free agent Kasha Terry.

At work. More on this later.

It Happened Elsewhere!

Liberty 105, Mercury 72. The Liberty shot 54.3 percent from the floor and set a franchise record in points scored, blowing out the visiting Liberty. Every player on the Liberty roster scored, and Tiffany Jackson of the Liberty scored a career high 21 points. Of the 105 points, 33 came from three-point land.

It was the worst loss by the Mercury since 2002. Diani Taurasi led the Mercury with 21 points.

Monarchs 82, Sky 70. The Sky (3-8) lose their fourth straight game in a road loss to the Monarchs (6-6), who break their own two game losing streak. Jia Perkins scored 22 and Candace Duprey had 16 points and 11 rebounds to lead the Sky, but the Monarchs hit 23 for 27 at the free throw line.

Sparks 77, Fever 63. The Fever (6-6) were sort of the "anti-Liberty" -- they shot 27.6 percent in a miserable shooting display. Lisa Leslie was the dominant force for the Sparks wtih 17 points and nine rebounds, and Candace Parker's double-double of 10 points and 10 rebounds was punctuated with a dunk with just 29 seconds left in the game, the second dunk in regular season play in WNBA history.

Tamika Catchings led the Fever with 17 points.

If a Dunk Happens in a Forest...

I'm doing my usual blog searches regarding the Dream and WNBA, and I've come across the blogs referring to the Candace Parker dunk last night. Generally, the haters are out and the attitude is dismissal.

Which is simply what I expected. If history tells us anything, it's that when a group belittles someone they consider beneath them by referring to a set of benchmarks the second group can't meet -- and then the second group meets the benchmarks -- the first group will simply move the benchmarks. Or find some reason to disqualify the achievement. It reminds me what someone said about the literacy tests in the South during the Civil Rights Era: whites were asked to spell "cat" and blacks were asked when the Edict of Nantes was revoked.

(By the way: 1685, baby.)

It Happened Elsewhere!

"Late Edition":

Comets 72, Lynx 65. (Saturday) A televised abortion of a game, with WNBA Commissioner Donna Orender presiding. The Lynx (6-6) shot just six percent from the field in the first quarter, and never woke up, shooting only 27.5 percent for the game. Despite Candace Wiggins's 24 points, the Comets (4-8) had three players in double figures, with warhorse Tina Thompson leading the Comets with 18 points.

It is the fifth straight loss for the Lynx, who started at 6-1.

Bouncing Baby Dunker

Congratulations to Candace Parker for throwing down above the rim in last night's Los Angeles Sparks victory over the Indiana Fever.

This is the second dunk in WNBA history, or third if you count the All-Star Game. It is also the first dunk by someone other than Lisa Leslie.

Dunks:

1. Lisa Leslie. July 30, 2002 versus the Miami Sol at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.
2. Lisa Leslie. July 9, 2005 versus the Eastern Conference All-Stars at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut.
3. Candace Parker. June 22, 2008 versus the Indiana Fever at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

Camille Little Traded to Storm

The big news among Atlanta Dream fans is that Camille Little just got traded to the Seattle Storm for a second round draft pick in 2009. Of course, we're not going to know if this is a brilliant move until 2009.

Right now, I have Little as somewhere on the best-to-worst chart in the Jennifer Lacy/Izi Castro Marques area. She's not a starter. It's not as if Betty Lennox went back to the Storm. And certainly, the Dream can finish dead last in the Eastern Conference just as easily without Little as with her. With coach Maryann Meadors seemingly unable to settle on a consistent rotation, it means that everyone else will get that much more playing time until Erika DeSousa returns.

So how much will we get for Little when 2009 comes around? I'm looking at the second round of last year's draft -- not much of an analysis, I'd have to look at the second rounds of all drafts. Let's assume that the Storm finish in the middle of the pack. So far, there have been only three quality players to emerge from the second round of 2008: Nicky Anosike of the Lynx, Erica White of the Comets and maybe Leilani Mitchell of the Mercury. After the seventh pick, only Mitchell was available of those three above. If there's an Anosike player later in the draft, it's going to be very hard for Meadors to find her.

Another complication is the affect this will have on Ivory Latta. Latta and Little were teammates on the North Carolina women's team, and theoretically know each other very well. Were they friends? Hard to tell. Maybe Ivory will be pissed that Little got traded; maybe she's glad to be rid of her.

