A Painful Loss

At one time, the Mystics and Lynx were on parallel paths. Both started out poorly and then began to have winning streaks to try and turn things back to respectability. With last night's loss, we've truly seen the fork in the road, with the Mystics continuing on the road to success, and the Lynx careening into the ditch. Adding insult to injury, Lindsey Harding sprained a knee and may be out for awhile. This was a truly painful loss.

The Lynx once again came out flat, and spent the entire game playing catch-up, with Augustus tying the score with under a minute left. However, they could manage only four points from Nicole Ohlde in the overtime, and came up empty. Last night they teamed Stansbury with Olhde in the hope for a little more post presence, but it did no good. They simply haven't acquired or developed the depth to recover from any obstacles such as injuries or star players having off nights. There's no room for error on this club.

Harding has been shaky all year, but represents one less weapon in the arsenal for the Lynx to try and snap of out their doldrums, if she's injured for any length of time. The best thing you can say about the team now is that they have an opportunity to develop other players who can become part of the core rotation for next year, especially at PG, and should have clearly seen enough that Olhde and Stansbury can't start for a playoff contending or championship club. The choice they made before the season started to not acquire more post help has come back to hurt them, big time. Their goal now should be to find those role players (Jacobs) or microwaves (Quinn, Murphy?) who they think will be able to contribute long term and develop--dare I say it--a blueprint for the future. Not some embarrassing marketing ploy, but a real one that will target players to help them where they need it most: the front court.

It would also help to find a veteran and accomplished coach who had a vision to compliment the blueprint, but that's a post for a different time.