1997 WNBA Champions

Some old school video of the 1997 Houston Comets. Enjoy.

1997 Cleveland Rockers

Lynette Woodard during her days as a Globetrotter.

W/L: 15-13, fourth (and last) in the Eastern Conference
Pythagorean W/L: 16-12
Points Scored Per Game: 70.2
Points Allowed Per Game: 68.4

Starters

PG: Tina Nicholson/Michelle Edwards (*)
SG: Lynette Woodard
SF: Eva Nemcova (**)
PF: Janice Braxton
C: Isabelle Fijalkowski

(*) Edwards was primarily a shooting guard.
(**) Nemcova was more a forward-center

Last of the 1997 Rockers to leave: Merlakia Jones played for Cleveland in all seven seasons that the Rockers existed in the WNBA.

Last survivor: Merlakia Jones's final WNBA season was with the Detroit Shock in 2004. However, if you want to count coaches, Jenny Boucek played for the Rockers in her only WNBA season as a player in 1997. Boucek now coaches the Sacramento Monarchs.



With their first round picks in the 1997 WNBA Elite Draft in February, the Rockers picked for both youth and talent. They chose Isabelle Fijalkowski who had been a star for the French national team, and then Lynette Woodard, a player who was actually the first female Harlem Globetrotter in 1985. Woodard, at 37, would be a virtual graybeard. Eva Nemcova and Merlakia Jones would come to the Rockers the regular draft.

The picks, however, were were most likely made by general manager Wayne Embry, who was the GM of the Cleveland Cavaliers as well. The Rockers didn't have a coach until May 1997 - Linda Hill-McDonald, the former coach at the University of Minnesota.

The move caused a lot of murmuring among women's basketball fans - during Hill-McDonald's final two years at Minnesota, the Gophers finished 8-47. It would be Hill-McDonald's job to make the most out of what she was given. Hill-McDonald was left to try to pick up some extra woman-power at an open tryout in late May that brought 175 WNBA wanna-bees out of the woodwork.

In their inaugural game on July 21, 1997, the Rockers ran into a buzzsaw as the visiting Houston Comets torched the Rockers 76-56, with Cynthia Cooper scoring 25 points in a game with the Rockers still in a defensive torpor. Announced attendance was 11,445 - a sell-out crowd for the Rockers.

The Rockers were at least winning where it counted - not on the floor, but in corporate sponsorship. The Rockers picked up $500,000 in corporate sponsorship even before the first tip-off, more than double that of their initial goal of $200,000 and ahead of all seven of the other WNBA teams.

Unfortunately, the crowds dwindled off in Cleveland. Cleveland found the early part of the season rough going, starting off 3-8 to end up dead last in the Eastern Conference, losing four straight in early July and ending up 6 1/2 games behind the Liberty. Michelle Edwards, obtained through the initial player allocations, was converted from shooting guard to point guard, and then hyperextended her knee and ended up on the injured list. Jenny Boucek injured her back. With all of the injuries, it took a while for Cleveland to right itself from its horrible 1-5 start and Cleveland managed to extend its record to 9-8 after a six-game winning streak.

by the end of July, the Rockers extended their win streak to seven games, with Eva Nemcova and Janice Braxton scoring 17 and 15 respectively as the Mercury fell to the Rockers 79-69. The Rockers were now 10-8 with just 10 games left in the season. The crowds began to inch from the 5,000 range to the 7,000 range. By August, Michelle Edwards was back and the Rockers won a record eighth straight game by crushing the Monarchs 72-51 at Gund Arena. With an 11-8 record, things were looking up.

Then, the bubble popped. The Houston Comets beat the Rockers in Cleveland 76-66. The Rockers would lose the WNBA's first double-overtime game to the Sparks. The Rockers knew that they could end up fighting the Charlotte Sting for the final playoff spot, since the winner of the Western Conference regular season was guaranteed one of the four playoff berths.

On August 23, 1997, Michelle Edwarda's running 3-pointer as time expired gave the Rockers an amazing 72-71 home victory over the visiting New York Liberty. It was the second last-second win in a row for Cleveland, the Rockers having beaten Houston the game before on a Janice Braxton free throw that gave them a 76-75 win on the road. The Rockers (14-12), Sting (14-13) and Sparks (13-13) were all vying for the final playoff spot. However, Cleveland would have to play the Liberty again in the final game of the season.

Going down to the final game, the Rockers were 15-12 and the Sting were 14-13. The Sparks had fallen on the final day of their season to the Phoenix Mercury, who had won their conference title and knocked the Sparks out of playoff contention. In order for the Sting to claim the final playoff spot, the Rockers would have to lose against New York and the Sting would have to beat the Starzz. The Sting's chances against the Starzz were extremely good - Utah was the worst team in the WNBA and they were playing in Charlotte, where the Sting's 11-2 home record led the league in home game victories.

