The Long Season
September 9, 2008
Despite the loss to injury of the team’s top two players, the Minnesota Lynx gave encouragement to a sparse gathering at Target Center with an 86-76 win over the Indiana Fever.
In one sense, the game was meaningless since Indiana had already cinched a playoff berth while the Lynx blew their playoff chances in a disastrous four-game road trip prior to last night’s game. The game did have significance, however, due to the fact that both Seimone Augustus and Candice Wiggins were felled by injury in the first half and did not return.
The season that showed much promise at the beginning for the talent-rich Lynx continues to limp on with the team gasping for breath as the end nears. Minnesota won its first five games this year and six of its first seven, only to go 9-16 afterward as coach Don Zierden displayed a remarkable ability to squander the talent he had at his disposal. The coach’s inability to come up with a game plan, inflexibility in his starting lineups, and lack of concern for fundamentals and team play cost the Lynx a spot in the playoffs. Minnesota will once again find itself on the outside looking in.
The Lynx have not ascended to a playoff position since 2004, and the team’s fan base continues to shrink. Last night, the crowd was announced as numbering 6,706. Most came cleverly disguised as empty seats. At the opening tip-off, there were more people in press row than there were seated in the spectator areas of Target Center. Midway through the game, instead of flinging out free tee-shirts to the crowd, the Lynx merely handed them out to spectators. Most in attendance got at least two.
If owner Glen Taylor intended to turn a profit with the Lynx when the team was established in 1999, he has failed to demonstrate the management savvy to do so. Instead, he appears content to showcase women’s professional basketball in the Land of 10,000 Lakes without concern for quality. Talented newcomers such as Wiggins, Nicky Anosike, and Charde Houston are wasted in Zierden’s so-called system, as is Augustus. Wiggins and Houston aren’t even starters. The Lynx are becoming the Flint Tropics of the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA).
Apparently the long layoff this Summer due to the Olympics (Augustus was an Olympian), caused the Lynx to lose whatever little cohesion the team might have had prior to the event. Consecutive losses to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Seattle, and Sacramento doomed the team to finish below the .500 mark. Perhaps they should have folded their tent before the start of the Olympics.
Against Indiana, Minnesota was facing a team with nothing to gain. True, the loss of both Augustus and Wiggins early on hurt the Lynx but Indiana also was playing without one of its top two players, Katie Douglas.
Augustus went down hard after a collision with Tamika Catchings. Seimone lay on the floor in pain for what seemed to be an inordinate amount of time before team physician Sheldon Burns could make it to her side. She then was placed in a neck brace and carted off the floor in a wheel chair. After the game, Zierden said that Augustus went to the hospital as a precaution, adding that he did not know the extent of the injury. Wiggins could be seen limping around the locker room, and will undergo tests on her knee.
As for the game itself, Zierden made sure to credit the “heart” of his players, who played on without their top two scorers “yet still managed to beat a playoff team.”
Houston and Vanessa Hayden-Johnson combined for 31 points off the bench to lead Minnesota to the win.