The Victor And The Vanquished

by Nate Parham on Oct 9, 2011 6:41 PM EDT in WNBA Playoffs 2011

In winning a championship after establishing themselves as the class of the league within their first few games, the Minnesota Lynx' triumph as 2011 WNBA champions seems obvious as already written in a piece entitled "Eschewing Eschaton" at SB Nation's Canis Hoopus.

"If you love basketball, you know these stories; you know these players. They don't need to be dressed up in any way, shape or form."

Although I would certainly agree that the team's talent was glaring for some time - and might have written something to that effect once or twice - it's also obvious that it eluded a number of WNBA analysts or fans alike even as the team began to hit a dominant stride mid-season. And really, "eluded" is probably generous - people were literally making up reasons that this team would lose.

That's not at all to say winning the championship was inevitable - or even seemingly as certain as the Seattle Storm's title last season relative to the competition - but it's also fair to say that as a 27-7 team, the Lynx were probably the most "under-heralded" champion in league history, at least in terms of the treatment of the team from whatever national media coverage it got and how it was regarded in comparison to how the Storm were regarded last season.

It is certainly true that we should take time to enjoy the team on its own terms for exactly what they did rather than blurring the accomplishments of this unit with historical context, but the treatment of the Lynx seems to be yet another example of women's basketball lacking "a sense of it's own mythology", as Jeff Goldberg wrote in Bird at the Buzzer or as Queenie alluded to in her piece about Kym Hampton and "the lost generations of women's basketball".

The 2011 Lynx were something special and are just as worthy of inclusion in the conversation about their standing among the league's greatest teams as the Storm were last year, albeit for different reasons. While victory might not have been inevitable, it does seem a certainty that they'll get their due, whether heading into next season or as they embark upon a title defense next postseason.

Equally interesting is the unfolding legacy of the Atlanta Dream, which is perhaps more easily recognized for a variety of reasons: here stands an expansion team that has found its way to the WNBA Finals in two of its four years of existence after being (perhaps legitimately) counted out in both.

Last season, most counted them out because of a poor regular season finish and a fourth seed in the playoffs. The basketball scenario was different this year, but even Dream fans - like Kris Willis of SB Nation - had reason to doubt how far this team could go.

I covered this team from day one this season which I will talk about a little more later. Internally I probably wrote them off three different times this season. All of the injuries, players leaving to play for their national teams, the 3-9 start, I am not sure I have ever seen a basketball team overcome as much adversity as this group did. In Game 3 of the WNBA Finals, it looked like all of that weight finally crashed on them.

Moreso than any team in the league - or in pro sports over the past two years? - the Dream have beaten the odds so often that it might be wiser to doubt the odds moving forward than Angel McCoughtry, Marynell Meadors, and Co. Although this team's flaws over the past two seasons may stand out most to some this season, the heart and resilience they've shown over two years' time is second to none and the coaching staff - which people have questioned at times - deserves credit for that.

I wanted this year's WNBA Finals to go five games because it figured to be as competitive and entertaining a matchup (on paper) as we've seen in recent memory; as a fan of the game and not necessarily either franchise in particular, it's easy to feel cheated by the "fickle basketball gods", in a different way than James might as a Dream fan.

If in fact you're a passionate basketball fan interested in basketball legacies and the proper preservation of some of the details that wash away with the passage of time, both victor and vanquished gave us plenty to reflect on during this long WNBA off-season.

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That’s not at all to say winning the championship was inevitable – or even seemingly as certain as the Seattle Storm’s title last season relative to the competition – but it’s also fair to say that as a 27-7 team, the Lynx were probably the most “under-heralded” champion in league history, at least in terms of the treatment of the team from whatever national media coverage it got and how it was regarded in comparison to how the Storm were regarded last season.

OK, I’ll bite…

…because this has been a major peeve of mine during both the regular season and especially in the post season, when for some reason it appeared to be politically incorrect to call the Lynx sweep in the finals (and having been personally derided as just a homer when I said the only team that was going to beat the Lynx…was the Lynx):

How were the Lynx seemingly not as certain to win the title this year as the Storm were last year, relative to the competition?

If you are basing it on the Storm having lost one fewer game during the regular season, OK then. W/L record means something, no doubt, so if that’s what people are basing that feeling off of, then that’s fine and we’re done. It’s basic enough.

But you’re usually…not that basic. ;) And if that’s not it, then are you saying that the Storm, statistically, were that much more dominant, compared to the other teams in the league, than the Lynx were?

Simple stats such as average points/game (Sea 2010 81.79 ppg / Minn 2011 81.5 ppg) and scoring differential (Sea 7.91 / Minn 7.88) seem to indicate that actually the teams were eerily similarly dominant in terms of offense. The Lynx actually actually shot slightly better as a team than the Storm: 46.1% for the Lynx compared to 45.5% for the Storm.

