Repeat no easy feat -- but Monarchs trying
By
Mechelle Voepel
Special to ESPN.com
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HOUSTON -- Today's topic is the concept of "repeating as champions," and there's not much better place to discuss that than here in Cometland.
Thursday, the Comets pummeled the Minnesota Lynx 78-55, a tonic for a Houston club that had previously lost four of its last five and is struggling with two key injuries. The Lynx, in their third back-to-back game situation of this season, looked weary, sloppy and discouraged. Minnesota topped 50 points only when the Comets put in reserves and went into cruise control in the last few minutes.
It was a game where most of the "drama" came in watching how many times Houston's Mount Snow appeared ready to erupt (I lost count; Michelle Snow looks ready to mix it up seemingly all game, every game) and seeing if Comet Girl and Haley would actually knock over all the pins in Human (and Mascot) Bowling during a timeout. There was an upset in "find-the-credit-card-statement-in-a-box-and-then-make-a-basket" -- the slower guy beat the quicker guy. The moral: Doesn't matter if you get there first, you have to finish.
The Lynx, who are 1-9 on the road (only expansion Chicago is worse at 1-10), now would have to consider it an achievement to just avoid finishing in last place in the Western Conference.
And yet … ask any of the West teams, and they certainly wouldn't say the Lynx were flat-out incapable of beating anybody else in the conference.
Thus, you have one of the reasons why winning a WNBA title is so difficult, let alone repeating as a winner, which is what Sacramento is trying to do this season. Detroit (2003) and Seattle (2004) couldn't do it after Houston had won four in a row and Los Angeles two in a row.
"The reason it's going to be hard to do anything like that now is pure and simple," Houston coach Van Chancellor said. "It's because of how much better the other teams are."
Yes, even the teams that, overall, aren't "good." They're still not nightly pushovers, especially in the West. If the Lynx at home come back to zap any of the playoff contenders during the remainder of the regular season, no one's going to be surprised. The Lynx still have home games against Sacramento (Saturday), Seattle (Aug. 1), Houston (Aug. 4) and San Antonio (Aug. 6).
And despite their terrible time away from Minneapolis, the Lynx might even throw everyone a real curve ball and win a game on the road against a team with much more at stake.
Tamecka Dixon, who spent her first nine season with L.A. and was part of the Sparks' two title teams, now is with Houston.
"The thing is, you have to be very mentally tough to try to repeat," Dixon said. "It's very hard to do. You're going to get everybody's best game because you're the champions. Whether you're feeling on top of your game or not, they're coming for you. Every time you take the floor, everybody else wants what you have."
The Comets, of course, are trying to get back to the summit they last reached in 2000. They need injured players Tina Thompson (strained calf) and Dominique Canty (broken finger) back to have a chance at that.
West leader Los Angeles has the league's best record (19-5) entering Friday night's action, as Lisa Leslie continues to show she's as good as ever. The Monarchs at 15-8 and the Comets at 14-11 are in good position for the playoffs … but then San Antonio, Seattle and Phoenix are all bunched together.
Just being the West's survivor into the finals is going to take a lot out of a team. And whoever the Eastern Conference's representative is -- Connecticut is currently in first place -- will be difficult to beat.
The Comets' four-peat was the result of Houston having the best nucleus of star players and keeping them for those four seasons. The Sparks also had continuity of talent. And, not to take anything away from Detroit, had Leslie not missed a chunk of games in 2003 with a knee injury, the Sparks very well could have had the league's best record and home-court advantage in the Finals. In which case, the odds of them three-peating would have been much better.
Detroit had its core group back to go for the title again in 2004, but the Shock never really seemed like the same team that season, and then they lost Swin Cash at the end to a knee injury. Seattle put everything together for the title in 2004, but salary-cap economics worked against the Storm in terms of keeping all those pieces in place.
The Monarchs' big loss from 2005 was defensive sparkplug Chelsea Newton, the kind of player that coach John Whisenant really likes to have for the defense he always wants to employ. Plus, DeMya Walker missed 11 games as she recovered after giving birth. Whisenant said before the season began that he just didn't have a good frame of reference for how much could be expected from Walker this season.
Walker, though, has an "I'll prove it to you" personality; she's the type of player who tends to respond well when she thinks someone might be suggesting the odds are against her.
Erin Buescher has upped her scoring average from 3.3 points per game last season to 10.2 this year and is playing more than twice as many minutes as she did in 2005. She's a candidate for the league's most improved player, an award that teammate Nicole Powell won last year. Scholanda Dorrell, a rookie out of LSU, has stepped in to provide Newton-like quickness and energy on defense, plus she's much more of a 3-point threat on offense.
Of course, Yolanda Griffith and Ticha Penicheiro anchor the starting lineup as they have for so long now. You look at the elements the Monarchs have and project where they will be in a month or so, if there are no injuries. At least on paper, it should be a pretty similar team to the one that won it all a year ago. And yet, as any one in any sport would tell you, recapturing the same feeling -- let alone results -- from a title team is never something you can plot on paper and expect to automatically work.
"The most important thing about trying to repeat is keeping close to the same type of players," Griffith said. "Houston was able to; they didn't lose their core players. Same with L.A. It's a big factor when teams lose players because of the salary cap or injuries or pregnancies or other things.
"And there's also the fact that you have the target on your back; everybody is gunning for you. You have to be able to accept that additional pressure. It's difficult because some people may relax after winning that championship and not be hungry to win another one.
"I'll still hungry. One didn't satisfy me."
Mechelle Voepel of The Kansas City Star is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. She can be reached at mvoepel123@yahoo.com.
