Los Angeles spoiled the first game in Golden State history in San Francisco on Tuesday. Sparks guard Aari McDonald scored 10 of her 12 points in the 4th quarter, including a 3-pointer to break the game’s last tie, and two free throws to put the visitors ahead by 4 with 0:05 remaining.
Both coaches — Natalie Nakase for Golden State, and Lynne Roberts for Los Angeles — made their WNBA debuts in the preseason exhibition. The Sparks visit San Francisco again on the 16th for the teams’ official openers.
***
My custom is to write something like a wire service brief — to remind myself that I used to be an old-school journalist — then the stuff that wouldn’t fly in an actual newspaper 50 years ago, but makes up the content of today’s Internet.
That was my first visit to a WNBA arena since the Sacramento Monarchs folded 15 years ago, and y’know something, it wasn’t nearly as much fun as I wanted.
I wore a shirt with Coach Roberts’ name on it. Whoever manages her FB account put those on sale after she got the Sparks job. I bought one, which someone noticed right away at the Chase Center.
“I like your shirt”, said a woman, walking past Row A3 in Section 4. I waved thanks, but after a minute, I got up to ask why.
“Why?” I said.
“What?” said the woman.
“You said you liked this shirt. Why?”
“I like her. I like her style, the way she coaches.”
I nodded. “Ah. Where have you watched her?”
“At Utah”, she said. I would’ve said that makes her a neophyte Roberts observer, but that’s not true anymore, is it. Coach was at Utah as long as she was at Pacific.
My seat is three rows behind the visitors’ bench, which made delivery of her Mothers’ Day card easy. “Am I gonna see you post-game?” Coach Roberts said, gesturing toward the press rooms.
“You’ll see me at yours“, I said. Odd that the Sparks media department knows who I am, but the Valkyries have no idea. Would y’believe I was writing about San Jose Spiders point guard Natalie Nakase a year before I ever visited the University of the Pacific.
I’m the last journalist to watch Nakase play pro ball in the US. Nakase and the San Diego Siege lost the 2006 NWBL Pro Cup final to Becky Hammon and the Colorado Chill, while I was the only reporter at the media table.
It hit me before the first timeout that I should do something about this: Introduce myself, get a seat in their media box, take notes on a desk instead of my lap, write copy while the ideas are fresh and a keyboard in front of me. Because I’m not going to be comfortable among these folk who aren’t there to study basketball, but there to consume “sports entertainment product”.
That’s what I’ll do before my 3 p.m. class today: Identify the Golden State’s media boss, and say hello.
***
There was a basketball game, between an expansion team and a .200 team (neither of which has been together as a team for a full week), and their first-year coaches. Though the score was tied after three quarters, both coaches remembered what was really at stake, and took time to evaluate competitors at the bottoms of the depth charts.
The Sparks could’ve used some interior help defense and rebounding. I’d rather talk about what a team has than what it does not, but they missed Cameron Brink. I imagined Brink would look more comfortable in their offense — besides Kelsey Plum, who’d look unbothered playing with concrete shoes undersea, and McDonald during her 4th quarter heroics, the Sparks looked unpolished.
I’ll wear my Pac-12 bias like a badge. I think the Arizona and Washington players looked more in tune than others on the floor, but they would benefit from Stanford contribution. The disintegration of the Pac-12 turned the 2024-25 college season into a mess for me — teams were scattered all over the map, and I had nowhere to go (I’m plotting a return to the West Coast Conference in November). Roberts, a Pac-12 coach of the year, even talked about that: “Maybe the only way the Pac-12 gets back together is through the WNBA”, she said in December (when we speculated that Kiki Iriafen might’ve been available to Los Angeles in the draft, and heck, why not get Alissa Pili in a trade from Minnesota).
I don’t have much to say about Tuesday’s game partly because I couldn’t see a lot of it. Anyone walking behind the visiting bench and the scorer’s table is an obstruction, and so is the rental cop who just stands there. And for sitting at the end of a row on an aisle, there’s constant traffic. Third row behind the visiting bench sounds like a great seat in theory, but in practice, I think I’m out of place.