San Antonio rolls over Mystics

By Keith Henry

WASHINGTON- The aggressive attitude of the Washington Mystics is apparent on the court at times. However, their inconsistencies continue to plague this team at the Verizon Center.

The Mystics brought their defense to the party and left it on the table in their 83-75 loss to the San Antonio Silver Stars in front of a national audience watching on ABC.

The game came down to lack of aggressiveness, defensive lapses and turnovers which ended up costing the Mystics a victory. “In the second quarter, we settled offensively. That’s one of the reasons we were switching and using a variety of presses to create some aggressiveness,” said Mystics head coach Tree Rollins.

The Mystics led early in the second quarter 21-13 and was looking to improve on it. But after a San Antonio timeout, they scored the next seven points off the bigs in Ruth Riley and Ann Wauters. A Wauters three cut the Mystics advantage to 21-20. After Nakia Sanford banked in a 14 foot jumper, the Silver Stars outscored Washington 16-5 to take a 36-28 halftime advantage.

San Antonio (12-6) stretched the lead to 50-38 on a Sophia Young lay-up with 6:04 left in the third quarter and it looked like the blowout was inevitable. But as usual, the Mystics turned up the heat late.

The Mystics outscored San Antonio 15-5 led by Alana Beard. Beard’s three from the corner cut the deficit to 55-53 with 1:34 left. The Silver Stars led 57-53 at the end of the quarter.

Washington (6-11) took a 61-60 lead on a couple Monique Currie free throws with 7:46 left in the fourth quarter. However, the Mystics whiffed on a couple of excellent opportunities which eventually came back to haunt them.

One of them was a driving lay-up from Taj McWilliams-Franklin that didn’t go in the basket with 6:03 left. Becky Hammon answered with a three to give the Silver Stars the lead for good at 63-61. That three started a run of nine unanswered points for San Antonio. Young buried a jumper to give the Silver Stars a 69-61 advantage with 3:56 remaining. McWilliams-Franklin stated, “We were close in the fourth quarter and had an opportunity to win. That’s all you can ask for, even if you play bad. The WNBA is made of teams that make runs. Every team makes runs whether it’s two quarters, the second and fourth. So every team in the league does that. You have to weather the run and put on your own run. I don’t think we weathered their run well. San Antonio weathered ours and still kept going. We didn’t weather theirs. We kind of let them do anything they wanted. And when we were pushed back against the wall, then we responded instead of responding earlier to get ourselves in the groove.”

It was the Hammon and Young show for much of the fourth quarter as they scored the final 24 points of the game. Hammon led all scorers with 28 points while Young followed with 23 points. “They have a great one-two combo with Becky and Sophia. They drastically turned the game around. It all boils down to our defensive execution,” said Beard.

At one point of the game, the communication wasn’t there on defense as Hammon was left alone for what seemed to be an eternity as she calmly drained a three pointer. Rollins said, “On Becky’s last three, she looked at us, smiled at us and shot the three. That’s how open she was because we didn’t communicate, we didn’t switch. So that kind of cost us the game.”

Beard led the Mystics with 21 points with Crystal Langhorne having her best game of the season with 17 points.