Tag Archives: Atlanta Dream

WNBA Today, 07/28/2011: Eastern Promise

So here we go with the games involving Eastern Conference contenders from Tuesday night. I covered the West’s top-five yesterday, so this wraps up the first set of games since the All-Star break.

Connecticut took their 2-5 road record to Chicago to open the second-half of their season. Connecticut have had some ugly performances away from the Mohegan Sun this year, but the win in New York two weeks earlier suggested they might be turning that around. Chicago came in at 7-2 at home, which is a good thing because they’re even worse on the road than the Sun.

Sun head coach Mike Thibault stuck with the same starting five that had earned a three-game win streak heading into the break, while Pokey Chatman brought Tamera Young in at small forward for the Sky. Against Connecticut’s quick perimeter lineup, starting Young ahead of Cathrine Kraayeveld made a lot of sense. Both teams had new players in uniform on the bench, with wing Shay Murphy available for the Sky and backup post Jessica Breland now part of the Sun’s roster.

The early stages were positive for Chicago, because they were keeping the turnovers down and actually attacking the rim – two aspects of the game they’ve struggled with all year. Unfortunately for them, Renee Montgomery was illustrating at the other end of the floor that Courtney Vandersloot can’t even come close to guarding her at this stage in their careers. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 07/24/2011: Where Trade Winds Might Blow, Eastern Edition

I’m intending to write another installment of ‘Your WNBA Questions Answered’ soon, so send in your queries about anything relating to the league via email, twitter, comments at the end of this piece or anywhere else you can get ahold of me. The first edition was here, if you want some idea of what sort of issues I tackled last time around. Anything about the league or the women’s game is welcome.

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Okay, so the first half of the WNBA season is over, the All-Star game is done and dusted, and there aren’t any games until Tuesday. Also, while contracts may have just become guaranteed, we still have three weeks to go until the trading deadline. Those who’ve followed the WNBA in previous seasons will know that this doesn’t exactly tend to herald a hive of activity around the league. The biggest move last year was the trade that sent Kara Braxton to Phoenix, helping them reach the Western Conference Finals only to get swept by Seattle. Which is probably exactly what they’d have achieved if they hadn’t traded for Kara Braxton. The year before, a Tamera Young/Armintie Price swap was the highlight. We have to go back to 2008 and Detroit’s move for Taj McWilliams-Franklin to find a deadline-week move that had a legitimate effect on the destination of the championship, but that trade at least illustrates that they can happen.

So I thought I’d utilise this brief pause in the season to take a look at what teams need, what they have to offer, and who might be most active in calling around for an extra piece over the next few weeks. There isn’t a single team in the league without any holes, so you never know what might happen. Eastern Conference teams today, Western Conference tomorrow, tackling the teams in order of the current standings (just as a break from my typical alphabetical order). Feel free to comment in the space below the article if you’ve got any better ideas – some of the WNBA’s GMs could use all the help they can get.

 

Indiana

The most obvious place that the Fever might be looking for help is at point guard. With Briann January out for the season after her ACL tear, they’ve been using backups Erin Phillips and Shannon Bobbitt for the last few weeks. Phillips has gotten most of the minutes, and has been doing a pretty decent job. Her shooting’s been markedly better than January’s, and her turnovers are significantly lower, but her assists are far lower than January’s as well. Even taking just her games as the starting point guard, Phillips is only at 3.4 assists per game. She isn’t a natural point, and she isn’t as comfortable in the offense as January was. Katie Douglas, who was shooting the lights out early in the year, has dropped off noticeably since Phillips replaced January, and that’s not a coincidence. Douglas has to create more herself now, and there are fewer easy shots available for her. Still, Phillips makes up for a lot of that with her own shooting.

The fact is that Indy are unlikely to find an upgrade on Phillips on the open market. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 07/21/2011: Dream, Lynx keep running, but Marion’s run is over

Before we get to yesterday’s games, first the big news from this afternoon. If the announcement that the worst team in the league is releasing their 11th player can ever truly be considered ‘big’. After 47 appearances, the Tulsa Shock finally decided that Marion Jones had served her purpose on their roster and cut her today, in order to sign backup center Abi Olajuwon. In the eyes of most WNBA fans it was about time, but some will still be sorry to see her go.

