Detroit ruck city

I was at the Sparks-Shock game last night for the 84-81 Los Angeles victory.

It started off as a fairly uncompelling contest, actually. Los Angeles came sprinting out of the gates from go. Their play was phenomenal, with a high-tempo half court kind of game with great play in the paint and excellent ball movement everywhere that had me absolutely amazed. Their half-court defense completely shut down the Shock, who had absolutely no ability to select good shots for the entire first half. Deanna Nolan of all people was held to five points in the first half. Maybe they were all taken aback by the fact that a visiting player, Candace Parker, received a greater ovation than anyone during the pre-game announcement of both teams' starting lineups. The Sparks looked unstoppable, and were looking down a 42-21 lead at one point in the second quarter.

Said a friend in attendance with me, "That's a Globetrotters score. They're playing one of the best teams in the league and you can't even tell."

The Sparks let up just a bit late in the second, but carried a 48-34 lead into halftime. For those of you who keep this in the back of your mind while watching a game as I do, you're thinking that they were on pace to win 96-68.

My perspective of the game changed significantly as it progressed. Early on, I was considering writing a simple recap and analysis of the game here. Then, I was going to consider turning this into a scathing critique of Sparks coach Michael Cooper, who, in one of this season's great coaching gaffes, turned a game in which his team should have put up 90 and won by at least 20 and made it a last second fight to the finish. He let his front court get out of position and give up space under the basket. He couldn't seem to figure out that he needed to tell Shannon Bobbitt not to hold on to the ball for the first 16 seconds of each possession. During a downright miserable third quarter, after Parker stopped the LA scoring lull with a great hustle play off a rebound, Cooper decided to immediately give her a break on the bench. Detroit never gained the lead, but shame on Cooper for letting them shave a 21 point lead to 1. If one more shot falls for the Shock, LA loses that game. Don't let your team go into cruise control.

Oh, did I say, "fight to the finish," just a moment ago? With 4.5 seconds left in the game, I gained an entirely new perspective on last night's action. Play had gotten progressively grittier and more physical as the game progressed, and Detroit especially began playing rough. Watching it all develop was like seeing a NHL playoff game where one team knows it's out of contention for the night and decides to try to hurt the members of the other team with a few questionable hits and some minor scuffling.

Except Detroit wasn't out of it in the least. But the team reminded us that it is coached by former bruising Pistons greats Bill Laimbeer and Rick Mahorn as they started giving unnecessarily hard fouls. LA was getting mugged.

That's when it happened. With 4.5 seconds left, Detroit's Plenette Pierson collided with the Sparks' Candace Parker, tempers flared, and the scuffle turned into a brawl on the court (Not a great video of the fight, but all I could come up with quickly). When (literally) push came to shove, at the end of the melee Parker and Delisha Milton-Jones were ejected from the Sparks, as were Detroit's Pierson and Mahorn, and the Shock suffered a casually as Cheryl Ford went down early with a nasty knee sprain and had to be taken off the court on a wheelchair.

Don't interpret my comments about Detroit's play above to mean that I think they were the only party in the wrong. Far from it. It's easy to love Candace Parker, and I admittedly can get caught up thinking that something going wrong must have been someone else's fault. She's a charismatic, phenomenal player who can seem to click at any position, and it's easy to get sucked in. That being said, the one thing I don't like about her is that she's a bit of a hothead. I could pretty much see the fight coming midway into the fourth quarter as she got into brief shoving matches after several plays, and Cooper needed to do a better job of cooling her down. In the collision that set off the brawl, she seemed to do her best to drag Pierson to the floor with her.

But Detroit were heavy instigators here, and I put a lot of blame on the coaching staff. Laimbeer and Mahorn need to realize that this isn't the '80s anymore, and the game has changed. You can't throw elbows, you can't punch a player when things get heated, and you definitely have no business clearing the bench with 4.5 seconds left. You can't have your players tackle their opponents when trying to foul to keep the game going. Give a quick swat at their arms when they've got the ball, head to the line, and continue with the game. Instead, the Shock were out to make their case physically.

Mahorn certainly deserved to be ejected. From my position in the stands, he was facing me, and it seemed to me like he did shove Lisa Leslie down during the fight. That aside, even assuming it was an accidental bump as he was trying to break everything up, he was in the wrong. It's one thing as a coach to step out onto the court to grab your players and try to pull them out of the mix. Your players. That's where the line is drawn. As a coach, you have no business touching the other team's players. That's the place of the LA staff and the refs, and Mahorn knows better.

Suspensions and fines will surely be handed out. While many of the Detroit fans seemed all too electrified hoping for another '04 Pacers-Pistons style brawl, this was a travesty. While the game may not have been great, the ending was shaping up to be very exciting. The Shock erased a 21-point lead to come back with every opportunity to steal the victory in the closing seconds. Instead, however, this took the momentum completely out of the game. Play was stopped for more than ten minutes, and the remaining 4.5 seconds (in which Detroit was then facing a 4-point deficit, though they kept things interesting with a late shot that again kept LA on their toes) went by in a kind of uninspired daze for those in attendance. It was all anticlimactic.

While it does occur to me that this might be the exact sort of thing to find its way to internet video and spark the curiosity of those who previously condemned women's basketball for being "soft" (which is nonsense to begin with), and while it could ignite an intense rivalry from here on out, it's still pretty sickening to think of last night's events as a positive in any light.