In short, we can't tell if this trade is going to be a barn burner, but we can't tell if it will be a bust, either. Who knows? Maybe Meadors is expecting the Storm to bottom out and for us to move up in the second round. (/joke)

Young Living the Dream

Here's a very interesting article about Tamera Young from her hometown newspaper.

Excerpt:

Lights out? Forget it. Bed checks? No ma'am.

"You're on your own time, you basically do what you want," Young said. "But you also have to prepare yourself for the game. There's no coach on you, there's no schedule, just 'Meet at 10 o'clock for shootaround."

Click the link, read the rest.

"...and does it really matter who is at fault?"

So is Coach Meadors the worst thing ever to happen to the Dream? My position is no. Except for our draft choices, you have to remember that this is a team of castoffs - players who, for whatever reason, the other WNBA teams didn't want. No one team said, "my goodness, Lennox/Latta/Feenstra is so important to the success of our team that we must protect her, and immediately!"

This team wasn't going to go to the playoffs. I don't think any expansion team has ever done that. I think Atlanta fans should have known that going in. Hope is a drug, baby.

That being said, this team has lost 12 straight games. Barring some miracle today, it will probably lose to the visiting Shock and tie the consecutive losses record for a single season of play.

Remembering the 2002 Detroit Shock, the coach of that team got fired when he lost ten straight. That's how Bill Laimbeer got his job in the WNBA.

Remember Coach Meadors time in Charlotte, she got fired after her team lost by 26 points to the Rockers in 1999? The Sting were expected to go to the playoffs; the Rockers were in last place. Meadors's record? 5-7. Not awful, just mediocre.

This brings me to the sad point of the post:

Coaches get fired.
Coaches get fired for lots of reasons.
Coaches get fired for things that are not their fault or for which they have no control over.

If the Atlanta Dream lose their first 13, that might be okay. Hey, the Shock lost 13 straight one time and they're still in the WNBA! If the streak continues to 14...or 15...or more...then the WNBA is going to become worried about Atlanta's fan base. In mid-July, football training camp starts. How much attention are fans going to pay to an 0-for-everything team?

Ron Terwillinger, the owner, might have to step in and make his first difficult choice. I like Coach Meadors. I believe that given time, she can turn the team around. I like the fact that she's doing everything she can to support this young squad. But when you lose 12 straight, you could be John Wooden and it wouldn't matter. After a certain number of losses, the team tunes out and the fans tune out.

A new coach shakes up the team. "Hey, we have a new coach. Maybe we can break out of this streak/maybe I'd better work harder or I might not be playing next year." A new coach also shakes up the fans. "Hey, at least Terwillinger is trying to do something!"

As Walt Whitman said, "Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes" I hope that Coach Meadors makes it through the year. And I also hope that Ron Terwillinger has Fred Williams on speed dial, just in case.

The Blog Shuffle

The link to the Houston Comets Official Blog has been removed. Houston Comets management, if you start a blog we expect you to keep it updated. The blog is one month old and there is no signs of it coming to life.

I added by Hollinger Power Rankings link at the bottom. I might do some more stuff with those as I get formatting issues figured out.

Who is at Fault, Part III

More comments from Bill Simmons on what makes coaches bad coaches.

Not enough winning streaks. Obviously, this doesn't count for the Dream. The Dream don't have any winning streaks. Simmons is attempting to account for teams that are world-beaters one night and egg-beaters the next. I'm assuming that a "win streak" in Bill's mind is a set of two or more consecutive wins. Therefore, a W-L-W-W-L-L-W-L record would consist of one "win streak" in eight games.

Opposing 3-point percentage. Will the three-point shots be contested by the defense? The Dream aren't bad off -- they're in sixth place, with opponents only shoting 32.4 percent beyond the arc. (The leader is the Fever, which holds its opponents to 25.7 percent; at the bottom of the league is the Comets with opponent shooting 42.9 percent from the arc.)

Clearly, Atlanta is keeping teams from dropping bombs from outside. Then again, teams might be more comfortable to just drive the ball into the paint rather than shoot from outside, and that might be relected in the stat line.

Lousy record on the road. I'd say our road record is pretty bad. I think every team in the W has won at least one away game, putting the Dream in dead last.