On a purely playing level, she never would’ve made a WNBA roster if her name wasn’t Marion Jones. She was a 34-year old rookie last year, who hadn’t played organised basketball in over ten years. People in that situation don’t make WNBA rosters. It’s hard enough to stick on a team when you’re coming out of college at 22 and have been working on your game for the previous decade. However, in fairness to Jones, she did improve as last season went on, and by the end of it she had at least become a vaguely serviceable end-of-the-bench guard. She wasn’t a complete joke as a WNBA player any more, and if you subscribe to +/- statistics, she even had a significantly positive impact when she was on the floor (no, you don’t want to take that too seriously).

The question I always had with Tulsa’s retention of Jones was where did they think they were going with her? Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 07/20/2011: Keeping the Dream alive, and other WNBA stories

Three games yesterday in the WNBA, and we’re back to more camp days so they were scattered throughout the afternoon and evening. Doesn’t this league realise that it disrupts my whole pattern when they play games so early? Frankly I think that packing arenas with thousands of screaming kids should come a distant second to pleasing me, but apparently the WNBA disagrees.

Forced to drag themselves out of bed for an early tip yesterday were Atlanta, coming off the back of their fourth win of the season on Saturday against Chicago, and their visitors Indiana. The Fever had lost two in a row after their seven-game win streak came to an end, so whether they were playing at 2 in the afternoon or 3 in the morning, they would’ve been keen to get back to winning ways.

Indiana head coach Lin Dunn made a couple of switches to her starting lineup in the hope of bringing some fresh energy to her group, inserting guard Shavonte Zellous for ‘power’ forward Tangela Smith, which in effect moves Tamika Catchings to the four in place of Smith. She also re-benched center Jessica Davenport for Tammy Sutton-Brown. Both were interesting changes to make against Atlanta especially. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 07/17/2011: Last year was a long time ago

Two games in the WNBA yesterday, both featuring franchises who reached the WNBA Finals last year. Each of them were facing conference rivals who have outperformed them so far this season, so there was a feeling of 2010 powers trying to cling on to the coattails of improved 2011 squads. Things can change pretty fast in this league.

The Eastern matchup featured 3-9 Atlanta hosting Chicago, who were sat at 7-7 and are potentially the most catchable team for the Dream to pass for a playoff spot. Already 1-1 against the Sky this season (in what will ultimately be a four-game season series), this wasn’t just a chance to pull a full game back on Chicago, but also to go ahead in the possible tiebreaker. After such a disappointing season for Atlanta so far, this looked like a big game going in. A loss would’ve left them four games outside the playoff positions, and while it’s still early, that’s a significant gap even before the All-Star break.

Both teams made alterations to their starting lineups. Chicago brought in Tamera Young for Cathrine Kraayeveld at the small forward spot, likely based on the idea that she’d be able to guard Angel McCoughtry far better than Kraay. McCoughtry was 12-40 from the field in her previous two games against Chicago, so they’d been doing something right in the prior matchups. For Atlanta, Coco Miller turned an ankle in practice and was ruled out of the game, so her place in the starting lineup had to be filled. After a one-game experiment with McCoughtry as the starter at power forward against New York (which worked last year in the playoffs, but failed miserably last Wednesday), Dream head coach Marynell Meadors replaced Miller with behemoth Alison Bales. So McCoughtry was back to small forward, Armintie Price to shooting guard, and the Dream were back to playing two true bigs. I still don’t understand why they made that switch against the Liberty in the first place.

Chicago were awful to start the game. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 07/14/2011: Run and Gun Fun

Four games yesterday, and it’s not too hard to work out which game to concentrate on. Let’s see, we had a) a blowout, b) a blowout, c) a near-blowout that only got close because Tulsa are so bad that teams are starting to relax too much against them, and d) the highest-scoring regulation game in WNBA history. Hope no one objects, but we’ll be going with d. Of course, seeing as it’s me, the other three games will get their due coverage later in this piece, but we’ll start with the one that was actually entertaining.

Phoenix arrived in Minnesota off the back of eight wins in their last nine games, a streak that’s making you start to wonder if they might just be for real this year. They still essentially ignore the defensive end of the floor, but there are hints here of the Mercury teams from past years that simply outscored everyone anyway. Still, circumstances do seem to have fallen their way in several games this year, so a first meeting with the new-breed in Minnesota seemed like a true test of the Mercury’s mettle. It also meant a contest with the team that is actually outscoring them in fastbreak points so far this season, a category you don’t often see anyone leading Phoenix in. So we knew going in that this one was likely to be fast, exciting, and distinctly high-scoring.

