June 5th, 2018: Phoenix at New York

Just the Facts, Ma'am: The Liberty were strong on the boards, but the Mercury were more accurate in their 80-74 win at Madison Square Garden. Brittney Griner had a game-high 26 points to lead the Mercury, with Diana Taurasi adding 21 to go over 8000 for her career. Tina Charles had 25 points and eight rebounds for New York.

For terrible non-calls, sketchy attendance numbers, the Halloween color scheme, stacks of PBJs, milestones, the missing links, and an inability to cope with Kia(h)s, join your intrepid blogger, who is not a f'ing morning person, after the jump.


It's game day at the Garden, a phrase that fills me with joy and relief. I can deal with a few thousand kids if that means I can actually watch my team play in a place that was meant to hold basketball.

Katie Smith seems to have made a small new friend, a little girl in a Final Four shirt traveling with her dad.

Brittany Boyd and Sugar Rodgers are both shooting around, but not in the uniform that we're wearing today. That worries me a little bit and makes me wonder if their statuses were upgraded just so the league wouldn't start asking pesky questions. Tina Charles is shooting in non-standard shorts, but Tina has her own opinion on pre-game fashion and this may just be a deke. (Phoenix in orange and Liberty in black. Happy Halloween, folks!)

I'm pretty sure that's Bethany Donaphin hugging and chatting with Spoon, but I'm not quite sure why Briann January is so friendly with our staff. I feel like I'm missing a couple of degrees of separation here. (She's also chatting up kidlet and kidlet's dad.

This may not be news to you, but Brittney Griner is really tall in real life. This may also not be news to you, but Leilani Mitchell is very short in real life, and not all the upswept hair in the world can change that.

Looks like no upper bowl seats have been sold. We're at half an hour before game time, and groups are few and far between so far.

Swin Cash looks nice today. Working the all black everything look, and the kerchief/kerchief-looking hat suits her.

It is 10:30. Bro, it is too damn early for beer. Then again, it was too early for beer with that one dude on the platform at Fulton Street.

We can't even sell out the lower deck for a School Day game. This is some kind of nonsense and I am so tired of it all.

Schoolkid choir for the anthem. It is what it is.

It's 43-35 Phoenix at halftime, after the Liberty burst out to a 27-21 first quarter lead. As the game wore on, Phoenix remembered that they have very tall players, and most possessions turned into alley-oop passes right to the basket. If you blinked after a Liberty basket, you probably missed the ensuing Mercury basket. Brittney Griner has racked up 17 points to lead Phoenix. Bria Hartley has 12 to lead the Liberty, but we're also getting buckets from Tina Charles and Amanda Zahui B.

Garden security has really ramped up the obnoxiousness this year. I don't know if they're not morning people or if they don't like dealing with groups or what, but we kept getting shifted around like they were looking for ways to entertain themselves.

There was a scruffy-looking dude chatting up security, and either that was Dolan or I've mistaken a perfectly innocent gentleman for a giant egotistical jerk.

I'm about 40% certain Taurasi got her tech for flirting with Forsberg. You're married, Diana.

So glad to see Brittany Boyd and Sugar Rodgers back on the floor, even if they're not quite right yet. And I don't think we'll see Boyd again in the second half. She looked pretty tight when she came out, and she let out a word that I don't repeat when there are children around. (The Storm fans' favorite euphemism applies here: starts with "f", ends with "uck", and isn't "firetruck".) But Kiah Stokes is back in the boot, and Epiphanny Prince is still out.

I love this team, but they might be one of the most frustrating Liberty teams I've seen in a long time. Everything's there until it's not. I don't know how much of that is us being short-handed and how much is dealing with Katie Smith's rookie mistakes as a coach. Games like these magnify the effect of one, or two, or five, bad calls. We need to have the whole gang together to know what we can really do, and maybe that's not even going to happen this season.

Brondello went more to her bench in the first half than in the second half- I don't think any of her young players even saw time in the second half. Marie Gülich looks blonder than I remembered from Oregon State, but I suppose enough time in the Valley of the Sun might put highlights in anyone's hair. She also seems shorter, but a) scale, and b) everyone looks shorter when Brittney Griner is in the room. Camille Little doesn't move all that great anymore, but she knows how to be in the way of the defense. Stephanie Talbot had a nifty defensive play in the first quarter to defuse a Liberty fast break.

Leilani Mitchell hits threes. She's very good at that. It seemed like the Mercury offense was moving faster when she was in- that looked like when the alley-oops were really starting to flow. Yvonne Turner mostly seemed to be in as a shooter. Phoenix didn't quite know what to do with her.

Brittney Griner is just automatic at the rim. If you let her get that close, you've already lost. And if she's not already that close, she's going to do her level best to get that close, and if that includes hitting you in the face, oh well, too bad so sad. (Yes, I am still sore. Probably not as sore as Amanda, though. Wasn't my face.) She had a couple of authoritative swats, one on Amanda Zahui B and one on Kia Vaughn. I think, in a perverse kind of way, she might be too tall to rebound. She doesn't have the right angles. But she's automatic on offense and deadly on defense, and I think Phoenix can live with that. Sancho Lyttle's outside game didn't make the trip in this one, and our defense played like we knew it. We were often hands down on her when she got outside the paint. But she made some vintage defensive plays, seizing steals and blocking a Marissa Coleman shot.