Lack of a consistent rotation. According to Simmons, it's important for a team to get to know each other. As a point guard, for example, you'd know the tendencies of every player. Who to pass to, who you can expect to make the shot on the low post, who really needs a great open look before you care to pass them the ball. Teams get to know each other's personalities. If the coach is buzzing people in and out with every stoppage of play, there is no flow. A coach who screws around with the lineup all the time destroys a team's confidence, since most players are egomaniacs and take any sort of benching as a slur on their innate ability.

I don't think there's any sort of stat that can measure that, but I'd claim that the Dream are some major offenders, at least in terms of starting lineup. I'd say Betty Lennox, Ivory Latta, and (now) Tamera Young are dependable, but you don't know what sort of mismash of players Coach Meadors is going to throw out there to fill the holes in the other two spots. I tend to agree with Simmons. Pick somebody, even if it's defensive liability Jennifer Lacy or immobile center Katie Feenstra. You have to decide, at some point, "this is what we're going with, win or lose." One message board poster complained about Coach Meadors subbing people in after just two minutes of the first quarter.

Downright stupidity. Or as someone called it, "monkey f--king". A "monkey f--k" is when the coach makes some egregiously dumbass move. The message boards have begun to take note of what they consider such monkey f--ks during Dream games.

* Not performing a countdown from the bench when you are near the ball handler and the shot clock is counting down to zero.
* Having Betty Lennox play point guard at times.
* Putting in Ann Strother to make a critical inbounds pass late in the game when Strother had been sitting on the bench the entire game until that point.

Has the poor monkey been violated egregiously during Dream games? When you're looking for bad things, you'll find them, and you might have a tendency to ignore the good. However, when you're 0-12, it becomes very hard to point out what is "good".

(* * *)

I'll review Simmons's points on what are his supposed signs of a bad coach:

1. Lousy record in close games.
2. Too many turnovers.
3. Too many offensive rebounds allowed.
4. Not enough winning streaks.
5. Opposing three point percentage.
6. Lousy record on the road.
7. Lack of a consistent rotation.
8. Downright stupidity.

Many of the things there can be found in the statistical records.

1. Lousy record? 0-2, and the New York loss was particularly frustrating.
2. Turnovers? We're 12th. But Betty Lennox sure turns over the ball a lot.
3. Offensive rebounds? We're just horrible, at the bottom of the league.
4. Not enough winning streaks? Yes, because we haven't had a win.
5. Opposing three point percentage? The high point. We're sixth in three point percentage against.
6. Lousy record on the road? Yes. Lousy record at home, too.
7. Lack of a consistent rotation. I don't have a stat to look at this, but I'd say "yes".
8. Downright stupidity. Message board posters will continue to note humps of the ol' monkey.

My conclusions will come in a future article.

Article About Survival of WNBA Teams

I've just finished reading an article called "The Demise of the WNBA in Florida" which discusses the two former WNBA teams in Flordia, the Miami Sol and the Orlando Miracle. The Miracle still exist as the Connecticut Sun; the Sol were disbanded after the 2003 season.

The point of the article, written for The Sports Journal, discusses the degree to which newspaper coverage influences the survival of a franchise. There are definitely some interesting facts to be discovered.

First, that the coverage of women's sports in general in newspapers is not only poor, it's miserably poor. Here are some percentages over time regarding total column space devoted to women's sports:

1900: 1.2 percent
1925-50: 4 percent
1975: 7.1 percent
1996: 11 percent

Clearly, there's been a lot of progress, but also a long way to go. Whenever women's sports is the subject, coverage in general remains quite poor.

Part of that reason is because of the "big four" in sports: baseball, football, basketball (NBA) and hockey. Those are the sports that drive purchase of newspapers by their respective fans. Thirty percent of newspapers are purchased by people primarily interested in the sports section. The impression from the article is that the fans of those sports wouldn't mind if the entire sports section of the newspaper was devoted to their particular sport, and their sport alone. This leaves no room for women's sports, much less "second tier sports" played by men that are not one of the big four above.

The second interesting fact is that actual amount of paper - physical pages - assigned to the sports section changes. The WNBA makes a smart decision in scheduling its season when few of the "big four" sports are active. However, this is also the time of year when the masters of the paper decide, "Okay, nothing important is going on in sports. Let's take two pages off the Sports section and give it to Lifestyles."

Still, for this brief amount of time, the WNBA can elbow its way into the paper. However, mid-July becomes a critical time of year. Why? Football training camps open. Every paper wants to cover football, and the WNBA has to take the hit because of that. Coverage of WNBA games becomes reduced.

