It was a game billed as a battle between MVP candidates Candace Parker and Breanna Stewart, but in the end that wasn’t what defined Friday’s matchup between the Los Angeles Sparks and Seattle Storm.
With the Sparks leading by two with 0.8 seconds left, Seattle guard Jewell Loyd made a corner 3-pointer to put her team ahead.
The referees reviewed the play to see if she got it off in time. It appeared that Loyd’s heel might have been out of bounds, but they ruled the shot was good, and the Storm beat the Sparks 90-89.
The loss moves the Sparks (13-5) to third place in the WNBA, as they missed a chance to tie Seattle (15-3) for first. L.A. also fell to 1-5 against teams in the top-five of the WNBA standings.
“We beat Minnesota, that’s it, in the top five,” Parker said after the game, her frustration evident. “So at this point, yeah, there’s positives that we can take from it, but we’re getting our (butts) kicked by the top league.”
Parker and Stewart entered the game as frontrunners for MVP. Both are former winners; Parker has two of the trophies, most recently in 2013, while Stewart won in 2018. And both have dominated this bubble season on both ends of the court while leading their teams to the top of the standings.
Both lived up to the billing on Friday. Stewart scored 20 and was an assist and two rebounds shy of her first career triple-double. Parker tied Loyd for the game-high 25 points while adding seven rebounds, six assists and three blocks.
The Sparks trailed by four entering the final five minutes. But L.A. guard Brittney Sykes, who finished with 17 points, hit four free throws around Parker’s second block of Stewart jumper to give the Sparks the lead.
Chelsea Gray, who added 18, split a pair of free throws on the Sparks’ next possession before seeing Stewart tie the game with a layup.
The Sparks opted not to use their final timeout, and Gray found a cutting Riquna Williams under the basket. She drew a foul and hit both free throws to give the Sparks a two-point lead with under a second remaining, rather than miss the last one intentionally to try to kill the clock.
“I think it can work and I think it depends on the timeout scenario,” head coach Derek Fisher said of that decision. “But definitely something to keep in mind the next time we’re in that type of situation.”
It seemed like a safe advantage, until Loyd’s heroics, though Fisher wasn’t sure if the officials actually checked to see if she was in-bounds on the play.
“Don’t get me started on another difference between NBA and WNBA to not have more (camera) angles to be able to look at it in those situations, but we had our chances,” Fisher said.
“I’m going to start shooting out of bounds,” Sykes added.
Parker made her presence felt early in the game, knocking down a 3-pointer to start a first half in which the Sparks led for all but 62 seconds. L.A. built the lead up to as many as 11.
But the third quarter saw double-digit lead changes. The first time Seattle retook the lead came on a Stewart spin move against Parker. But Parker answered right back with her fifth 3-pointer, tying a career high.
While Parker said she was pleased with the team’s fourth-quarter execution, earlier mistakes came back to bite them in the end.
“It’s those baseline drives, putting them to the free-throw line early in the third quarter. It’s those second-chance points when we need to come up with a good rebound,” she said. “So it’s those type of situations that we got to be better at.”
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September 05, 2020 at 11:25AM
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Sparks lose to Storm on Jewell Loyd’s buzzer-beater - OCRegister
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