Yes, another chance to hear my dulcet tones, this time previewing the women’s World Championships which begin tomorrow. David Siegel was kind enough to invite me back to his Dishin & Swishin podcast to talk about the teams, players, groups and everything else surrounding the upcoming tournament – including whether anyone can beat Team USA.
Follow the link below to head to the piece, and click any of the play options at the top of the article to listen.
My appearance on the Dishin’ & Swishin’ podcast is now live HERE. Yes, that really is my accent. We talked All-Star ahead of Saturday’s game, discussing who deserved to be there, whether the fans and coaches had chosen correctly, and other aspects of the first half of the season. If the audio merely whets your appetite, you can read more about my All-Star choices in the feature that went up earlier this week here.
Normal, text-based WNBA coverage will continue later tonight.
The WNBA community did a pretty solid job of selecting the All-Star starters this year. Not perfect (we’ll get into that in a minute), but we’ve seen some bizarre names voted in by the fans in previous years (Jayne Appel and Anna DeForge spring to mind). There was no one in that category this time around. But you know what? One of the benefits of deciding your own hypothetical All-Star rosters is that you can blithely ignore the voting public anyway. So before the results of the coaches’ votes for the reserves are released tonight, let’s decide who deserves to be heading to Connecticut for the big game on Saturday afternoon.
East
Guards
The fans had to vote for two guards and three frontcourt players, then the coaches had to provide two guards, three frontcourt, and one wildcard extra. So we’re looking to fill all of those, and because I like to ease into these things, we’re starting with the Eastern Conference. It’s easier in the East, because there simply aren’t that many players worth considering. Perusing the backcourt players available, our options are severely limited. Herrington, Bentley, Thomas and Hayes all seem like reaches from Atlanta, so there are zero candidates from the team that led the East for most of the first half of the season. Injuries or poor performance has knocked out Douglas, January and Phillips from last year’s conference champs. And even the hosts for the All-Star game have played so poorly this year that you can argue over whether they have deserving candidates.
So by my count we have seven vaguely viable possibilities. Epiphanny Prince and maybe Courtney Vandersloot in Chicago; Shavonte Zellous in Indiana; Ivory Latta in Washington; Cappie Pondexter in New York; and Kara Lawson or Allison Hightower in Connecticut. Lawson’s typically the Sun’s best perimeter player, but she’s missed 40% of their games through injury so far this season. It’s hard to overlook that without supreme performance when available, and she’s been good but not great. Latta and Prince both started the season strongly but have tailed off a little as it’s progressed (Prince also missed a few games through a combination of an ankle sprain and representing Russia at EuroBasket Women). Hightower’s improvement has been impressive, but she’s still the best of a bunch in Connecticut that have been awful as a whole. Pondexter continues to rank highly in raw scoring averages, but her percentages and efficiency have been terrible, she started the year playing no defense whatsoever, and she’s the central part of a team setting a record-breaking turnover pace.
So it’s not a great list. Pondexter’s an interesting case. She’s clearly been voted in more because of her superstar status and reputation than her performance this season. But she is still a star and carrying a heavy load on a team that expects her to generate a large percentage of their offense. To me it comes down to five – Prince, Zellous, Latta, Pondexter and Hightower – and it’s a matter of how you want to order them. And now that I’m trying to do this, maybe the East isn’t so easy after all.
WNBAlien 