By Mel Greenberg
WASHINGTON – It will still be a while before the identity is determined of a new tenant who will occupy a stately office-residental structure, dressed in white, which is located at nearby 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.
In the WNBA, campaigning of a different style continued Sunday afternoon here at the Verizon Center in a matchup between the Eastern Division-contending Connecticut Sun and the playoff-contending Washington Mystics.
Correction on the last part of the previous sentence.
Make that the trying-to-get-into-playoff-contention Washington Mystics.
“If we don’t get it done in July, our break is going to be the break, because we only have six games afterwards,” Mystics senior stateswoman Taj McWilliams-Franklin said after Washington pulled off an adventurous 69-64 triumph over the Connecticut Sun. “This is basically our mini-playoffs, these next seven games.”
Washington trails the third-place deadlocked New York Liberty and Indiana Fever by 2 ½ games for the last postseason spot in the East. Once the month nears and end, the WNBA summer will go into suspension for the duration of the Beijing Olympics before resuming in September.
In Sunday’s game, a statistical graphic of the Mystics’ differential over the Sun would resemble polling results at various junctures of presidential candidates.
After an early surge to a 9-0 advantage by Connecticut, the rest of the afternoon belonged to the Mystics, who twice squandered most of a pair of seemingly insurmountable leads.
A lopsided 31-18 lead in the second quarter was reduced to a slim 36-34 margin at halftime. The differential than ballooned to a fat 54-40 advantage in the third quarter, only to shrivel all the way down to 63-62 in the last minute before Washington finally stopped Connecticut from bending the outcome in its direction.
More accurately, make that before the Sun helped the Mystics avoid a setback in the last minute.
“We just have to put teams away,” said McWilliams-Franklin, who had 11 points and 10 rebounds. Nikki Blue had a career-high 13 points for Washington.
“We just keep letting them hang around,” McWilliams-Franklin replayed the flow of the game. “You get a lead in the second quarter and you lose it. You get a lead in the third quarter, we lose it.
“As a team that needs wins, we don’t have the luxury of a Connecticut that can lose a game here and there and still be fighting for first or second place. Every game is important. As a team, we must be desperate every single minute.”
Credit the Whalen factor for affecting Washington’s inability to run away once it got way out in front of the Sun.
Lindsay Whalen, who needs to be given serious consideration in the WNBA’s MVP discussion, poured in 33 points, but they all went for naught when the bottom line came into play.
“I thought we were ready to go,” Whalen said. “We got off to a good start. I don’t know. I felt they played well and we had some stretches where we couldn’t score. We just just have to get back to running some offense and looking to get our shots. We just have to be ready to re-gather ourselves mentally and be ready to go Tuesday night.”
“Awful in stretches,” was the way Connecticut coach Mike Thibault described an anemic field goal effort in which the Sun was 20-for-60. “As a group, we’re just not making shots right now. When your point guard is making half your points, it’s not a good thing.”
The loss dropped the Sun a game behind the Detroit Shock and left Connecticut one-up in the loss column over New York and Indiana.
“We have to get more people to step up and make open shots,” Thibault said. “We’re rushing things. We’re fumbling the ball in the lane. That was ugly.”
--Mel
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