While Maya Moore is the only rookie in the Lynx starting lineup, Minnesota started the game like a team that had never faced Phoenix before or even seen them on tape. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 07/10/2011: I wish I were a gambling man

Everything below was written before Jennifer Gillom was replced by Joe Bryant as head coach of the Los Angeles Sparks late this evening. More on that tomorrow.

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Some nights, it annoys me that I’m not a more adventurous gambler. You see, I don’t like losing money, so I tend to bet small, even when I’m convinced the odds are in my favour. I also don’t have an account anywhere that offers in-play betting, which was the second factor that stopped me making a bundle last night. But let’s just say that if a) I had more guts, and b) somewhere easily accessible actually took the bets, I could’ve made some nice coin out of yesterday’s WNBA schedule.

Some games start off going one way on the scoreboard, but if you’re watching closely enough and know a little about the squads, it’s pretty easy to gauge whether the pattern’s going to last. When one team gets all the breaks, shots are going in that they rarely manage to make, and the other team are contriving to miss countless point-blank layups, chances are things are going to swing round before the night is out. It happened a lot last night. Oh and by the way, gambling is legal where I live. If it happens not to be where you reside, please don’t take this as a suggestion that you break the law. That would be wrong.

The first game last night featured Washington in Indiana, and the first instance of me scouting around for a website that would let me open an account in seconds and bet on a complete collapse by the team in front. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 07/01/2011: Dream alive, Shock need CPR

Only two games in the WNBA last night, and only one that actually resembled a contest, so let’s focus on that one first. New York went to Atlanta off the back of two wins, but neither of the victories over Tulsa and LA had been particularly convincing. Atlanta were 2-7, had lost twice in their own arena in the previous week, and were still trying to get their season started. Suffice it to say that both these teams could’ve desperately used the win, and outside of playing Tulsa and Washington last night might well have been one of their easier opportunities.

The Dream were still without Sancho Lyttle, knocked out of EuroBasket in Spain but still too banged up to appear for Atlanta. New York had all 11 available, assuming you count that ghost wandering around in the #14 Liberty jersey as actually being Nicole Powell. The very first possession of the game was both a reminder of the issues New York have had this season and a taste of what was to come for the rest of the night. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 06/27/2011: Deep Thinking

Three WNBA games yester… oh no, wait, four WNBA games yesterday. Almost forgot the gripping Tulsa-Washington matchup. Safe to say that we won’t be spending very long on that one. The most important event in Sunday’s games might well turn out to be the injury suffered by yet another key player, but before we get to the disappointing news let’s worry about the game of the day. Minnesota, coming off that disappointing loss in Seattle where the Storm held them to 55 points, welcomed the Eastern Conference-leading Indiana Fever to the Frozen North for their yearly visit. Two teams that had shown some form in the early stages of the season, and the first matchup between Tamika Catchings and Maya Moore – this one had all the signs of being interesting and entertaining, and it didn’t disappoint.

Indiana stuck with their new starting unit featuring Jessica Davenport at center, while the Lynx starting five was the same as it’s been all year. Part of the intrigue with this game was how the rest of the rosters would produce. Minnesota went into the year with everyone talking about how much talent they had, and whether there were enough minutes to go around. As it’s turned out, head coach Cheryl Reeve has ended up relying heavily on her starting five, while her bench players have struggled to produce, especially at the offensive end. Indiana, on the other end, have recently discovered some depth, with Erin Phillips, Jeanette Pohlen, Shavonte Zellous and even the recently demoted Tammy Sutton-Brown all offering important support from the pine. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 06/25/2011: Storm -1 Still Blow a Gale

Sometimes, basketball games are about more than just winning and losing. Sometimes, even just three weeks into a season, a team has to go out on the floor and prove that they still belong. That they’re still the champs, and that the route to this year’s title still goes through them. That without their star player they can still compete with the best teams in this league. And that however horrific their offense might be, you’re still going to have trouble scoring points against them. Ladies and gentlemen, your Seattle Storm!

For anyone who caught yesterday’s article before the late update (or the few of you with the temerity to not even read it at all), Lauren Jackson has been ruled out for ‘a minimum of three weeks’ with ‘a labral injury in her left hip’. They’re going to let her rest, then try physical therapy, and if she doesn’t respond well enough only then will they resort to surgery. So the Storm went into last night’s game at home to Minnesota not just smarting from the ass-kicking they took from the Lynx two weeks ago, but shorn of last year’s WNBA MVP. However, as we all know, in life and in sports – beware of the wounded animal.

Continue reading →