Tag Archives: San Antonio Stars

WNBA Today, 05/26/2012: Sun and Fever keep rolling; Liberty fears deepen

It was a Friday night triple-header this week in the WNBA, and seeing as the general opinion seemed to be positive last time we tried it, we’re going to tackle them Bullet Point Breakdown style.

 

San Antonio Silver Stars 79 @ Connecticut Sun 83

  • San Antonio head coach Dan Hughes stuck with his itty-bitty starting lineup, With Danielle Adams at center and Jia Perkins the nominal small forward. Connecticut’s Mike Thibault changed things around a little, with Allison Hightower getting the start ahead of Kalana Greene on the wing. Renee Montgomery continues to come off the bench for the Sun (and isn’t very happy about it, according to local press).
  • Tan White is back practicing for Connecticut after her concussion, but didn’t play. Rookie Ziomara Morrison, who was supposed to help provide size and bulk to San Antonio’s interior, is reportedly limited by a finger injury but continues to dress and played very briefly.
  • Adams did a decent job on Charles early, despite the extra inches that the Sun center has on her. Adams can use her bulk to at least make it difficult for Charles on the low block.
  • At the other end, Charles had a few problems. She likes to play free safety a little bit, drifting in the paint to be able to offer help defense when her teammates need it. Against a lot of 5s that’s fine, but with Adams, if you sag back she’s just going to sit happily at the three-point line and fire away all day. The same problem occurred when Adams set screens for her guards, because Connecticut typically trap the ballhandler (or at least show hard with a ghost of a double-team) on pick and rolls. So Adams sets the screen, the guard’s defender and Charles slide over to challenge the ball, and if the guard can pass back to Adams she’s often wide open for a jumper. The defense depends either on a third defender rotating across to cover quickly, or Charles recovering in time to challenge the shot. Both of those are difficult to keep doing effectively. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 05/20/2012: First Impressions

Welcome to the first WNBA Today of the 2012 season. We’re going to be trying to keep the game recaps a little more brief this year, hopefully to the benefit of both author and audience. The idea is that there should be more analysis and impressions, without quite so much basic recapping of play after play and possession after possession. At least that’s the target. There might be a few kinks to work out.

We’re also going to try something new for the opening edition, which we’re calling WNBAlien Bullet Point Breakdowns. The content in BPBs will be pretty similar, but it separates it all out into nice easy chunks, and saves having to mould it all into a coherent article. This won’t be how every WNBA Today is presented all season, but especially on days with lots of games it may well make a regular return. Feel free to leave a note on whether you think it works. In fact, feel free to comment below about anything related to the articles or the WNBA, or drop a line to richardcohen123@yahoo.co.uk . You can also follow me on Twitter at @RichardCohen1, where you’ll find all kinds of pithy comments. Mostly about basketball.

On with the games, starting with Friday night’s opener in Seattle, and right through all seven of the weekend’s contests.

 

Los Angeles Sparks 72 @ Seattle Storm 66

  • A couple of surprises in the Sparks starting lineup, but they were less shocking when news emerged that Sharnee Zoll and Nicky Anosike were both suffering from knee injuries. The lack of real point guard options on the Sparks roster immediately came under the microscope, with Alana Beard and Marissa Coleman starting in the backcourt. Seattle were as expected, with Camille Little and Tina Thompson sharing the forward spots.
  • Seattle got out to a smoking hot start, because they were pushing the ball and looking for early offense within their sets. LA came out with a pretty dodgy looking 2-3 zone defense on several possessions and Ann Wauters murdered Candace Parker right in the middle of it. Continue reading →

2012 In-Depth WNBA Season Preview: San Antonio Silver Stars

PG: Danielle Robinson/Tully Bevilaqua

SG: Becky Hammon/Jia Perkins

SF: Shameka Christon/Shenise Johnson

PF: Sophia Young/Danielle Adams/Tangela Smith

C: Jayne Appel/Ziomara Morrison

Significant additions: Christon (free agency after being out of the league), Johnson (college draft), Smith (trade with Indiana), Morrison (free agency from outside the league)

Significant losses: Ruth Riley (free agency to Chicago), Scholanda Robinson (free agency to Tulsa), Roneeka Hodges (trade with Indiana), Porsha Phillips (cut)

—–

Last season was fun for the Silver Stars and their fans. Expectations were modest after a poor year under Sandy Brondello in 2010, and everyone was happy to have Dan Hughes back in charge. Then Danielle Robinson and Danielle Adams both excited everyone as rookies, Jia Perkins proved a worthy addition on the perimeter, and they even took a game off the eventual champion Minnesota Lynx in the first-round of the playoffs. Things were looking up, and a team that had started to age and look a little stale had a fresh outlook. Now they have to build on that momentum and keep the push going, as they try to make the step from plucky outsider to true contender. Continue reading →

WNBA Offseason Overview/Preseason Preview: San Antonio Silver Stars

Current roster certainties and virtual certainties:

PG: Danielle Robinson/Tully Bevilaqua

SG: Becky Hammon/Jia Perkins/Shenise Johnson

SF: Shameka Christon

PF: Sophia Young/Danielle Adams

C: Tangela Smith/Jayne Appel

Fighting for the final roster spot: Porsha Phillips, Ziomara Morrison, Latoya Williams, Loree Moore, Ify Ibekwe

———-

It was a strange offseason for the Silver Stars. They added some veteran talent, potentially improved their depth significantly, got lucky in the draft in the eyes of many – and yet unless a longshot or two comes through, failed to address their key weaknesses from a year ago.