Defensively, the rebounding numbers are also actually pretty similar: 36.29 reb/game for the Storm in ’10 vs. 36.52 reb/game for the Lynx in ’11, with rebounding differentials of 6.5 and 6.38, respectively.

So it seems like, on average, the layman sportsfan like myself could look at the team stats and expect the both Storm in ‘10, and the Lynx in ’11, to drop 82 points on the opposing team and win by 8, while snagging 36 rebounds, 6 more than the opponent. (It would be interesting to know if those are sort of magical regular season numbers, actually, that sort of point to a championship season—didn’t you have a post to that effect on here somewhere?)

What causes the Storm to seem much more dominant? Is it that, once you mash all the numbers together the Storm are really so much clearly head and shoulders above their competition than the Lynx were?

Or was it simply that they had one clear-cut star in Lauren Jackson leading the way with 20+ ppg so that they fit the mold of what we expect a championship team to look like (a good team with a dominant player)? Is it that we’re used to seeing Sue Bird heroics and that she’s been part of the national dialogue as “the best point guard” since her days at UConn?

"I'm just playing [a center] on TV" ~Taj McWilliams-Franklin

by Shannon Cotterell on Oct 10, 2011 2:27 PM EDT reply actions

Facts vs. Perception

By “seemingly as certain”, the implication is that people seemed more certain that the Storm would win, not that the Storm were definitively better.

People’s certainty doesn’t necessarily mean much, but I think there were a number of reasons why there was a stronger feeling of inevitability around the Storm because of how their season unfolded:

1. The Storm have a long record of dominance at KeyArena, were only the first team since the old Sparks days to go undefeated at home, and had home court advantage throughout the playoffs. It’s only a few less wins, but the Lynx don’t have that kind of home court legacy and didn’t have the best home record in the conference.

2. Four of the Storm’s six losses were after they clinched a playoff berth…in July. Perhaps strictly from a Seattle perspective (where I was, of course) their 22-2 start was among the best in Seattle pro sports history and league history. Those games had no meaning whatsoever.

3. Even with those four late losses, the Storm finished 13 games ahead of second place Phoenix, which was 15-19. So yes, the competition in the Western Conference was indisputably weaker.

4. Along those lines, there was no way that LA was going to win a game against the Storm. SASS played Minn well during the season and did win a game in the first round, fwiw.

5. Lauren Jackson was unreal last year and Bird was better statistically than Whalen – in a year that we might not see a point guard repeat – which made them nearly impossible to defend in a different way and – yes – viscerally more dominant.

Let’s be honest, the Storm got lucky on more than one occasion, even at home. But because the wins kept coming and they were consistently setting/breaking all kinds of records, the Storm “felt” like a juggernaut for all of the reasons above.

But to the point of the full quote you pulled out, despite all of that “feeling” about the Storm’s inevitability in winning a title because of how their season unfolded, the Lynx were just as good statistically (in fact, almost identical in many ways). And given that they finished the season with similar numbers as the 2010 Storm, my point is that this team deserves more attention.

So there are two issues here: 1) facts and 2) people’s perception. For the reasons above, I think it was easier for people to grasp just how dominant the Storm were – people could take their pick of shiny objects. In contrast, I’d argue that the perception of the Lynx has not at all matched the facts of how good they are and – although this is very subjective – I’d say it wouldn’t be difficult to prove that they are the most “under heralded” champion because they didn’t give people the easy milestones to latch onto.

I did think the Lynx would win it all. But I felt the Storm had the title locked up beyond the shadow of a doubt after they came back from down 18 to beat the Mercury in July for their 12th consecutive win. And the media coverage of each team reflected that. Feelings are always misleading though and ultimately I think that following the Storm’s dominance might be part of why the Lynx’ success was muted for people.

Twitter: @NateP_SBN.

by Nate Parham on Oct 10, 2011 3:23 PM EDT up reply actions 1 recs

As they say on the Internet: “quoted for truth”.

by James Bowman on Oct 10, 2011 4:21 PM EDT up reply actions

And the Lynx had a 9-game win streak...

…smack in the middle of the season, on either side of the All-Star game (to which they sent 4 players). I guess everyone already forgot that.

OK then.

So the Lynx’s 2011 season looked different than the Storm’s 2010 season.

Sure. Fine.

But were the Lynx clearly the most dominant team in the league, compared to other teams in the league, all of this season?

Yes.

There’s no 2 ways around that.

The 2011 Lynx didn’t have to get a time machine and go back and beat the 2010 Storm in order to win the WNBA championship this year (I’d like to see that game, though). They only had to beat the other teams in the league this year.

Oh, and beat them, they did.

