Apparently, championship expectations were too great from the start for the Minnesota Lynx this season.
“The expectations for us to be a playoff team was spot on,” coach Cheryl Reeve said Tuesday. “But the expectation that we would be one of the elite teams in the WNBA, I could tell early on, wasn’t going to happen and was a bit of a stretch.”
Visions of a WNBA championship formed during a busy offseason, which included the Lynx acquiring all-star guard Lindsay Whalen and selecting all-star power forward Rebekkah Brunson in the dispersal draft when Sacramento folded. They joined a Lynx squad that already had all-stars Seimone Augustus, Charde Houston and Nicky Anosike.
Making the playoffs looked like a given.
Instead, the Lynx missed the playoffs for the 10th time in 12 years after compiling a 13-21 record and a fifth-place finish in the Western Conference. They haven’t made the playoffs since 2004.
“It’s a strange feeling not to be a part of the playoffs,” said Reeve, who was an assistant coach with the Detroit Shock when they won two WNBA titles. “This is only the third time in my (coaching) career that I haven’t been in the playoffs. Clearly, our team fell short of expectations.”
Why? Team management isn’t quite sure.
“We have to figure out what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again,” executive vice president Roger Griffith said. “I don’t want to make any excuses. There are no excuses for what happened this season.
“The challenge is to pinpoint what happened. It could be a mixture of a lot of things. We’ve got to let the disappointment settle and let the evaluation process take place.”
Whalen laments the team’s 2-9 start.
“I think the slow start ended up costing us in the end as far as not making the playoffs,” she said. “We put ourselves in a 2-9 hole and struggled from there to get back to .500 and in the playoff picture.
“We’ll all look back on the season with a lot of feelings of missed opportunities. With all the close games that we did lose, you can’t help but think about one or two of them and things you could have done differently. And this season, that ended up being the difference in making the playoffs as opposed to not making them.”
Injuries to Augustus and Candice Wiggins certainly weren’t in the championship blueprint. Augustus missed the first month of the season after surgery to remove fibroids and her uterus. When she returned, she averaged a career-low 16.9 points per game.
Wiggins had knee surgery during training camp, returned to play eight games during the midseason and then suffered a season-ending ruptured left Achilles’ tendon.
The team’s depth was supposed to bridge their absence, but that didn’t happen.
Minnesota lost nine games after holding double-digit leads. Clearly, going for the jugular and closing out games wasn’t in the team’s nature. Having one of the league’s worst defenses and worst shooting percentages didn’t help either.
Griffith and Reeve spent Monday conducting exit interviews and evaluations with players.
“When I sit down and talk with them, it makes me more optimistic for the future because they’re taking it so hard,” Griffith said. “I heard a lot of good things about recognizing what needs to be done.”
“The coaches want us to take everything we learned and come back next year ready, focused and willing to do whatever it takes to not be in this position next year,” rookie Monica Wright said.
Next year. It is the seemingly annual battle cry of the Lynx to just wait until next year. The Lynx, assured of two of the top four picks in the 2011 draft, are crossing their fingers during the WNBA lottery that they again will get the top pick next spring. UConn’s Maya Moore is a no-brainer as the top overall pick.
The Lynx have stockpiled top-level picks in recent years, but the talent hasn’t produced victories.
“Fundamentally, part of the analysis is to see how we use draft picks and free agents to assemble the best team,” Griffith said. “We like what we did in building the team, but we need to do more. That’s our challenge.”
Said Reeve: “This season isn’t quite what I had envisioned, but we do have a really talented team.”
