In the latest episode of Locked On Women’s Basketball, Hunter Cruse, Em Adler and Lincoln Shafer decide to travel back in time and revisit WNBA teams of the past. They spin two wheels to determine where in WNBA history they’ll end up, with one wheel selecting the year (1997-2015) and one selecting the team.
The first team the wheels select is the 2000 Phoenix Mercury. Under head coach Cheryl Miller, that team went 20-12, a five-win improvement over 1999, and lost in the Western Conference semifinals to the Los Angeles Sparks. Its top players included forward Brandy Reed, guard Tonya Edwards and forward/center Jennifer Gillom. Here’s Adler on Reed:
“This is one of two Brandy Reed seasons. One of the most lost players in in league history, [she was an] absolute frickin’ star for two and a half seasons, and then we’re not going to talk about what happened afterwards. … If you’ve never heard of her, there are reasons, but she was absolutely insane and probably deserved to finish, like, top-three in MVP [voting] twice.”
Later in the episode, the wheels land on the 2002 Orlando Miracle, who became the Connecticut Sun a year later. The Miracle were led in 2002 by Dee Brown, went 16-16 and missed the playoffs. Their best players included guard Shannon Johnson, forward/guard Nykesha Sales and forward Wendy Palmer. Adler explains where the franchise was at this point in WNBA history:
“This is the last year before Mike Thibault gets there [as head coach and general manager]. So what that means is you have a lot of players who basically don’t perform as well as they do in any other season of their career, except for Wendy Palmer, who just randomly shoots super well from three and stops committing a lethal amount of turnovers.”
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