DeWanna Bonner was money from the corner, and running the break. She creates such mismatches with her height and shooting ability. I think she might actually have kept on some of the baby weight, and it's good for her. Doesn't keep her from falling down whenever she thinks there's a slight breeze, but does keep her upright when she's not attempting to flop. Briann January is, methinks, there for her defense, and maybe to keep opposing defenses off Taurasi by bringing the ball up. I'm having trouble believing the minute count in the box score, she was such a non-entity on the floor. Diana Taurasi did Diana Taurasi things: she drove the lane hard and got contact, she hit her free throws (more attempts than my entire damn team, but I'm not bitter at all), she hit threes both contested and uncontested. Her defense was lackluster at times, and I don't know if she still has all of her astonishing range, but she's still damn good.

When Phoenix remembers that they're usually taller than the other team, they have a good shot at winning. They're tall, and they can use that height well in transition. But they were slacking on the boards today, and we feasted.

I don't think Sugar Rodgers was completely ready to come back yet, no matter how much we needed to bolster the backcourt. She had limited mobility, and looked very slow on the floor. It didn't look like she was able to cut and move laterally very much, which reduced her to being a slow spot-up shooter. I don't know why she was in the game down the stretch when she was so clearly limited. Brittany Boyd started off looking good, out there with all her emotion and all her aggression, like a wrecking ball. But she slowed up quickly and left the game abruptly (and swearing, as described above), so I think she re-aggravated the leg and may not be ready for Connecticut (and why risk her against Indiana?) I swear, any point guard who spends more than two years around the Liberty starts developing some of Spoon's body language. It's creepy. Kia Nurse looked like she was getting her first taste of the big time. She was wearing down by the end of her run. Her defense was top notch, but her shots were falling short. I'm still surprised we didn't see more of her at the end of the game.

This was one of the best games I've seen out of Amanda Zahui B in a Liberty uniform. Judging from the second half start she got over Kia Vaughn, Coach would seem to agree. She was going hard on the glass and sacrificing her body on defense. I'm still not enthused about her as a three-point shooter, but it's nice to have her as a bailout option when the shot clock is running down. Rebecca Allen brought energy but not much else positive. She's a little bit of a disaster on the floor sometimes, bless her heart.

And in both genuine and idiomatic uses of the term, bless your heart, Kia Vaughn. She had to start because of the re-injury to Kiah Stokes, and, um. It did not go well. What's the opposite of a thing going well? That was Kia Vaughn today. She couldn't hang on to passes. She made terrible decisions with the ball. She was mediocre on defense. She missed gimme shots on gorgeous passes. She's an adorable human, but I think I would like to cancel this reboot of the Kia Vaughn Experience now. Tina Charles took the team on her back, which is normally our fatal flaw, but so much of it came organically from rebounds and broken plays that I can't be too mad. She's just that good. But she wore down near the end, because c'mon, how much can one woman take? She's getting tripled at one end and doubling down on defense at the other. There's only so much she can do.

I don't like lineups that have Marissa Coleman at the four. She's tall, but she's not built for that kind of banging, you should pardon my language. She's better on the perimeter, where she can launch shots and swoop in for offensive rebounds like she did today (two on one possession!) instead of getting beat up on the inside. This wasn't a good match-up for her, especially with the positional shuffling she had to do. Shavonte Zellous seemed to be spending a lot of time in Taurasi's head, but the experience looked to be mutual. Both of them did a lot of talking. Quick, act surprised. Z looked like she was trying to force a lot of action, and it wasn't working. Bria Hartley alternated between taking stupid shots, playing intense defense alongside Tina (the two of them came hard at Taurasi and forced her to cough up the ball a couple of times), and making terrible passes. She was dragging in the fourth quarter, and I think Katie mismanaged her minutes at the end.

I'm not enthusiastic about my team being the proving ground for a rookie head coach. I felt that way about St. John's when Joe Tartamella took over, and I feel the same way about the Liberty with Katie Smith taking over. In both cases, I thought the hiring process was uninspired at best and lazy at worst. I can see Katie's potential as a head coach- the team looks motivated, and she's willing to reward players for doing well instead of continuing to reward a lackluster starter. I'm not just thinking the choice to start Amanda instead of Kia Vaughn in the second half. There was a sequence when she had Kia Nurse at the scorer's table to replace Bria after a couple of dumb plays by Bria. Whereupon Bria hit a three and forced a timeout. Kia didn't come in after that stoppage. But by the same token, she's got to learn to trust her players at the end. I get pulling Amanda after the fourth foul. I don't get not putting her back in. I get pulling Kia Nurse out to get her head back in the game. I don't get not going back to her. I also question some of her clock management. Right now, she looks like someone who's more used to the rules of the college game, and that's biting us in the end.

I was very disappointed in these officials. I expected better out of this crew, because they usually are better, but when Tina Charles is literally hopping mad, you have messed up. I'm still angry that Amanda got hit in the face three times, and then got called for the foul when the momentum from being pushed caused her to knock Griner over. A 14-FTA differential is noticeable in a six-point game.

So is every school group in the area tired of hearing the same anti-bullying slam poetry at halftime, and that's why we can't even draw on School Day? I mean, c'mon. Play a recording of Wil Wheaton saying "Don't be a dick" and teach the kids about nutrition or something. Change it up. The kids were uninspired and mostly quiet. The group around us was well-behaved, and the kids actually seemed a little too polite, like we were going to bite their heads off for having to go to the bathroom.

You should've seen the look on Tina's face when the MC announced that each starter would be giving away an autographed t-shirt. Tina was like, "I was not told there would be t-shirts."

This is my team. This will be my team until it is taken away from me. But I wish sometimes circumstances didn't make it so damn hard to enjoy it.