Congrats to Jenny Boucek!!!

The Sacramento Monarchs, their front office and ownership have bucked WNBA trends time and again. They hired John Whisenant for reasons no one could discern at the time and the man led them to several Western Conference finals, a pair of Western Conference Championships and a WNBA championship. They have focused on defense as a team under Whisenant when the rest of the league was trying to increase scoring, pace and improve the offense. Whisenant and his defense are gone now, and the team needs a new coach.

These days it seems vogue to hire mediocre, former NBA players to come in and embarass themselves, like Dave Cowens did in Chicago, or perhaps how Mugsy Bogues is doing in Charlotte.

The Monarchs have bucked the trend again and are apparently ready to announce a former WNBA player and WNBA assistant coach as their new Head Coach. We know her and love her as the assistant coach Jenny Boucek, who was part of the 2004 Storm's championship coaching staff. Jenny we wish you the best of luck this coming season, and look forward to defeating your new team in the Western Conference finals this year!

Fumbling Towards Cognizance

I am not quite sure what happened. Perhaps it was the depressing start to the Sonics 2005-2006 season. Perhaps the death of my mother or the sale of my teams to an out of town ownership group. Possibly it was influenced by a really boring WNBA ASG and the second first round playoff collapse by the Storm. Perhaps it was the news that I had skin cancer. Likely it was some bizarre chemical/intellectual/spiritual combination of all these things. Somehow I fell into a mental funk from which I could not dig myself out. I simply could not find the motivation or the interest in crunching numbers or researching and writing about basketball.

I may be working myself out of the funk now, however. I am writing for a Sonics blogging site, SonicsCentral.com and have rediscovered a little of the passion I have for writing about basketball. I will pick up working on my individual and lineup +/- numbers for the 2006 Storm season. It will take a while since there are some big discrepancies between my numbers and those provided by the Lynx organization, so I am double checking discrepancies game by game. Some were typos on my part in my spreadsheet, others were different ways of crediting free throws to lineups. I always credit the player on the floor when the foul occurs not when the free throw is taken.

In the mean time, Storm season ticket renewals went out and I plan to double my ticket purchase this year from two seats to four seats as part of my commitment to showing the ownership that I want these teams to stay here in Seattle. Sign up for season tickets now if you haven't already done so, you will get to pick your seats in January (I believe) if you order your tickets now, so get on it and show your support for the WNBA, for the Storm and for keeping YOUR teams in YOUR region.