The Rockers had to go to Madison Square Garden. The Liberty had already clinched the third spot in the playoffs. When the Rockers got to New York, they faced the Liberty and their 18,000 fans at Madison Square Garden who set a game attendance record. However, the Rockers knew at least that their fate was in their own hands.

After leading the Rockers by 18 points in the first half, the Liberty fought for their lives as the Rockers battled back. They managed to tie the game with one minute left. Rebecca Lobo let a pass go off her hands with 23 seconds to go...but the Rockers Janice Braxon missed a 3-point shot with 2.9 seconds to go and the game went into overtime, 69-69.

Unfortunately, the overtime was all Liberty. With New York leading 75-72, Lobo's turnaround jumper with 1:01 to go was a puncture wound in the heart of the Rockers. Cleveland lost 79-72 and no longer controlled its fate.

This put the Rockers fate in the Sting's hands. The Sting learned this minutes before tipoff, and that all they needed to do to go to the post-season was to win against Utah. A confident Charlotte team started the game with a 20-4 run. The Rockers seasons ended as Charlotte easily won 70-52 to go to the WNBA Playoffs. For the Rockers, there was nothing to do but wait till next year.

1997 Charlotte Sting

Vicky Bullett of the Sting vs. Heidi Burge of the Sparks on July 21, 1997. The Sting won 75-64.

W/L: 15-13, third in the Eastern Conference
Pythagorean W/L: 16-12
Points Scored Per Game: 67.3
Points Allowed Per Game: 66.0

Starters

PG: Nicole Levesque
SG: Andrea Stinson
SF: Andrea Congreaves/Penny Moore
PF: Vicky Bullett (*)
C: Rhonda Mapp (*)

(*) - both were F/C type players

Last of the 1997 Sting to leave: Andrea Stinson would play with the Sting until the end of the 2004 season.

Last survivor: Stinson, who played her final season in 2005 for the Detroit Shock.



It might have been a very different story if Van Chancellor had been hired for the head coaching job at Charlotte. Instead, Chancellor would go to Houston and Charlotte would hire Marynell Meadors as their head coach. Meadors would look to the ACC for coaches, picking up Sue Panek as one of her assistants (Panek and Meadors would reunite when Meadors became head coach of the Atlanta Dream in 2008.)

She also made it clear that she was looking for a point guard that had "speed, quickness, and scoring ability", according to a April 27, 1997 article from the Charlotte Observer. Her starting point guard would be Tora Suber, a young tattoo-sporting point guard when tattoos were still a novelty instead of de rigeur among WNBA players. Meadors knew Tora Suber when she was coaching at Florida State and Suber was playing for Virginia, and made Suber her first round draft pick and seventh pick overall.

The Charlotte Sting started the season ugly. They struggled in their season opening loss to the Mercury in Phoenix, 76-59 and lost 74-54 on the road to the Sparks in their second game - in each of those losses the Sting shot 33.3 percent...or less. The Sting would start 0-3 before finally winning their home debut 67-44.

Despite their 0-3 start, the Sting managed to hang in there and were 6-6 after their first twelve games. The Sting were schizophrenic - they had won their six games all at home and lost all of their away games. Their home win streak would come to an end when the then 12-3 Liberty came to Charlotte on July 23rd to win 65-63 on a pair of free throws by Rebecca Lobo with 4.6 seconds left. Defensively, the Sting were okay but offensively, they needed punch, at least in those early losses.

One of the unexpected bonuses for the Sting that year was when they signed Nicole Levesque as a replacement point guard. Levesque had joined the Sting one game into the season. She had not only played in training camp, but had been yanked out of her job at a resort in Vermont. Suber struggled with injuries - a sore back, a broken nose - and fell out of the starting lineup. Clearly, Suber wasn't ready to run the Sting offense - but Levesque was.

Charlotte's main adversary seemed to be fatigue rather than their Eastern Conference opponents. The Sting hovered around .500 for the back half of their season, with some ugly losses, including a 81-49 loss to Cleveland in August 17th the day after they beat Houston at home on August 16th. With the Cleveland Rockers right behind them, the question was whether or not Charlotte could squeeze its way into a playoff spot. On August 20th, the Sting traveled to Houston and lost 77-69, dropping them into a tie with Cleveland at 13-12 with just three games to go.

