During the WNBA Finals, Phoenix's Diana Taurasi said she wasn't going to watch a replay of the Mercury's instant-classic 120-116 overtime victory against Indiana that opened the series. That game had turned out so well for Phoenix that Taurasi didn't want to mar the memory of it by viewing it again and noticing mistakes.
However, she later said she watched every second of Game 3, a Phoenix loss. And perhaps that is instructive of how video -- now an extremely valuable and high-tech tool in athletic preparation -- is used by at least one superstar women's basketball player.
It's not that there was nothing to learn from the first game for Taurasi, who ended up adding the honor of WNBA Finals MVP to her regular-season award. It's just that the one-point defeat in Game 3 had some critical moments that Taurasi wanted to review, any of which could have changed the outcome.
"I went back and looked at the film, watched the whole game," she said. "There were a lot of good things we did. Defensively we were solid, we did the things we wanted to do. But it was a couple of those key situations that they took advantage of."
Taurasi previously in the series had offered her view that games between evenly matched foes did not come down to X's and O's but rather who made big plays at the right times. However, that was rhetoric she herself would disprove somewhat. To hear her dissect in great detail the most crucial possessions of a contest was to realize that winning really was about both the success of the X's and O's plus the actual execution.
Players and coaches for the Mercury and Fever kept referring to their WNBA Finals showdown as being like a chess match. That's a frequently used analogy in sports, but in this particular case it really applied.
"They'll watch film and make adjustments to our defense," Indiana's Katie Douglas said after her team's Game 2 victory, "and hopefully we'll see some things we can do better as well."
The series went the distance, and after his team won the deciding fifth game, Phoenix coach Corey Gaines pointed out something he'd noticed on film as being a critical strategic move against the Fever.
"I took the pick-and-roll to the middle of the floor, and we eliminated their defense," he said.
Gaines had said before that game that he thought the ultimate key to Phoenix's being able to triumph in the series would rest in the Mercury's ability to get players in the right positions to maximize their offense. And in reviewing the video, Gaines thought that slight changes in spacing really would amount to the difference between winning and losing. Apparently, it did.
Studying film goes way back, of course. But in today's world, the process is so refined and specific that players and coaches can quickly find exact instances that illustrate whatever point on which they are focusing.
And in women's basketball, in which success is so often predicated on execution even for teams with outstanding one-on-one players, preparation with video is a major component of winning.
On the pro level, it's more for reinforcing principles and schemes plus quickly identifying breakdowns. On the college level, it's also a primary teaching mechanism.
Kansas coach Bonnie Henrickson, who played college basketball herself in the 1980s, says that rudimentary film work back then was important, too. But today, it's far, far advanced from what it used to be.
"We'd go in a lounge, and they'd roll in the TV and VCR," Henrickson said of her playing days. "But it was never on the road or anything individually. Whereas now, our players can watch individual edits two or three times a week for their own development."
Texas A&M coach Gary Blair says he sometimes uses video from WNBA games to help teach his Aggies.
"There's some good coaching ideas in the league and some teams that really execute well what we want our kids to do," Blair said.
With 13 teams in the WNBA and 11-player rosters, parity and players' great familiarity with one another are essentially givens. That means sometimes video work is the only way to discern subtle things that might go unnoticed otherwise.
But although it's now become an indispensable tool, video can accomplish only so much toward earning a victory. When talking about preparing for the scoring combo of Taurasi and Cappie Pondexter, Indiana's Ebony Hoffman said even being pretty sure what an opponent is going to do isn't necessarily enough to prevent it.
"Especially with Cappie and Diana, it's very hard to stop them from where they want to go," Hoffman said. "If an offensive-minded, aggressive player wants to go someplace, they're going to go there. But you still have to try to keep them from scoring."
Mechelle Voepel, a regular contributor to ESPN.com, can be reached at mvoepel123@yahoo.com. Read her blog at http://voepel.wordpress.com.