The major focus of the article is how the print media and the WNBA interact. Is it the case that "the WNBA isn't popular, therefore no one covers it" (the jock/fratboy viewpoint) or "no one will cover the WNBA, therefore it can't become popular" (the feminist viewpoint)?

I agree with the article that sports editors act as gatekeepers - they decide how much of the sports section gets devoted to any particular sport. These sports editors - probably 95 percent of whom are men, if not more - most likely reflect the biases of the society they come from. To claim that their perceptions on the relative worth of men's and women's sports would not come into play - in other words to claim that these sports editors live in a vacuum and are completely uninfluenced by their cultures - would be a ludicrous assertion.

The editors claim "hey, we just give the readers what they want to read". Then again, that's the same argument used by television executives when we see the 479th reality show on television - "we just give people what they want". Editors fail to make the jump that one of the reasons the readers come to like particular sports is visibility, and that by acting as gatekeepers, they get to decide what is visible. They influence what the readers want to read.

There was a glimmer of hope, however. The article stated that in both Miami and Orlando, rather than assigning the WNBA beat to the peach-fuzzed kid out of college - the person to whom you give the unpopular beats to - both papers actually hired someone to cover the WNBA, and those hires were people who had backgrounds either in women's college basketball or women's sports in general.

Just remember what Gandhi said: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." The WNBA is in the second of Gandhi's steps in its struggle for survival. (In some necks of the woods, in step three.) But the battle for acceptance is going to take a long time, and it won't be easy.

2008/12 - Mystics 72, Dream 61

"If that was your first exposure to the WNBA, you'd never come back."
--TonyL222, on Rebkell

I always have a great deal of reluctance writing the game summaries now that we're in a 12-game losing streak. Writing them depresses me a bit. Obviously, I love the Dream and I want to be the WNBA be successful in Atlanta, but how successful are we going to be if we keep losing games like this? I'm not going to walk out, but I wonder if others will.

Yep. Twelve straight losses, you read that right. That is third in terms of all time consecutive losses. Here are the records, as far as I know:

2001-02 Portland Fire: 14 (I believe that the Fire closed out 2001 with 11 straight losses, then lost their first three of 2002)
2006 Chicago Sky: 13
2002 Detroit Shock: 13 (losses from opening day)
2008 Atlanta Dream: 12 (losses from opening day)

Some people might not count the Fire's record as it's spread out over two seasons. However, the Dream might tie the record on Sunday against the Shock.

How do I know? I just hooked up to NBA TV and watched the Lynx-Shock game while following the Dream-Mystics game on the computer. In both circumstances, I couldn't believe what I was seeing/watching/hearing.

The Lynx-Shock game ended in overtime, with Deanna Nolan dropping over 40 points on the Lynx at Detroit. Whereas in Washington, the Ravenwood Finishing School was playing the Bluebelle Girls Academy. Both teams shot under forty percent in the first half. The score was 23-22 after halftime, which is basically one quarter of any game played by the Phoenix Mercury.

The Mystics, furthermore, scored 15 turnoversr in the first half. As Kathy Orton of the Washington Post said, "It was nearly as many turnovers at halftime as they manage in a game."

Combine those two facts, and the Dream should have led by 20 at halftime. (Well, maybe 15.) Instead, they led by one.

At least, the Dream had three players in double figures. The two usual suspects (Lennox and Latta) and Tamera Young, who scored 11 points and six rebounds. Betty Lennox was one away from a double-double, with 18 points and nine rebounds.

After those three? Nothing. It was a repeat of the Houston-Atlanta debacle, where the bench fell asleep. The remaining six scores combined for 16 points. Camille Little played seven minutes without scoring a single point.

The Dream shot 32.8 percent from the field, which I believe is our second lowest showing all season, after Los Angeles euthenized us for 26 percent.

Our turnovers were no better than those of the Mystics. Tree Rollins screamed at the Mystics in halftime, and they gave up the rock only five times in the second half. At the end of the game, each team had 20 turnovers.

