Final score: Storm 69 – Mystics 72 (L) (7-8)

Attendance | 4312

Anthem Xtra Notes | Plenty

Anthem High Note | Squeezed it out

Anthem Style | Luther V.

Fan Noise | Played big

Signs | Just a couple

Fan Psyche | Not anther OT!

Halftime | Storm Quest – Make a mess with food

Once again, the Storm give us a record-setting night: Four overtimes and the longest game in WNBA history; Lauren Jackson passes Edna Campbell to record the most points in a season for any Storm player; Lauren also scores the first Storm double double with 24 points and 12 rebounds, although it took two of the overtimes to do it (until this game, the Storm were the only WNBA team to not have a player score a double double); and finally, the guy who does the music snippets during timeouts had to run out to his car and grab his Heavy Metal Greatest Hits CD, another first for the Storm organization. Okay, that last one is a bit of an exaggeration, but he did have to dig pretty deep to keep things rocking.

Also, all of us armchair Head Coaches out in fan forum land get our wish. Michelle Marciniak and Kamila Vodickova start the game, and Michelle plays heavy minutes throughout. Now what will we have to complain about? Unfortunately, plenty.

You see, after all of the above, we still lose to a 4-9 team, at home, in quadruple overtime.

The theme for tonight can be described as the exception to the rule “Defense wins ball games.” True, when a team is struggling to score, they can turn to their defense and limit the opponent’s scoring too. And by playing hard defense, as the Storm do tonight, opportunities for easy baskets should present themselves. Unfortunately, the Storm do not capitalize on the fruits of their defense. Time and time again, they steal the ball or force a turnover (the Mystics have 22), but can’t score. And to make matters worse, when they take the shot that they only hit about a third of the time, the Mystics are the ones who get the rebound.

One of the potential highlights of the game is that the Storm hold the Mystics to only 15 points in the second half. This is a great defensive team effort. That sad part is that the Storm only score 22 points in the second half themselves, which leads to a 50-50 tie at the end of regulation.

So how did we, the armchair coaches, do by starting 3M and Kamila? Well, the first half starts and ends about the same as in other recent games. The Storm start out behind and stay there through the half. True, they keep it close and avoid the double-digit leads we’ve seen lately, but the overall impact that 3M and Kamila bring seems to only lessen the drought. The dreaded “first-half of the second-half” doesn’t really show up, mainly because the scoring is sparse but even throughout. The Storm come back late in the game, trade the lead with the Mystics for awhile, and end up with the tie, 3 times.

There are a couple of things that just make no sense in how the plays are run in the overtimes. Through 20 minutes of OT, there are only 3 or 4 plays (seemingly) that are specifically run for Lauren. Why not give your all-time leading scorer the ball? Why is Simone playing so many minutes in the clutch when she hasn’t scored more than 4 or 5 points in the last several games? Where is Kamila?

It is understandable that Coach Dunn may have been thinking about tomorrow night and the Fire. After all, they almost beat the Comets for crying out loud and here we are in the middle of a marathon. Maybe Kamila was tired. Maybe Coach Dunn was saving something for tomorrow. Whatever is going on, the unfortunate fact is that at the most important time of the game no one seems to want to shoot the ball and our star player is not getting the ball passed to her in scoring position.

It’s easy to see all of this from the 18th row. It’s easy to write of all this for a website, safely at home (at 1:30 am) without having someone put their hands in my face, body slam me out of my chair, or second-guess me at every turn. Honestly, I’m very happy that we have won 7 games and that our top player has scored more points, in half a season, than our leading scorer did for all of last season. But it’s also hard to understand why we didn’t beat the Mystics tonight. Sure, they have Chamique and Nikki and Vicki, but we’re still a better team than they are and we should have creamed them.

Notes:

Tonight’s anthem is… okay. The singer added lots of notes of course (what else is new, sooner or later we’ll just have to accept the inevitable and quit harping about it). He also had a couple of lyrical problems. We’re pretty sure that it’s “gave proof through the night,” not “gave proof to the night.” And, adding an “h” to words isn’t really a viable stylistic choice, as in “ho’er the ramparts we hwatched.” So far, no one has flamed us for taking the anthem singers to task. Our feelings about the anthem may be the one instance where we might be called “conservative.” Eeek. I promise never to call myself or my wife “conservative” again.

Kudos to Hannah, the little girl who shot the lights out during the timeout Sears sponsored shooting contest. She went nuts, missing only once (we think) and obliterated her competition. Mom and Dad ought to spend the whole $200 gift certificate on her and get her a cool new bike.

The officiating stank, again, but we won’t go into details. Any non-Storm fan would say that complaining about the officials is the mark of desperation. Since we’re not desperate, just frustrated, we won’t go on. However, several “colorful” comments were directed at the refs tonight. The tone of the comments started out relatively benign (and G-rated), such as “You’re an idiot,” and “You’re still an idiot.” As the game wore on, the rating went up. During one extremely quiet spot during the fourth overtime, one fan (okay, it was me) took the opportunity to bellow, “Hey ref, you should go back to the NBA.” Such was the overall lack of quality officiating.

Okay, putting tonight’s game behind us, it’s time to get pumped for Portland on the 4th! Expect a full Fanstuff report about the bus trip and Gameday about the game.