Los Angeles, CA – Los Angeles Sparks were outmatched in height and harmony as the New York Liberty heated up from deep hitting 14 triples, the most made all season by a Sparks’ opponent while Liberty’s dominance in the paint led by Emma Meesseman season-high 24 points and Jonquel Jones’ double-double, 21 points and 11 rebounds drowned whom some WNBA coaches referred as the hottest team amongst the league, scoring a season team high 105 over Sparks 97 for a rematch victory at Crypto arena on Tuesday night.
“I just felt like we were missing a little ‘umph’ today. Defensively, we were not great,” coach Lynne Roberts said. “I just heard Dearica [Hamby] is top 10 [on the Sparks’ all-time scoring list], which is awesome. We just were a little bit off, but we still scored almost 100 and did some good things. But you have to give credit to New York, I thought they did a good job. Their zone slowed us down a little bit.”
Los Angeles’ team leaders, Kelsey Plum scored 26 points and Hamby added 21 points, eight rebounds and four steals but didn’t have enough still with the other two core scorers on the team, Azura Stevens and Rickea Jackson, scoring 17 and 16 respectively, to dispel the magic of defending league champions despite a relative quiet night from their leading scorer Sabrina Ionescu, whom scored 14 points and six assists.
“I think, offensively, we know who we are, we know what we’re good at, we know what gets us away from that,” coach Roberts said. “But New York shot 56% and had 14 threes.”
For Los Angeles (15-17), this is their fifth game in eight days as they fallen short for the third time in their last 10 games.
“One game shouldn’t break us,” Hamby said. “Like I said, we did a lot of things well, and we didn’t play our best basketball, but we have really important games coming up that we should win, and [we’ll] go from there.”
For New York (21-11), whom just loss to the Minnesota Lynx on Sunday, 83-71, bounced back with a historic win for their head coach Sandy Brondello, celebrating her 100th victory to tie as the All-time winningest coach with this franchise.
Veteran and fan favorite, Natasha Cloud made back-to-back buckets to give her team their largest lead, 96-85. Ionescu followed with a layup while 1:22 remaining in the game. Los Angeles failed to convert on offense, turning into another Cloud uncontested drive in the lane for a 102-91 lead.
New York had a trio of twenty-point scorers including starter Leonie Fiebich 20 points while Cloud had 11 points with two assists, two steals and two rebounds. Besides “Stewie” (knee) absence from the game, Isabelle Harrison (concussion), Nyara Sabally (knee) and Kennedy Burke (calf) did not play though Burke was listed as for emergency due to the team being short-handed.
“In the past, the zone made us slow down a little bit, but tonight, we actually did a really good job for the most part,” Plum said.
From Plum’s outlook, Sparks was able to draw a silver lining with their productive offense but might face going back to drawing board for their depth contribution after Cameron Brink did not play in the second half of the game. Live reports on Twitter were disseminated of her noticeably missing off the bench the beginning of the third quarter. Later during the game you could see her having her ankle wrapped up before it was confirmed post-game she tweaked her ankle without any further update.