Even with all of that, we were still ahead 46-45 as late as the late third quarter. Then Monique Currie scored the next six points to give Washington the five point lead. After fighting back to bring it to a five point gap again, 65-60, with 4:40 remaining, the Dream proceeded to miss its next six shots:

4:04 Lacy Jump Shot: Missed
3:36 Young Jump Shot: Missed
2:58 Lennox Jump Shot: Missed
1:56 Lennox 3pt Shot: Missed
1:40 Latta Jump Shot: Missed
0:14 Lovelace 3pt Shot: Missed

Four minutes, forty seconds of play. Six missed shots. Six personal fouls. Feenstra fouls out. As Harry Doyle, the announcer of the Indians in the movie Major League might say, "Feenstra fouls out. (Turns away from mike.) Thank God."

The two factors that killed us:

1) Alana Beard came back after being benched in the second quarter. Beard scored zero points in the first half, 18 in the second.
2) The Dream basically packed up and went home in the final five minutes of the game. Maybe there was something good on TV back at the hotel. Maybe they wanted to catch Lynx-Shock in overtime.

The Dream get the Mystics one more time this year. That game will be Friday, July 25th in Atlanta. I just don't want to have to wait any more for our next win.

Fans are mad on the message boards. They're mad at Coach Meadors. They're mad at Katie Feenstra, who has come to typify our woes at the center position. As for Coach Meadors, I'll have more to say about that in my series of "Who is at Fault?" articles.

I will never give up on the Dream. They're my team. I bleed powder blue. What do I suggest as a solution to our woes? Maybe Coach Meadors needs to contact the coach of the Atlanta Diamonds in the Women's Blue Chip league. They're 2-0.

Looking ahead to the game on Sunday against the Shock, do I have any suggestions? "Prayer, Mr. Saavik. The Klingons don't take prisoners."

Jambi the Genie Says....

Jambi the Genie has gone 13-11 this year (with the help of nationalsportsrankings.com). This may be his last chance before we lock his box!



Dream @ Mystics. The Mystics extend their winning streak, as five Mystics score in double figures. Washington 100, Atlanta 85.

Lynx @ Shock. The Lynx shoot over fifty percent from the field. Minnesota 91, Shock 79.

Sparks @ Silver Stars. Candace Parker gets another triple-double. Los Angeles 95, San Antonio 86.

Sky @ Mercury. Cappie and Diana lead the way to another win by the defending champions. Phoenix 70, Sky 53.

Sun @ Monarchs. After their walloping by the Mercury, the Sun find their bearings quickly. Connecticut 82, Sacramento 67.

Fever @ Storm. The Fever get an amazing victory in the final minute in a classic game. Indiana 69, Seattle 67.

Who is at Fault, Part II

I'm going to continue an earlier entry which asks the question "Is Coach Meadors the reason why the Dream are doing so badly? Or is it the team that's not up to par?

Offensive rebounds. Bill Simmons's uses an offensive rebound differential stat:

Your offensive rebounds - Your opponent's offensive rebounds.

I consider that stat just a bit suspect. Offensive rebounds are all about second chance points. However, your offensive rebounds are basically how many second chances you get at a shot. When you subtract the opponent's offensive rebounds, you're taken away your opponent's chances. I don't quite understand why these two should combine, except as a measure of general rebounding aggressiveness or toughness.

Here are the results:


Off Reb/Game
Off Reb of Opp/Game
Difference
Detroit
12.8
9.1
3.7
Houston
11.8
9.4
2.4
Washington
9.5
8.4
1.1
Connecticut
11.8
11.3
0.5
Sacramento
11.8
11.3
0.5
New York
10.2
10.2
0
Indiana
9.9
10.1
-0.2
Minnesota
10.2
10.8
-0.6
Los Angeles
11.1
12
-0.9
Seattle
10.5
11.4
-0.9
Chicago
10
11
-1
San Antonio
9.5
10.7
-1.2
Phoenix
10.8
12.1
-1.3
Atlanta
10.5
12.9
-2.4

The first smell test for a statistic is "do the results jibe with my common sense?" In this case, they do. We'd expect Detroit to be at the top of the table and Atlanta at the bottom. What I didn't suspect is how far down along the bottom we'd be. Note the big jump between the Mercury's difference (-1.3) and the Dream's (-2.4)

However, much of this isn't Meadors's fault. We've had problems for several reasons -- Erika DeSouza is injured. Izi Castro Marques was off playing for the Brazilian team. There have been gaps in the rebounding game due to the fact that the players we expected to be there weren't there.

