Smith still believes in the Shock

  Monday, Katie Smith went to the White House with the rest of the current Detroit Shock members (and a few no longer with the team but who were part of the 2008 championship group.)

  Maybe that was the perfect way to start the second half of this WNBA season for the Shock: by celebrating what the team was last year, and what it hopes to get back to being. That will take some work. The Shock is 5-9 and is in last place in the Eastern Conference. Detroit, which has been off since July 22, gets back to play on Friday when it hosts Minnesota.

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All-Star Game: Fun for everybody

  Just a few observations from Saturday’s All-Star Game that don’t have anything to do with UConn (because I did that for ESPN.com):

  *-Kudos to LJ: Lauren Jackson has sore Achilles’ tendon, and I can’t imagine any fan or journalist would have criticized her if she’d skipped the flight to Connecticut and the All-Star Game. She still has the second half of the season in front of her and a chance to win a WNBA championship. Jackson doesn’t have to prove she will play in pain; we’ve seen plenty of that from her. So had she decided to give her Achilles’ a rest in a concession to long-term goals, no one would have thought less of her.

 

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Off to the All-Star Game

   I was feeling pretty peacock-like when Tamika Catchings had a season-high 28 points in Tuesday’s Indiana victory over Washington. Why? Because I’d already planned to write about her for ESPN.com, and so the story ran Wednesday after she’d had this great game. 

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When the “impossible” almost happens

    It was 55 degrees early Sunday morning in the Kansas City area. Absurd, I thought, shivering as my dog frolicked after her breakfast. It can’t be this cold in July. It’s impossible.

  But … then it occurred to me that maybe this was a sign that the impossible really could happen. Great! We needed such signs in Kansas City on Sunday. Millions of other people wanted what we did, too, but no one wanted it more than us. Tom Watson, age 59, was leading the Open Championship and on the verge of making sports history that would have no equal.

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Examining the “right” to say what’s wrong

   A couple of years ago at a WNBA finals game in Sacramento, a fellow writer and I got to talking about something that I’ve always found difficult to discuss. It was a relief to talk to her about it, because she understood exactly what I meant and had similar feelings about it.

  Here’s what it was: We agreed that it’s hard to write columns that sound critical of people without questioning whether you really have the “right” to do it.

  I know this may seem counter to the view many people have of the media. And that’s probably because it seems most columnists don’t seem to ever have second thoughts about this. They have a column, it’s their opinion and if you don’t like it, they don’t care. 

  Or at least they act like they don’t care. I think it may bother a lot of columnists more than they let on when readers e-mail to say, “I think you’re completely wrong,” or variations thereof. 

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Let’s not forget what Parker’s trying to do

   The Los Angeles Sparks fell 82-71 at Connecticut on Tuesday, and the preseason favorite’s worries got a little more intense. The Sparks are now 4-8 _ um, you may have noticed the 3-10 team behind LA in the West standings just fired its coach _ and so the question has to be asked.

  Are the Sparks really going to right the ship when Lisa Leslie returns from injury and Candace Parker returns to her usual self after her maternity leave?

  Many of us are trying to figure out why we guzzled the Sparks’ purple Kool-aid despite knowing that there really are some good reasons Leslie is retiring at season’s end, that Parker was going to try to do the ultimate quickie bounce-back, that Tina Thompson would be in a new place with different circumstances, and that the Sparks were going to have point-guard questions that other top teams wouldn’t have.

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Monarchs firing Boucek is a senseless decision

  Every once in a while, there are personnel moves in sports that are so unfair, so wrong-headed and so contrary to progress that I have a hard time sitting down long enough to type in my thoughts about them.

  Because what I feel more like doing is rampaging around and screaming. Witnessing sheer stupidity has that effect on me.

  But since that is definitely not a good way to communicate publicly, I’m forcing myself to sit down so I can write that Sacramento’s firing of Jenny Boucek as head coach is as dumb a decision as anything I’ve seen in following the WNBA since its 1997 inception.

 (And that covers a lot of idiotic ground, especially when you consider some of the Mystics’ coaching moves, the Lynx’s trade of Katie Smith, and the Henry Bibby “era” for the Sparks.)

  Monarchs general manager John Whisenant announced Sunday that Boucek had been fired and he will return to the sidelines. 

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Deuces are wild on Saturday

   Three of four WNBA games were decided by a single, solitary basket Saturday … and in the only contest that wasn’t close, Candace Parker had two points.

   So two was the magic number on a crazy night where if you’re a Monarchs’ fan, you’re saying, “OK, what else can happen to us?” … if you’re a Sparks fan, you’re saying, “So when does the ‘running away with the West’ stuff start? … if you’re a Sun fan, you’re saying, “Crap, we lose to freaking Detroit again and this time I didn’t even get to heckle Laimbeer.” … and if you’re a Dream fan, you’re saying, “Another lousy last 2 minutes. Gee, where have I seen this before?”

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World Cup review: The week *before* Brandi got famous

  It was during this week 10 years ago that we were all building toward the “dream” final of the 1999 Women’s World Cup: USA vs. China at a sold-out Rose Bowl.

  The semifinals had been at Stanford Stadium on July 4, and that was an incredible day. Briana Scurry was brilliant in goal, and so I wrote in my story for the Kansas City Star: 

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Revisiting Teasley’s recent thoughts is rather eerie

   A few weeks ago, I chatted with Atlanta guard Nikki Teasley about coming back to the WNBA after missing last season on maternity leave.

  One  of the things we discussed was how surprised she was that fellow North Carolina graduate Ivory Latta had been cut from the team before the season began.

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