From Resilient Storm push past Shock by Mechelle Voepel:

“People are going to just see the score, and they’re not even going to realize how tough a game it was,” Bird said. “And people might look at our record and think we haven’t had any close games. But, aside from a few, almost every game we’ve had to work. We’ve often had to come back. That’s the resiliency of this team.” – Sue Bird

I think that’s what I like most about this year’s squad. They don’t make excuses if they play badly, they tough it out despite “feeling like crap”, and they pull a win despite being down most of the game. I couldn’t say that to the previous year’s groups. Maybe it was the addition of awesome vets Le’Coe Willingham and Svetlana Abrosimova in the bench. Or maybe it was because everybody’s game stepped up (Swin, Camille, and even T Wright). Maybe they’re finally clicking in both ends of the court. But maybe it was because they have this mental toughness with them this year — like they just wouldn’t quit until the final buzzer sounds or something. They had quite a few comeback games under their belt as proof of that.

This team is far from perfect (hello, injured Birdy) but I like their guts and their swagger and I hope they will weather all through the storm that will come their way. And also, I hope that they make it out of the first round of the playoffs alive. Five (or six?) first round exits is already enough.

So I’ve been catching up on games that I haven’t seen last week. There are only a handful of those up in LiveAccess by the way. I’m not really sure why the Seattle home games are not archived yet and are only tagged with “Coming Soon” — how soon is soon anyway?

I managed to watch at least a quarter of the blowout in San Antonio. Frakkin’ LiveAccess would freeze from time to time and my Quad-Core 4-GB RAM CPU would act up. So I gave up on it and just got contented with the fact that we annihilated the Silver Stars 84-56. No complaining from this side LOL — except for the fact that either LiveAccess or Firefox or my internet connection sucks.

I haven’t watched the Storm vs Atlanta Dream game properly because I was at work then and the game wasn’t on LiveAccess. I think it was shown on ESPN2 and archived at ESPN360 but regional restrictions prevent me to watch said game. Too bad because it was awesome; we shut down the high-flying Atlanta team and handed them their first loss. We scored 90-72 behind LJ’s 32 monster points.

Up next in my viewing list was the Sunset Showdown against the Sporks in LA. The Storm didn’t actually dominate but they came up with a win 79-75 behind Birdy’s hot shooting. She had 22 points on 7 of 12 shooting, 4 of 8 on three points. LJ, Swin, and the fabulous Camille Little also chipped in.

Halfway through the LA game, I had this brilliant idea to change browsers. I dunno what was wrong with me that I forgot Firefox being a huge memory hog but well, yeah, when I switched to Google Chrome, the stream was fairly okay, still pixelated at times but no buffering or freezing. Guess, Google Chrome it is then.

After I was done with the LA game, *someone* (super thanks, you) gave me access to UConn’s 2002 Final Four Games and I managed to watch those two in the same night. Ergo, I only had about 2 hours sleep before I had to blearily jump to the shower and go to work. It was worth it though. Birdy and Swin (and Tamika and Ashja and DT) were a joy to watch in their college years and they are still great nowadays.

Lastly, I was able to finish the Phoenix game where the storm completely tore through the nonexistent Phoenix defense and played almost perfectly. Birdy got a double-double, LJ, Swin, and the most underrated player ever Camille Little each added 16 points, Tanisha got her shooting groove back, Svet was awesome (despite getting clocked on the face by DT), and Jana Vesela showed that she has a lot to offer this team. The final score was 97-74 but that totally doesn’t tell the whole story of total domination LOL.

Up next is LA at the Key. Hope all goes well and we hand those Sporks their seventh loss LOL.

—

We used to be seven-man deep into our rotation but I think Vesela can be integrated already. I mean, okay so she was playing in garbage time in the Phoenix game, but she was already moving well. That alley-oop with 0.05sec left should be in the highlight reel,W, are you hearing me? Probably not LOL.

Anyway, if we could get Abby Bishop and Lacey some playing time so they get accustomed to the plays, then great. By the way, whatever happened to A-Rob?