However, one of those games was against the Utah Starzz, the worst team in the WNBA - and it would be played at home, where the Sting were very successful. With their record at 14-13, the Sting learned that the Cleveland Rockers had lost in overtime to New York just minutes before tipoff - if they defeated the Starzz, they were in the playoffs. The Sting started with a 20-4 run to sink the Starzz 70-52

This earned the Sting a seed in the playoffs, where they would face the Houston Comets in Houston. Andrea Congreaves said that the pressure to win would be on Houston, and not Charlotte. Charlotte led the game at halftime by four points but Houston's Wanda Guyton suffered a concussion during the second half, and the injury timeout broke Charlotte's magical spell. They had won the 12 previous times they had led in halftime, but they fell apart in the final eight minutes of the game. The Comets were down 46-44 after being down by four at the half, but turned the deficit into a 56-48 lead with 6:33 to go. Cooper would score 10 of the next 12 Houston points to finish wtih 31 points overall despite the Comets shooting 37.7 percent in the game.

And the last team that had stolen a halftime lead from the Sting before the Sting started up its win-after-leading-at-halftime streak? It was the Houston Comets. They had beaten the Sting three out of four times in the regular season, and Charlotte finished the year with a 1-4 record against Houston.

Andrea Stinson would receive an odd consolation prize. She would finish second to Cynthia Cooper in Most Valuable Player voting - despite not even being elected to the league's All-Star team. As for Tora Suber, she would never be a reguar starter again and be known more for the anti-tattooing backlash than for her accomplishments as a player.

WNBA Team Capsules: 1997 Houston Comets

1997 Houston Comets

W/L: 18-10, first in Eastern Conference
Pythagorean W/L: 22-6
Points Scored Per Game: 71.8
Points Allowed Per Game: 65.5

Starters:

PG: Kim Perrot
SG: Cynthia Cooper
SF: Janeth Arcain
PF: Tina Thompson
C: Wanda Guyton

Last of the 1997 Comets to leave: Tina Thompson remained with the Comets until it was disbanded after the 2008 season. She was the only Comets player to play in each of the 12 seasons of the Houston Comets.

Last survivor: Tina Thompson is still playing in the WNBA, to begin playing with the Los Angeles Sparks in the 2009 season.




The Comets were the very first WNBA champions, and not only that, the Comets defined the WNBA from 1997 to 2000, where they won four straight championships. Fran Harris, a player on the 1997 Comets team, went to to write a book called "Summer Madness" about that first WNBA season.

I suspect - strongly - that David Stern and the WNBA would like to promote the myth that the WNBA was the first women's professional league, that before the WNBA came along there was nothing but desert and tumbleweed as far as women's pro basketball was concerned. (For example, the WNBA has an opportunity to honor the All-American Red Heads at the All Star Game in 2009, but the WNBA comes off as if it doesn't care about the history of the game before they were there.) What many don't realize is that there was already a pro league in existence - the ABL - and players were being forced to choose one league or the other, with agents trying to convince players not to sign with the ABL and sign with the new WNBA instead.

Finding out about the old Comets is an interesting task. Most newspaper articles about the Comets are either

a) Wow, isn't it amazing that women are playing basketball in Houston? God bless the WNBA, or
b) The Comets have won the first WNBA championship.

There really isn't much in between. So we have no idea as to how the 1997 season progressed for the Comets, or what were its highs or lows.

As it turns out, it was the New York Liberty that got the jumpstart in the season, starting off with winning its first seven games and 10 of its first 12 games. Houston at least kept a winning record, with Charlotte and Cleveland sinking below .500 initially - they would catch up. It turned out that every single team in the East would have a .500 or better record, and three of those teams would go to the playoffs, which were reserved for the two conference winners and the two best remaining teams.

Part of the problem was that Sheryl Swoopes of the Comets had given birth that year and that Houston initially struggled without her. She didn't come back until August 7 and after her first three games in a Comets uniform she had nothing to show for it. She would finally score 21 points against the Utah Starzz on August 13 to bring the Comets record to 16-7 and finally bump them ahead of the Liberty.

The Comets still had some work to do. In 1997, the semifinals and finals would be one game apiece. They found themselves playing against the Charlotte Sting in the first semifinal, and Wanda Guyton was injured. However, Cooper had 31 points for the Comets as they rolled over the Sting 70-54 at home.

This set up a Comets-Liberty final, as New York defeated Western Conference champion Phoenix in the other semifinal game. New York, which had struggled at the end of the year, found themselves in Houston to take on their rivals. New York had won three of the four games that year against Houston, and had reason to feel confident. Unfortunately, the 1997 WNBA Title Game mirrored New York's season - start out strong, and stumble at the end.

By the second half, Liberty C Rebecca Lobo was being checked by a dentist after she received an elbow in the mouth from Tina Thompson. The Comets won 65-51 and celebrated the first of their four championships.

Interesting Fact: The first president of the WNBA, Val Ackerman, predicted (so she says) that she thought attendance for WNBA games would be about 4,000 per year. If so, that prediction has been well exceed in each of the years of the WNBA's existence.