Posts for category ‘washington mystics’

[a basketball hoop somewhere in Washington, D.C. - K. Weidie]

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Excuse the comparison to the men’s game and think of the following more as context to what the Washington Mystics have accomplished this season. Through their run, a prevailing storyline has been about someone who hasn’t played at all, all-star Alana Beard. No one expected Washington to do anything after Beard had season-ending surgery on an injured left ankle tendon in April. Instead, the Mystics finished as the first overall seed in the East.

Unfortunately for the growing Mystics fan base, their team lost its opening playoff game against the Atlanta Dream in D.C. on Wednesday night. They’ve long moved past the ‘what if we had Alana’ stage, but for context, perspective, and for the hell of it, let’s find the NBA equivalent of Beard’s statistical production for a better idea of her impact, or lack thereof.

I chose three advanced stat categories to put in the Basketball-Reference.com historical NBA database (and please excuse the refresher course via the Basketball-Reference glossary):

• PER (Player Efficiency Rating): “The PER sums up all a player’s positive accomplishments, subtracts the negative accomplishments, and returns a per-minute rating of a player’s performance.” *Note: developed by ESPN’s John Hollinger.
• Usg% (Usage Percentage): “Usage percentage is an estimate of the percentage of team plays used by a player while he was on the floor.”
• WS/48 (Win Shares Per 48 Minutes): “An estimate of the number of wins contributed by the player per 48 minutes (league average is approximately 0.100).”

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Washington Mystics head coach Julie Plank was the epitome of business as usual after her team’s big 80-71 win on Sunday against the Seattle Storm, which just happens to be the best team in the WNBA. But the coach still understood that the victory was crucial, not only for a team still learning a lot about themselves, but also for their playoff hopes.

“It just felt like a championship, a playoff-type game,” said Plank after the win over the previously 25-5 Storm at the Verizon Center, pushing the Mystics’ record to 19-12, the most regular season wins in franchise history with three games to go.  “We’ve won six out of eight games, and this is kinda how we were playing before the All-Star break,” Plank continued. “We’re in a good rhythm right now, and we know that every game matters …. we haven’t clinched a playoff berth yet.”

“Yet” was evidently the operative word. The Connecticut Sun later lost to the Indiana Fever on Sunday, clinching a playoff berth for the Mystics likely before Plank even left the arena, and also marking another franchise first — the first time the team has ever earned consecutive trips to the WNBA playoffs.

So how did the Mystics do it? It wasn’t easy. On Friday in Connecticut, Seattle rested several of their top players. Point guard leader, and third in the league with 5.6 assist per game, Sue Bird played just over six minutes. Swin Cash, averaging 14 points per game, second on the Storm, also played just over six minutes. And two-time MVP Lauren Jackson, third in the WNBA averaging 20.9 points per game, didn’t even play; the reason cited was back spasms. Seattle lost to a Connecticut team that Washington has been trying to fend off for a playoff berth by 20 points.

Sunday was a different story. Jackson showed every bit of her natural skill and feel for the basket en route to 14 points, Cash looked to be unstoppable both inside and out, leading her team with 15 points, and Bird was a straight surgeon on the hardwood –  Jason Kidd with a jump shot — on her way to notching 12 points and seven assists. The Storm came to play.

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From 1999 to 2004, two different versions of Chamique Holdsclaw played in Washington D.C.

The first version was drafted by the Washington Mystics first overall in 1999 out of Tennessee and started in the inaugural WNBA All-Star game as a rookie.  Holdsclaw led the team to two playoff appearances, and averaged 18.4 points and 9.1 rebounds a game during her tenure.  She created so much buzz and excitement for women’s professional basketball in Washington D.C. that the Mystics led the league in attendance five out of her six years with the team, averaging well over 15,000 fans per game (close to what the Wizards averaged during that same span, until someone named Jordan came back and spiked the numbers).  Attendance banners were put up in the Verizon Center to recognize this achievement, and this was largely due to Holdsclaw.

But in 2004, another side of Holdsclaw began to emerge, and the positive press about her began to subside.  She missed a series of games down the stretch during the 2004 season, and rumors swirled about whether she was pregnant, suffering from some type of drug addiction, or just plain unhappy with playing in Washington.  Just a few months after the season ended, Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post, broke the story that Holdsclaw had been diagnosed with depression, and she had been too ashamed to speak up about it earlier.  She never wore a Mystics uniform again.

Since she left D.C., Holdsclaw has played for three WNBA different teams (Los Angeles Sparks, Atlanta Dream and her current team, the San Antonio Silver Stars), a Polish women’s basketball team called TS Wisla Can-Pack Krakow, and she also retired for two seasons.

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