I ran across this page after seeing that Nancy Lieberman was, at the age of 50, rejoining the WNBA team, the Detroit Shock.
The game begins and suddenly my faculties are barraged with scene after scene of flailing ponytails and basketballs careening dangerously in every direction. At one point, Terry and Doris commented on the great defense each team was playing, but where I come from that isn’t called “defense”, it’s called “banging it off the rim”. The bricks were falling everywhere. Three minutes into the second half, OSHA showed up and closed down the game until everyone came back wearing steel-toed boots and hard hats.
While the whole post is pretty funny, I wondered just how accurate this description was.
Not accurate enough.
I just invested some time watching the Seattle Storm play the Sacremento Monarchs. These teams are bad. Stinking bad. Just about any boy’s high school team with a winning record could school either one of these teams.
- There is no movement on offense. Both teams seem to play a zone offense. Any good defensive team could trap the ball very easily.
- The only offense was from spaced shooters who didn’t leave their spaces. There was no reason to leave any shooter. If there was a defender within 6 feet of the shooter, the ball was lucky to find the glass.
- Both teams threw the ball away like they were trying to take a dive.
- The announcer said that somebody was trying to set up a pick and roll, and it must be a different play than the one that is used by the Utah Jazz. There was no pick, there was no roll.
- Nobody ever cut to the basket.
- Four out of five trips down the court resulted in the ball being thrown away, literally into the arms of the opponent, or a brick being thrown up as the clock ran down.
I exaggerated when I said that any high school boy’s team could school these two teams. I have seen some men’s college games where the coach must have hired his team out to do masonry work because they were so good at hoisting up bricks. Any team in the men’s NCAA tourney could take either of these two women’s teams. The game would be over in the first quarter as the men’s team feasted on a trap and fast break to make the score something like 25-0.
I would like to see the Washington Huskies men take on the Seattle Storm in an exhibition game. I think the Huskies could play just four men and it would still not be close.