Some might point to the Ann Wauters/Camille Little trade as a mistake. However,

1) There was no guarantee that Wauters would play. She's sat out seasons before. She declined to play for the Liberty. She's European, and she can simply pick and choose what WNBA team she wants to play for. Do we have any guarantee that she would have even reported to the Dream?

2) We get a 2009 first round draft choice. That's going to help build the team.

I think even with the bad rebounding, we have to give Coach Meadors a pass. If the rebounding stays bad...? There are still over 20 more games to play. Give it time.

Other Linky Goodness

A new link has been added to the StormFans.org message forum. You can go there to hear what rabid fans are saying about that team of all-stars that lives in that wet northwestern city.

At National Sports Rankings.com, a new feature has been added to their matchup software. Would you like to play out the 2004 Women's Olympic Basketball Tournament to see if another team walks away with the gold? Click on the link, make the right choices, and go to it!

It Happened Elsewhere!

From Wednesday night....

Fever 83, Liberty 69. The home team Fever (6-4) outmuscled the visiting Liberty (5-5) on the boards, 38-28. Katie Douglas lead the Liberty with 16 points and 8 rebounds. It was the fourth time in a row that Indiana has beaten New York. Allison Feaster of the Fever scored her 354th three pointer, putting her seventh on the WNBA's all time list.

Mystics 67, Comets 63. The Comets found the visiting Mystics (4-7) poor sports as Washington went on an 10-0 run late in the fourth quarter to eclipse the hometown Comets (3-8). With under a minute left, Houston had cut the Mystics lead to just two points, but Hamchetou Maiga-Ba, Michelle Snow, and Tina Thompson all missed either shots or free throws and blew their chances at taking control of the game.

Mercury 102, Sun 81. The hometown Mercury (3-6) made 22 of 23 free throws and shot over 50 percent from the field to defeat the Sun (9-3), the WNBA's team with the most wins. Diana Taurasi of the Mercury scored 32 points as last year's WNBA champoins made it look easy. It was the Sun's second loss in three games.

Sparks 80, Sky 67. Four Sky (3-6) players scored in double figures...but five Sparks (8-2) players crossed into double digits, led by Lisa Leslie. Kiesha Brown failed to score a single point, but added nine rebounds to the Sparks's cause. The Sky were outrebounded 41-24 as the Sparks got their fourth straight win.

2008/11 - Silver Stars 81, Dream 66

Another day, another bad game by Atlanta. We seem to be masters at finding more ways to lose ballgames. The loss brings up to 0-11 on the year and we are just two games away from the record of the Detroit Shock. (Guess who we play on our 13th game? Hint: This motor city team was mentioned in the previous sentence.)

My thoughts, brief as they are:

1) Our first shot was a "stuck bucket" shot -- one of those shots where the ball wedges between the rim and the backboard. We knew it was going to be an omen, but not for whom.

2) Stacey Lovelace had an amazing game. Thirty-one minutes, 18 points, 5 rebounds. She scored six points in the first quarter. Although, I suspect, one of her baskets was a "walk-in".

3) Every game there is a focus on a fan favorite. The Dream, being no fools, put Tamera Young on the scoreboard. If she can keep it up, she'll be a future WNBA superstar, but she might have hurt her knee during this game. Fans are holding their breath that this is not the case. She went back out on the floor anyway.

4) Then, in the second quarter, we got the shaft. The Silver Stars put Ann Wauters and Ruth Riley in, and the Dream were forced to figure out some way behind these two gigantic fenceposts. We traded the rights to Ann Wauters to the Silver Stars for Camille Little, I believe. That will give the Dream two first round draft picks in 2009, but somehow I feel that we got hosed.

5) End of first half:

Betty Lennox: 2 points
Ivory Latta: 1 point

I think the last time either of those players were held to two points or less in a half was in preschool. (Hey...remember heaving the basketball up at the goal in second grade?)

6) In the third quarter, it continued to go awry. Tamera Young picked up her fourth foul. Lennox was trying to get back into the swing of things, but tried to make some freak shot from under the backboard that Shaq himself couldn't have made.

7) They put Ann Strother back in the game in the third. I think she fouled someone less than a minute after they put her on the court. She got less than two minutes in the game. I'm beginning to suspect...hard...that Ann won't be with us next year? (How long does a WNBA contract last, anyway?)