San Antonio signed Shameka Christon, a player in a very similar situation to Alana Beard in LA. An All-Star level small forward back in her New York days, Christon hasn’t played in the WNBA since suffering an eye injury early in her 2010 season with Chicago. A knee injury then kept her out of the 2011 season, and unlike Beard there aren’t even any overseas numbers or performances to judge her fitness from. If she can return to something like her former self, it’ll be a nice pick up, but it could take some time. Shenise Johnson, thought to be the second-best player in this draft class by many, fell to the Silver Stars at #5 and may be ready to help the team quicker than Christon. A combo-guard/wing wasn’t really what this team needed, but head coach/GM Dan Hughes obviously felt she was too good to pass up once she dropped down the board. A trade also brought in Tangela Smith from Indiana, swapped for gunner Roneeka Hodges. Smith had a poor year for the Fever last season, but San Antonio will be hoping she can at least provide some veteran know-how and a little help for them in the post.

Because that’s where this team’s issues lie, and in fact where they’ve lain for quite some time – they don’t have much size or presence in the paint, and their rebounding is horrendous. Continue reading →

WNBA Free Agency List & Analysis: San Antonio Silver Stars

Unrestricted Free Agents: Ruth Riley, Scholanda Robinson, (Ann Wauters)

Restricted Free Agents: None

Reserved: None

It’s a short list of existing players that San Antonio have to deal with this year. Riley’s been a stalwart for them for five seasons now, but no longer seems particularly vital to their roster. Her size and willingness to fight for the cause are useful, but she’s their starting center and they’re an appalling rebounding team – which tells you a lot. She comes with her own faults, but Jayne Appel is probably ready to fill Riley’s limited role, which would then just leave the problem of filling Appel’s spot. They’d probably like to keep Riley around, because 6-5 centers don’t grow on trees, but they’d also probably like her price to come down quite a bit. She’s no longer worth the sums they’ve been paying her in prior years. There’ve also been suggestions from some quarters that she’s considering retirement. Scholanda Robinson wandered in and out of Dan Hughes’s rotation in 2011, despite starting over half their games. With her limited production, it’s hard to see them paying her much more than the veteran’s minimum, and she may find a more favourable situation somewhere else.

The Silver Stars already have some cap space to explore free agency, and if they don’t re-sign Riley they’ve got a whole lot more. The primary need is glaringly obvious – rebounding and interior presence. One potential source for that was Ann Wauters, the Belgian center who last played in the WNBA for San Antonio in 2009. She’s reportedly made some indications that she wants to return to the league this year. However, the Silver Stars cored her in 2010, but decided not to keep the designation attached to her in 2011, which made her an unrestricted free agent. The expectation was that if she ever decided to return to the WNBA, her loyalty to her former team would take her back to San Antonio even without being cored. Rumour has it that Wauters may be returning, but that it could well be to a different city, which will leave San Antonio searching for other options. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 09/21/2011: A brawl and a blowout cut the West down to two

There are many different ways to play the game of basketball. Many different ways to win a game of basketball. Some of them are more pleasing on the eye than others, but when you look back at the record books in future years, all it tells you is who won or lost. Both of the WNBA’s Western Conference semi-finals went to deciding games, and the spectacles they produced were very different. But when it came down to it, two teams were delighted, two were disconsolate, and the rest was just details.

However, those were some pretty exciting details. Phoenix went up to Seattle on Monday night buoyed by their reasonably comfortable victory in Game 2. They might’ve had a horrible record against the Storm over the last couple of years, and they hadn’t won in Seattle since 2009, but they had the momentum after largely dominating the game in Arizona. The Key Arena crowd would inevitably help, and the Storm had been a vastly superior team on their own floor this season, but Game 2 had left them looking vulnerable. They’d need to perform far better than they had on Saturday to close out the series.

Both starting fives remained the same, DeWanna Bonner keeping her spot in the lineup for Phoenix despite Nakia Sanford now being fit enough to take part. It made sense, considering how effective they’d been in the previous game. Before we even get into the game action, let’s get the most obvious element of the discussion out the way first – this was a physical game. From the opening tip, it was just a war. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 09/19/2011: Nightmare series ends for Sun; Lynx pushed to decider

Two more WNBA playoff games, two more teams playing to keep their seasons alive on Sunday in the WNBA. Once again it was time to step up or go home, because in these best-of-three series if you can’t bounce back quickly from a loss, you’re done for.

