LOS ANGELES – When they say “rekindle your Spark,” I just know this is what they mean.
Just like I know the Sparks might have lost you with their four consecutive losing seasons.
But they’re playing now like a team determined to rekindle its relationship with L.A. – and so I’m telling you, you might want to give our WNBA team another chance.
Because not only are the Sparks winning, not only are they butting into the WNBA’s playoff conversation, but they’re doing it in style.
Playing a beautiful brand of high-IQ team basketball. Running up the score. Talking their talk. Doing everything you’re supposed to do in L.A. if you want to move the proverbial needle — putting on a show.
And I’m telling you, no playoff team should want to see them coming; I don’t know that they’ll be favored to go very far, but now that they’re finally healthy, they sure look like a headache and a handful. They’re so hot right now, no team should want to touch them. But you should totally tune in.
Because the next few games have higher stakes for the Sparks than any of their contests in years.
Going into this weekend’s pivotal back-to-back set – they face the eighth-place Golden State Valkyries in San Francisco on Saturday and host the sixth-place Seattle Storm on Sunday – the Sparks have charged into ninth place having won nine of 11 games. They have 15 games to play. And the top eight teams make the playoffs, which is something the Sparks haven’t done in four seasons, after having missed the playoffs only four times in the franchise’s previous 24 seasons.
And they’ve scored at least 100 points in five of their past six games – which, if you’ve forgotten, are 40-minute affairs in the WNBA. Think of all the great Sparks teams of the past, those perennial contenders led by greats like Lisa Leslie and Candace Parker. Never in 28 years had any of them put up more than three 100-point games in a season.
Sure, scoring overall has gone up over the years in the WNBA, like in the NBA. Still, where there’s Sparks, this season there’s fire: Coach Lynne Roberts’ pace-and-space squad is averaging 86.6 points per game, 1.7 more than the franchise’s next-best scoring season.
Definitely didn’t see this tear coming even a month ago. On July 10, the Sparks were 6-14 and it was looking like another lost season for what was – and what should be – one of women’s sports ultimate glamour teams.
Women’s basketball’s high tide might have been elevating the game across the country, but that only served to emphasize the Sparks’ concurrent stall.
While every other WNBA team went about beefing up its infrastructure and watching its valuation grow (the expansion Valkyries are worth $500 million), the Sparks have been lagging, on the court and off of it too. They’re still without even a dedicated practice facility to call home, a detriment to player development and in free agency – and so even franchise icons have been jumping ship.
So when the season started and Roberts asked for patience after the Sparks lost their home opener to the Minnesota Lynx – “it’s all timing-based,” she said – it felt both like a reasonable request but also like the team was back to square one … again. Do not pass Go, do not collect $200.
The Sparks had a new coach – the fourth in four years, counting interim coach Fred Williams – and a new star. But Roberts was coming from college and Kelsey Plum hadn’t had the opportunity yet to carry a WNBA team. The plague of injuries hadn’t lifted either, last year’s No. 2 pick Cameron Brink was still recovering from a torn ACL and speedy spark plug Rae Burrell was injured just seconds into the season. Promising sophomore Rickea Jackson wasn’t immediately clicking in the Sparks’ new offense – and it didn’t help that she suffered a concussion in that game against Minnesota.
Asking for time meant asking for more time. And we might spend large swaths of our lives sitting in traffic in Southern California, but what we want from our sports is instant gratification. Around here, as fans, we’re always in a win-now mode.
And, well, gratification came in what felt like an instant.
In the blink of one month, Roberts proved she is who the Sparks hoped she would be, the coach whose Utah teams were among the Pac-12’s top scoring teams in each of her final three seasons, averaging between 82 and 75 points per game. Also helpful: Her insistence that her team not “give yourself a hook to hang an excuse on.”
And Plum, women’s college basketball’s all-time leading scorer before Caitlin Clark came along, is the leader I thought she’d be. She’s successfully infused this squad with her “feistiness and competitive spirit,” as Jackson said after the Sparks outraced a red-hot Indiana Fever team (without Clark) 100-91 on Tuesday.
“No, KP is literally like one of the most high-IQ players I’ve ever played with,” Jackson continued. “The way that she looks at the game, the things that she tells me within the game, even at practice, it has helped grow my game so much. But also the confidence she instills in me, each and every game she’s coming up to me – and she doesn’t know how much that means to me – because as our leader, you want to make you proud. You want to [put] a smile on her face.”
And Jackson, the athletic, aggressive forward from Detroit? “Put somebody smaller on her to match her athleticism or her speed,” Roberts dared, “or put somebody bigger on her and match your size. Either way, she’s going to make you wrong.” Wrong to the tune of 18.8 points per game on 47% shooting in the past eight games – a span in which the Sparks are averaging 97.3 points.
Add Julie Allemand, a Belgian guard who has also recently returned from injury. She’s been carving up defenses, averaging nearly seven assists in the past eight games and notching the 22nd triple-double in WNBA history in the Sparks’ victory over Connecticut on Thursday.
And Brink, the popular 6-foot-4 center returned to action just four games ago and has already cordoned off much of the court. She’s one of those players – like Anthony Davis – who makes defense exciting. The way she got the crowd going when, on consecutive sequences against Indiana, she smothered arguably (if you can find anyone to argue this) the fastest guard in the league, one on one, forcing Kelsey Mitchell to first give the ball up and then to travel? Yeah, the Sparks are fun again.
They have their swagger back.
“It’s been really cool for me, rewarding to see these guys understand what it takes to really win and to hate losing, not get used to losing,” Roberts said this week. “They’ve turned the corner with that. But … there’s not a sense of, you know, we’ve arrived. Because we haven’t. We have not achieved what we said we were going to do. We’re having a solid season, but we didn’t set out to have a solid season. We want to make the playoffs.”
And surely, no, not all is right with the world, but this one thing – the Sparks in a playoff hunt? As it should be.
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