Sparks lose tight home opener
LOS ANGELES » Sparks coach and GM Derek Fisher knows you needn’t only build an impressive roster in a crowded L.A. sports landscape.
Those players have to come through.
“We wanted to be in a position where we’re expected to be successful,” Fisher said before tipoff. “In L.A., when we’re in direct competition with 11 other professional sports teams, you have to be relevant,; you have to have players that people want to come and see, otherwise people aren’t going to fight the traffic and come watch you play.”
A crowd of 4,701 battled traffic Tuesday to see the team’s 2022 home opener at Crypto.com Arena, among them basketball greats Magic Johnson, Lisa Leslie, Carmelo Anthony and Baron Davis, as was comic actress Leslie Johnson, who played the part of an enthused fan from her frontrow seat.
They saw Fisher’s revamped roster lose their home debut 87-84 against the Minnesota Lynx, their
old rivals from championship tussles in the previous decade. The Sparks fell to 2-3, Minnesota improved to 1-4.
The game came down to its final moments, when Kayla McBride capped a remarkable 23-point outing — the day after she arrived back in the United States after her season in Turkey — with a driving layup and a free throw that put the Lynx ahead 87-84 with 2.1 seconds left.
The play spoiled the Sparks’ own late-game heroics, including Lexie Brown burying her fourth 3-pointer to tie the game 82-82 with 53 seconds left and Liz Cambage’s turnaround shot over Minnesota’s Sylvia Fowles, who committed her sixth and final foul defending the attempt.
Brown and Cambage finished with 12 points apiece.
Former Mater Dei High School standout Katie Lou
Samuelson made her Sparks debut, scoring nine points on 3-for-5 3-point shooting in 23 minutes – less than a week after winning a Spanish League title.
But it was Sparks mainstay Nneka Ogwumike, a six-time All-Star and former league MVP, who was the Sparks’ most incandescent contributor, finishing with 22 points and eight rebounds.
The Sparks got the good start they’d been missing in their first four games, bolting ahead 12-4 on Chiney Ogwumike’s layup through contact with 5:33 to go in the opening frame – a play that drew a full body shiver of a celebration from big sister Nneka, who’d delivered the pass to her in the post.
But thanks to an alert 12 first-quarter points from Kayla McBride — who stepped off a plane in L.A. after flying in from following a season spent in Turkey
and proceeded to pour in 12 first-quarter points and 17 in her first 11 minutes of action.
Her deep 3 with 2:26 to play in the first quarter erased all of the Sparks’ advantage, tying it up 14-14.
The Lynx went into halftime leading 46-40, enough to hold off the Sparks in the second half, when they outscored their guests 44-41 — not quite enough to come through with a win.