The proposition was a little different for Connecticut than our three other Game 1 losers. The only team to drop the opening game at home – and that after losing two home games in the entire regular season – the Sun now had to go out and steal a game back in Atlanta. Just like they proved last year, the Dream don’t necessarily need home court advantage to turn teams over, and a low seed couldn’t stop them sweeping through the East and heading to the WNBA Finals in 2010. Now if they could defend their own home court, they’d have an extra couple of days to rest before taking on New York or Indiana.

The same starting fives unsurprisingly remained in place. Atlanta may have made their key fourth quarter run in Game 1 with Angel McCoughtry on the sidelines, but they weren’t about to bench their leading scorer and driving force on the basis of that. The first quarter wasn’t pretty, especially for Connecticut. The very first shot the Sun put in the air was a 17-foot jump shot from Tina Charles, which just perpetuated their central issue from the previous game – their star center taking far too many shots from outside. Meanwhile, Atlanta’s first three shots were all taken by the opposing center – Erika de Souza – and her combined distance from the basket on all three would’ve come nowhere near 17 feet. Get used to me saying this because it was a theme all night – Charles was already settling for shots from too far away from the basket.

Sun coach Mike Thibault recognised how poorly his team had opened the game, calling a timeout down just 4-2 less than two minutes into the game. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 09/17/2011: Dream steal one on the road; Lynx sneak one at home

After a nailbiter and a blowout opened up the 2011 WNBA playoffs on Thursday, the remaining first round series got underway on Friday night. With the 1-1-1 format that the league switched to last year still in play, defending your home court in the opening game has become vitally important for the higher seed. Lose on your own floor in Game 1, and your opponent has the chance to close out on home territory in Game 2. Indiana and Seattle both pulled off home victories to open their series – could Connecticut and Minnesota do the same?

Heading into their games against Atlanta, the main storylines seemed obvious. Connecticut had to find a way to stop Angel McCoughtry, while the Dream had to stop Tina Charles. If that somehow played out to a tie, then the relative performances of the supporting casts would come into play – but if either managed to take over, their teammates might not matter too much.

Both teams had their expected starting fives on the floor to start the game, a far cry from last year when Atlanta coach Marynell Meadors made heavy changes from her regular lineup for the opening playoff game. After relying heavily on her starting five during a successful second half of the season, there was no way that she would make similar changes this year.

The first half was dominated by the defenses. Continue reading →

WNBAlien Playoff Previews – Western Conference Semi-Finals: Minnesota vs. San Antonio

#1 Minnesota Lynx (27-7) vs. #4 San Antonio Silver Stars (18-16)

 

Regular season series: Minnesota 4-0

@ S.A. 07/31: Lynx 70-69

@ Min. 08/04: Lynx 62-60

@ Min 08/26: Lynx 85-75

@ S.A. 08/28: Lynx 72-61

 

So after all that work to make it into the postseason, San Antonio have earned the dubious pleasure of facing the 2011 Minnesota Lynx. The positive angle is that the Silver Stars won five of their last six games of the regular season. The problem is that they won’t be seeing Washington, Tulsa or LA in the playoffs. They’ll be travelling north to face a Lynx team that has finally pieced all their talent together and stayed healthy, losing only seven games all season en route to wrapping up the best record in the WNBA with weeks to spare. It’s a formidable prospect, and at first glance the signs don’t looks good for San Antonio.

Remember how good the all-conquering Seattle Storm team were last year? The group that swept every round in the playoffs? This Lynx team finished just one game worse than the 2010 Storm, and has put up some remarkably similar numbers. Continue reading →

WNBA Today, 09/12/2011: East finally shakes out as regular season comes to a close

Sunday was the final day of the WNBA regular season, and there were still issues to be decided. Most importantly, the seeding and resulting first-round matchups in the Eastern Conference were still up for grabs, but the remaining games all carried some level of interest. Records were broken, a scoring title was won by the narrowest of margins, and we finally discovered who the hell would be facing whom in the postseason. Not a bad way to finish out the preamble before the real fight begins on Thursday night.

The opening game of the day, tipping off four hours before anyone else, was in Connecticut. Both the Sun and their visitors, New York, had every reason to go all out for the win. A Connecticut victory would confirm them as the #2 seeds, bringing with it the first round home court advantage that was vitally important to a team coming into this game with a 14-2 home record (and just 6-11 on the road). A New York win would’ve given them a chance to sneak into second place as well, although they would then be reliant on Atlanta beating Indiana in the game later in the afternoon. A loss for the Liberty would mean third or fourth, again depending on the later result. Regardless of the winner here, at least one team would be hanging on what happened in Indiana, but ignoring the permutations it was essentially like any other sporting event – win good, loss bad.

After a long ceremony to commemorate the 10-year anniversary of 9/11, which can’t have helped the concentration levels of the players, the standard starting fives took the floor. Maybe the teams cooled down after such a long gap was created between their warm-up and the tip-off, because the first quarter wasn’t pretty. Continue reading →