8) More crap in the fourth quarter. Lacy picks up a couple of fouls to start off the fourth. Lennox picks up foul number four on the way to a nine-point game. The only bright spot in the fourth was, oddly enough, Feenstra who made three out of four free throws in the quarter.

9) The refs love Hammon. She gets called for traveling in the fourth quarter...so she confers with one of the referees. Clearly, the refs have seen the error of their ways. The call gets changed to a "jump ball" call. When you join the Hammonite cult, superpowers come with the package. It's like being a Jedi.

("You saw no traveling. There must be a jump ball." "I saw no traveling. There must be a jump ball.")

10) There were at least a couple of Hammon fans in the crowd carrying signs saying,
"WE SUPPORT HAMMON", and "HAMMON IS MY GOLD". Well, Hammon had nine assists so we can certainly call her a "medium of exchange."

10a) Number of Dream signs sighted in the crowd: zero.

11) The crowd was slightly over 6,000. Most of them came in in the second quarter. Atlanta traffic was as rotten as usual. It took me 40 minutes to get to the game. And the people behind me were kids...who were cheering they're little hearts out for the Powder Blues.

12) While driving home, I saw someone wearing a gold vest, with blond hair and bushy eyebrows, walking down the sidewalk with a realllly tall girl. Damned if it didn't look like...Becky Hammon. I thought it took three hours to recover from one of these games, but Becky's out on the town in thirty minutes. (It's superpowers, I'm telling ya.)

13) We shot 36.1 percent from the field and 18.2 percent from the free throw line. Those are San Antonio's stats (well, the field goal percentages are anyway). As for San Antonio, they shot over fifty percent.

Well, to quote a rap song:

For all you suckers - liars, your cheap amplifiers
You crossed up wires are always starting fires
You grown up criers - now here's a pair of pliers
Get a job like your mother - I heard she fixes old dryers
You have no desires - your father fixes tires
You try to sell ya equipment - but you get no buyers
It's you they never hire - you're never on flyers
Cause you and your crew - is only known as good triers

Somehow, I felt like Chuck D. was dissing the Dream. Could have been worse. Could have been Flavor Flav. The Dream is good triers. And that's about all.

Who is at Fault?

Note: Today might be just as busy as yesterday. So I'm going to start this post, and I will probably finish it later. And yes, I know we're still waiting for lots of things -- an analysis of the Dream's game against the Silver Stars, other WNBA outcomes, and the like. We might have to wait for some time if work keeps busy. I'm writing on my lunch hour.

Bill Simmons might be a jerk when it comes to the WNBA, and he might have unfortunately popularized the "more about my personal life and pop-culture tastes than actual game analysis" style of sport journalism, but every now and then, he writes a gem.

With some Atlanta fans turning against coach Marynell Meadors, I want to know if she's really just as bad as they say she is, or is it just that the team is bad and there isn't much she can do about it. You give Casey Stengel the 1962 Mets, and he's going to lose games. Maybe no coach could have made chicken salad with the chicken...stuff on the court that the Dream is providing.

Simmons, in an article about former Celtics coach Doc Rivers called "What's Up, Doc" lists what he believes makes a bad coach. The good thing about his list is that most of it can be hunted up in the statistics; the stats don't lie, but we have to decide how to interprent what they mean.

His bad-coach metric consists of anaylzing the following:

Lousy record in close games, or games with a final margin of five points or less. He does't provided much of an analysis of why this margin-of-victory stat is important.

The Dream have only had two such games: an 85-81 loss to Minnesota and an 81-77 loss to the Liberty. The Dream are dead last in average margin of victory, losing games by an average of 13 points. The first loss was really decided in the second quarter and the Lynx had to shoot the lights out to win it. However, if we're looking for Games Thrown Away, it would be the game against the Liberty, where the Dream turned a six-point lead going into the fourth quarter into a four point loss.

Turnover average. According to Simmons, well-coached teams don't turn the ball over. The Dream are 12th in the league with 18.7 turnovers per game. Two other teams in the bottom half of the NBA are actually worse, with the Monarchs actually an additional turnover worse than the Dream. In terms of "turnover versus", we turn the ball over on an average of two times a game more than our opponents, which puts us at 11th. It could be worse. The Sparks give the ball to their opponents three times a game, worst in the league.

I had a nice rant about rebounding coming up, but the WNBA site doesn't break down rebounds into offensive rebounds and defensive rebounds. So I might have to do that myself.

Lunchtime is coming to an end. Check in later!