Sparks Looking to Seize the Day

Eleven consecutive games? The Sparks have had longer winning streaks. They’ve been lauded as the most talented team in the league before.

The only thing they haven’t had is a WNBA championship.

So all of their regular-season success comes with a set of ellipses, not an exclamation point, as we wait for them to provide the rest of the story.

“We know it doesn’t matter what you do yesterday, or even what you do today,” guard Ukari Figgs said. “It’s what you do tomorrow.”

Her “today” had been a pretty good one, as the Sparks defeated the Sacramento Monarchs, 80-78, even though star center Lisa Leslie sat out the game because of a knee injury.

But 21 tomorrows from now is when the playoffs begin, when we’ll see if this year is really any different from the past.

In 1999, the Sparks took advantage of the WNBA’s funky playoff format that starts the conference finals on the lower-seeded team’s home court and took the first game of their series against the Houston Comets. But the Comets won both games in Houston.

Last year the Sparks were supposed to be better. They won 12 in a row and 24 out of 25 games during one stretch of the regular season to finish with the league’s best record.

They had home-court advantage in the playoffs, and swept their first-round series against Phoenix.

Then they went to Houston and were pounded by 19 points. They lost by five when they came back to L.A.

So even the 11,000 screaming day-campers who were at Staples Center on Wednesday should know better than to put too much into the Sparks’ 20-3 record this season, which includes victories in the last 11 games.

Still, the Sparks keep insisting, this time it’s different.

“I think the whipping we took last year in Houston in the [conference] finals, that in itself set the pace for this year,” Coach Michael Cooper said. “We know now what a killer instinct is all about.”

DeLisha Milton said: “What happened to us in Houston last year and the year before, it’s made us who we are today. We realized that we can have all the talent in the world, but if you don’t have the mental toughness and the experience, it doesn’t matter how much athletic ability you have.”

They have experience. Leslie, Tamecka Dixon and Mwadi Mabika have been with the team since the onset of the league in 1997, and Cooper believes that counts for something.

“You live and learn,” Figgs said. “We learned a lot from last year, playing so well in the regular season, then having a great start to the playoffs and a horrible finish to the playoffs.”

So the experience is transferring to more and more victories.

“Every game that we play, we get better and better,” Cooper said. “I feel we’re a championship team. We’re a team that’s got our eyes strictly on the grand prize, and that’s the title. We’re not going to stop till we get there.

“[We’re] more mature. This year we’re not playing to our opponents’ level. We’re playing to a level that we’re capable of playing at.”

The Sparks still like to get out on the fastbreak, and Figgs is as quick as they get. But they know how to execute in the half-court game, as well, which is so crucial down the stretch of games--and in the playoffs.

“I think it’s because we take notice and say, ‘OK, let’s actually set a good screen and let’s actually curl off the screen’ instead of just being out there freelancing,” Milton said.

When the game slowed down Wednesday, after the Monarchs kept coming back from big deficits and applying the pressure, the Sparks won with smart passes and by making the open shots.

And they did it all without their go-to player, Leslie, who had led the team in scoring in 17 of the first 22 games.

“We found a way to win, and that’s what separates us from being a good team and being a great team,” Leslie said.

There are still some unsettling signs. Their three losses--all in a row--came to Houston, their top competitor in the West, and Cleveland and New York, the top two teams in the Eastern Conference.

All the losses came on the road. And all came in June.

Now they’re starting to build momentum again as they come down the stretch of a regular season that concludes Aug. 14 at Portland.

“I think we just want to take our mentality and our aggressive attitude into the playoffs this year,” Figgs said.

In the past they always left them behind, as if they were handing the car keys to the valet on arrival.

This WNBA regular season is a week longer than in 2000, but so far it hasn’t affected the Sparks’ focus.

Way off in the tomorrows, they’ll try to see if they can make the postseason last longer as well.

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J.A. Adande can be reached at [email protected].

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