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July 24, 2007

Lauren And Sue In The News

I wanted to call out a couple of great articles on the Web right now about Lauren Jackson and Sue Bird.

The first comes from Sports Illustrated ("How Lauren Got Her Groove Back"), and gives some nice depth to Jackson's personal journey in the WNBA over the last few years:

Perhaps that explains why Jackson, 26, continues to defy basketball convention. Now in her seventh year in the WNBA, the 2003 league MVP is playing the most productive and joyful basketball of her career despite stress fractures in her left shin. At the All-Star break Jackson was leading the league in scoring (22.4 points a game, the highest average of her career), blocks (2.16) and double doubles (10) and was ranked second in rebounding (9.3). She was also 12th in three-point shooting, hitting at a 40.5% clip. "Lauren Jackson is not a prototype, she's a freak," says Chicago Sky coach Bo Overton. "She's a post player with a guard's body control and skill, who can shoot the three, drive and handle the ball. There's no one like her."

It also confirms that if the Storm move to Oklahoma, she's not going with them:

Jackson is signed through the 2008 season but says she won't be heading anywhere. "I want to stay here," she says of Seattle. "The thought of not having a team here, or not being able to end my WNBA career here, is really sad. It definitely weighs on my head because I know this could be my last year in the league." She says there are a few other teams she would consider playing for, "but it's hard to pick and choose where you go in this league."

The second article is on ESPN ("Rolling in Rubles"), and it focuses on Sue Bird's experiences playing in Russia before the start of the regular WNBA season. Due to team and player salary caps ($728,000 and $93,000 respectively), many WNBA players spend their WNBA off-season playing around the globe as a way of monetizing their talents. In this case, Sue and Phoenix player Diana Taurasi went to Moscow to make nearly a half-million each playing ball:

Bird, 26, and Taurasi, 24, are too young to appreciate the incongruity that the man responsible for the public funding of their team's sparkling new arena is Moscow region governor B.V. Gromov, a former general and the last Soviet soldier to leave Afghanistan in 1989. For that matter, they are too young to fully appreciate the irony of American basketball players traveling to Russia to earn a far better living than possible in the United States. They learned about the Soviet Union in history class, certainly, but they do not personally remember when Reagan first called the U.S.S.R. the "Evil Empire", nor the decades when the threat of nuclear war between the two countries was a constant source of tension and worry. Though they somewhat understand the complexities of those times because they saw "Rocky IV."

Both are good, and worth a read.

Posted by Gavin Shearer at July 24, 2007 9:37 AM. Posted to Seattle Storm.

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