They beat them pretty. They beat them ugly. Sometimes they just beat them with one player. They beat them with Brunson for a while. Then they beat them with Augustus. Then they beat them with Whalen. They beat them with Mama Taj at the buzzer. They beat them with a wide-eyed rookie. Or they beat them with everyone on the team, and the game finished with 6-7 or more players in double figures. They beat them with their bench. They beat them with players who had been cut from other teams. Starters had the stomach flu and had to go puke in the locker room during the game or after the game, but still beat them (and had lines of 26pts/11reb and 8pts/10 reb to boot…yeah, Brunson was sick, too).

Having witnessed all of that, why wouldn’t the fans of the Lynx believe in their team wholeheartedly? Why wouldn’t they have confidence? Why wouldn’t they feel a sense of destiny?

Wouldn’t you if that was your team? Wouldn’t you feel like…this is it? That the time had finally come? That all the pieces were in place and the only reason that your team could possibly lose is that they’d gone from being a Yugo to a spaceship in such a short span of time that they were still figuring out the controls? (Even then, who bets against the badass with the killer spaceship?)

That’s what’s really weird to me in some of the post game narratives I’ve seen—the concept that Lynx fans were somehow wrong in their confidence in their team. We weren’t—the Lynx had proven repeatedly that they were dominant and deserved that confidence this season.

"I'm just playing [a center] on TV" ~Taj McWilliams-Franklin

by Shannon Cotterell on Oct 11, 2011 12:44 PM EDT up reply actions

I think the most interesting thing about the Lynx this year...

…was their defensive dependence on Taj, possibly their least heralded player on the roster (at least in terms of the local fanbase). I’m fairly certain that her defensive presence wasn’t lost on the team or the coaching staff. There is a blurb on the local sports channel today about how Cheryl Reeve has already said that bringing her back is a key component to the off-season.

I’m not arguing that she’s their best player or even that she’s the most important one, overall (she’s not). However, the interior defense with her on the bench was kind of glaring and I can’t imagine them not addressing the interior in the draft. (Maybe it’s simply a matter of her being the “best of the rest”; on the perimeter, the team always had 2 really good players on the court; a Wiggins/Augustus/Moore trio isn’t going to produce all that much differently than Whalen/Wiggins/Moore, etc. The Brunson/McWilliams-Franklin duo doesn’t have any bench-related combo to compete with.)

The only reasons that I can think of for the Lynx being underheralded are a) their bench was inconsistent, b) their defense hinged a lot on 1 player, c) a single injury at the point or in the paint would have crippled them (granted, this can be said about a lot of teams) and (to me, the reason with the most “oompf”) d) they are the Green Bay Packers of the WNBA: they won a year earlier than most people probably expected them to. Yeah, we know they’re really young and really talented, but the traditional championship narrative says that teams have to “pay their dues”.

by Stop-n-Pop on Oct 10, 2011 5:15 PM EDT up reply actions

"Yeah, we know they’re really young and really talented, but the traditional championship narrative says that teams have to "pay their dues".

This is a good point – people kept waiting for their youth to do them in…certainly at least partially due to their “newness” to the elite.

You’re absolutely right about Taj as a defender – she was outstanding this year. Augustus also improved greatly on the wing as well in one on one situations…but overall, i do agree Taj was critical to anchoring their D.

The one injury away from failure point is interesting: for a “high-chemistry” team, might people assume one ripple them more because it disrupts their rhythm?

Twitter: @NateP_SBN.

by Nate Parham on Oct 10, 2011 5:26 PM EDT up reply actions

I like the "high-chemistry" take

They are basically the team I think David Kahn sees in his head when he tries to put the Wolves together: up-tempo team ball that plays “fast break” defense and relies on tons of ball movement.

That being said, it’s hard to overlook what Whalen did this year and they simply do not have a backup point guard that I’d trust over the long haul. Brunson is great but a Brunson/Adair frontcourt isn’t a championship frontcourt. Amber Harris is untested and unready. I don’t know if Wright has the positional flexibility to get much more playing time behind a Whalen/Augustus/Moore/Wiggins perimeter rotation. They have an amazing starting 5, and the flexibility of players like Moore and Wiggins allowed them to get creative with some rotations, but they need Taj to come back next year, some of their bench players to develop into their new roles (Wright as a 2/3 and Harris to show she can play) or hit in the draft in order to make it click again. (In an alternate universe, I wonder what a Renee Montgomery/Tina Charles/Augustus/Brunson/Wiggins led team would look like if they never pulled the trigger on the Whalen trade.)

by Stop-n-Pop on Oct 10, 2011 5:37 PM EDT up reply actions

Also..

….the Lynx had the longest and most athletic perimeter rotation in the league. (To build on the Kahn bit.)

by Stop-n-Pop on Oct 10, 2011 5:37 PM EDT up reply actions

hmmm...big typo...

That was supposed to be “…one injury will cripple them more…”

But anyway, I think that’s a good assessment.

