August 17th, 2007: Connecticut at New York

New York Liberty 74, Connecticut Sun 66

Mike Thibault loses his cool, Katie Douglas persists in being awesome, Janel McCarville is having a slight temporal malfunction, and the Liberty are a team.


Did we get help from the refs? Yeah, a little. Did it help us that Thibault blew his top and wasn't thinking clearly when he made some of his substitutions? Yeah, a little. Did it help us that Asjha Jones was injured/inactive? Oh, yeah.

Damned if I care, though. We are the masters of our own destiny and the captains of our own fate, or something like that. We needed this, and we got it.

The Sun were feeling a bit more sociable today than usual, or at least Whalen was. Maybe it was related to the increased number of Sun fans that a weekend-ish sort of game brings down from Connecticut, or maybe we just caught her and the rest of the team on a bad day the last time. Ionno. Maltsi was really nice, really personable, and seemed slightly surprised to find a whole bunch of Greek going on in New York. (She shouldn't have been. I don't know if it's still true, but back in the day, Astoria was the second-largest Greek community in the world. The biggest was Athens.)

I don't know why they insisted on doing both "God Bless America" and the national anthem, but whatever. It was a very pretty "God Bless America", even if the singer did drag it on so long that de Souza and Maltsi were both fidgeting and communicating during the end of the song. Not only that, but she forced the choral group that did the anthem into the fastest damn rendition of that song I've ever heard.

There aren't enough words to describe how amazing Katie Douglas is. There really aren't. That shot of hers is so smooth, and she's so smart on defense, and, damnit, she's hard not to root for, no matter how important the game is, no matter what team she's on. The only reason I wouldn't want her on the Liberty would be because it would seem to defeat the purpose of going young- but on the other hand, if I were building a franchise of players I love to watch play, she'd be there in a heartbeat. And Whalen, while I don't like her (she seems to have a chip on her shoulder and no good reason to have it), does have an amazing knack for finding small spaces and making use of them, whether it's to get a shot up, a pass off, or a rebound down. I'd probably find her less "cocky" and more "confident" if she were on my team. Sales is still feeling whatever injuries she's gotten this season, from the looks of her, because she's not as fierce as I recall her being, although she's still as strong as she ever was (I did not envy Erin drawing her on defense at all). Rasmussen's got good hustle, but why on earth is she taking deep shots? Get inside and work it, girl! Thibault played silly buggers with his centers all night- I'm honestly not sure what he's trying to do with de Souza. Yeah, she didn't have it that much tonight, but how could you tell? The small lineup didn't help him very much, since Willingham had a brilliant knack for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was surprised we didn't see more of Dydek- is her back still bothering her? She was the difference-maker for the Sun, I felt- Douglas and Whalen played well the whole way, but their defense began to click with Margo in the middle- nothing got past her. If she'd been able to play more- or had been played more, depending on the situation- the Sun might well have been able to pull that game out and I'd have no fingernails left by tip on Sunday. But it was what it was. Maltsi hit one unbelievable shot from somewhere in the general vicinity of the N train, but she's not the player I'd have in at the end of the game- she takes too much time and doesn't have great shot selection at critical points. Carey didn't do much that impressed me. Mahoney- I like her hustle and her aggression (and yes, she totally got robbed on that block/charge), but I think she's caught in a catch-22: she doesn't get a lot of minutes, so she feels she has to prove herself in the few minutes she does get, so she does things she shouldn't do, so she gets fouls and commits turnovers, so she gets fewer minutes, so she has to prove herself even more, etc. I think that if she got a regular dosage of minutes, she'd be a little steadier. With Sales starting to slip, I think we're going to need to see more of both Mahoney and the tonight-deactivated Hairston at the three if the Sun are going to keep up their status as a top Eastern team.

I forgot how much fun Thibault is to watch on the job, especially when he feels his team is being wronged. He's so dramatic. It's great. I mean, I also enjoy watching him play chess, as it were, doing the whole coaching thing, because he's one of the top coaches in this league and watching him work is educational.

You guys know me and my English-major pet peeve with teams having singular nouns as names. I finally realized why Liberty doesn't bother me as much as other teams do. This really is a single unit. This really is a team. Yeah, tonight Cathrine was bombing the threes like nobody's business in order to be high scorer, but everyone was in on the act if they got into the game. Shameka had some control issues with her shooting and her ballhandling, but she was in the thick of things to grab rebounds. Erin hit the shots she needed to hit. Loree was all over the place in that good way. Janel was tough on the inside, although she had a couple of instances of temporal discontinuity- she threw two beautiful passes to her *former* point guard that resulted in Sun fast breaks. I still think she should have been credited with assists on those two baskets. On the other hand, she did also throw a lovely pass to Shameka for the finish- how many times has she thrown that half-not-looking little bounce pass to the cutter for the easy lay-up? Tiffany was almost as out of control as Shameka in the first half, and I despaired, because one can make up for the other but if both are out of sorts we're doomed. But then Tiffany got herself righted and started really fighting inside, and that gave us more options. Unfortunately, she and Jess both forgot that Dydek is insanely tall, and that having a seven-footer's wingspan really doesn't do much against a seven-footer except let her give you a high-five on equal terms. They drove into her and she sent the shots flying. We played well together, which is one of the things that I love about these kids- there's chemistry on the floor between them, and they genuinely seem to like each other. Now, if Patty would only loosen up the rotation a little bit, preferably before any of our players fall over on the court, I'd be a lot more sanguine about Chicago- and Detroit, Goddess and the Connecticut Sun willing.

As mentioned earlier, there were Sky folks about. I had been wondering who the rather tall, rather dark, young woman was I saw; I wonder now if she was Carla Thomas. Of course, she might have been a collegian, or even a random rather tall woman. She did carry herself like she was *someone*, though.

Spoon looks good with the braids in that particular style. Very neat.

It all comes down to this, always has and always will: JUST WIN, BABY.