I’d add to the Adair/Harris/Wright commentary that all three showed a higher basketball acumen than Anthony Randolph in the playoffs and had big moments if not stretches. So further Adair/Harris development could help them fill a Taj void… but Harris is harder to get a beat on than Adair right now…so.. who knows…?

Twitter: @NateP_SBN.

by Nate Parham on Oct 10, 2011 5:44 PM EDT up reply actions

(I have a soft spot for Anthony Randolph as a Warriors fan. I do hope he eventually harnesses all that potential and figures out how to succeed in the pros one day)

Twitter: @NateP_SBN.

by Nate Parham on Oct 10, 2011 5:46 PM EDT up reply actions

Re. the "youth" of the Lynx.

The Lynx did start a rookie, but otherwise their starting lineup had the following years of experience: 5, 7, 7, 12 = 31 combined. They also had 2 WNBA champions out the on the floor already.

By contrast, the Dream starting lineup (using the final game) experience was: 2, 6, 5, 4, 4 = 21 combined.

If anyone’s peaking early, it’s Atlanta. ;) McCoughtry, arguably the big star for Atlanta, only had 2 years of experience. Seimone’s an old lady by comparison with 5. ;)

I think we think of the Lynx as being young because of the emphasis on Moore, (and sure, the bench is young—hence the inconsistent) but the Lynx starting lineup is actually hitting its prime right now.

I do agree that Taj was critical, but so were say Jackson and Bird for the Storm last year. There really are very few teams who can take a hit to a key starter and continue to dominate. I don’t actually think that it would cripple the Lynx more than other teams, because the chemistry on the team extended to the bench as well, and individual players, like Adair, got dramatically better as the year went on. I don’t think they’re necessarily BETTER off than other teams if they lose a player, but I don’t think they’re any worse off, either, just because of being a more balanced team.

And don’t get me started on the Lynx paying dues. 12 years of dues, man. Twelve. Long. Years. LOL

"I'm just playing [a center] on TV" ~Taj McWilliams-Franklin

by Shannon Cotterell on Oct 10, 2011 5:58 PM EDT up reply actions

Also, because I just thought of it again and I have to say it...

…and it’s horrible for me to say it as a Stanford fan but…

…How do you think Phoenix feels about sleeping on Adair and keeping Brooke Smith instead?

"I'm just playing [a center] on TV" ~Taj McWilliams-Franklin

by Shannon Cotterell on Oct 10, 2011 6:01 PM EDT up reply actions

They mentioned it in the series...

…I think they feel crappy.

by Stop-n-Pop on Oct 10, 2011 6:16 PM EDT up reply actions

Adair also tends to go beastmode on them when she's in Phoenix...

Just to make sure they notice. ;)

Can’t wait to see what her game looks like next season. She’s already proven she’ll put the work in.

"I'm just playing [a center] on TV" ~Taj McWilliams-Franklin

by Shannon Cotterell on Oct 10, 2011 6:53 PM EDT up reply actions

They shouldn't feel so bad.

Adair two years ago is where Courtney Paris is now and she was justifiably cut. She put in a lot of work and hours in the past two years, sprints, drills, on her own. While the Georgetown connection between Reeve and the GT coach helped to get a
foot in the door, Adair NOW is not who she was two years ago.

I remember Cal facing her and Wright in the NCAA and I wasn’t that impressed with her then. I am impressed with her now but the her of now had to do a lot of training to get here. Perhaps the Mercury could have kept better tabs on her but there are many, many players who, once they leave the WNBA, don’t ever make a comeback.

by tjalorak on Oct 14, 2011 1:40 AM EDT up reply actions

Youth is probably the wrong word

Inexperience together is probably better. And I think the paying dues thing still applies. Yeah, they’ve been around for a while but this current group is, as mentioned, inexperienced together. 3 new full time starters (Seimone, Taj, Moore) with new roles on the bench…Reeve said it clicked from the opening practice but even I thought they’d have to be lucky to win this year and I thought they were the bee’s knees.

by Stop-n-Pop on Oct 10, 2011 6:16 PM EDT up reply actions

Two new starters

Seimone’s always been a starter when she was healthy.

Don’t forget that Augustus, Brunson, Moore, Whalen and Wiggins were all on the USA Basketball training camp roster back in May, and they’ve all been in the USA Basketball system for a while, so it’s not like they’re unfamiliar with each other at all. They’ve been on teams together for years already. And Taj is a seasoned vet who’s been on a lot of teams and knows how to come in and adapt quickly.

I think all of that mitigated the relative “newness” of this particular lineup, and was part of why training camp went so smoothly—5 players had already have a pre-WNBA-training-camp training camp together.

"I'm just playing [a center] on TV" ~Taj McWilliams-Franklin

by Shannon Cotterell on Oct 10, 2011 7:07 PM EDT up reply actions