Nicky Anosike pauses during a Washington Mystics team photo session. The St. Peter's HS product was traded from Minnesota to the Mystics in April.Nicky Anosike’s not-quite-but-close-enough homecoming started out with a real one.
Since she left St. Peter’s for the University of Tennessee in 2004, Anosike’s been on the home team in Knoxville, Minneapolis and Valencia, Spain, the most recent of her four stops in Europe.
So if you can’t reach Washington by the Staten Island Ferry, that’s OK. Two hours on the express rail is good enough now that Anosike is beginning her first season with the WNBA’s Washington Mystics after three years in Minnesota.
“It’s awesome,” said Anosike. “My family actually just left last week. They came and stayed with me. They were there to support me because I was coming to a new team and that could be scary at times.
“It’s just nice that they could hop on a train in two hours and they’re there to see me. It just makes it so much easier as opposed to being at Tennessee, when I was so far away from home, and then going even further to Minnesota. This is the closest I’ve been to home in probably eight years. It’s so exciting. It’s so nice to have family there to support you. People don’t realize how much easier it makes it.”
It was even easier on Wednesday when Anosike made her Mystics’ debut in a preseason game against the New York Liberty at the Prudential Center in Newark, the Liberty’s temporary home court while Madison Square Garden undergoes renovations over the next few summers.
Anosike scored the first eight points of the Mystics’ 60-57 win and finished with 14 points and five rebounds. With the game tied at 51, she drained a foul-line jumper with 3:08 to go, then came up with a steal at the other end.
Ultimately, it took a transition three from Matee Ajavon with 4.8 seconds to go to finish off the Liberty.
“It sets the tone for the whole season,” said Anosike. “It’s the first time in uniform that you step on the floor as a team. It’s really important. I think we did well. I think we had a few moments where we showed that we haven’t played together for a long time. But I think those things will come.
“The little things are really important for us at this point. We gave up a lot of offensive rebounds. Our defense, we weren’t really in sync. Our offense we weren’t really as in sync as we should have been at times. But that’s all things we can correct and I’m excited.”
That has a lot to do with her new environment. Anosike spent the last three seasons with the Minnesota Lynx after being taken 16th overall — the second pick of the second round — in the 2008 draft. She went to the WNBA All Star Game in 2009, the season in which she led the Lynx across the board: scoring (13.2), rebounding (7.4), assists (2.7), steals (2.7) and blocks (0.93).
She started 93 of the 95 games she played in Minnesota, but the handful of games she didn’t play at the end of last season led to her departure.
“Last season I was playing through a lot of pain,” said Anosike. “I just kind of felt like maybe my knee was a little sore and I felt like I should keep playing. After a while I just kind of wanted to stop taking the pills to take the pain away.
“I just wanted to see what was going on and I got an MRI. The MRI said I had a torn meniscus and I needed to go get it cleaned out. And I made the decision that I would go get the surgery because I just didn’t want to be in pain anymore and I didn’t want to take pain medicine anymore.
“I’m not sure too many people were happy with that decision. Of course, you have to deal with whatever comes from your decisions. That was my choice and I stuck by it.”
Anosike had surgery on the knee in September and after recuperating, headed to Spain to play and wait for news on a potential trade.
She was in Russia for the EuroLeague Final Four when her agent told her the Mystics had acquired her for a 2012 first-round draft pick. The trade came two days before the 2011 draft, and Washington wasn’t done dealing, trading guard Linday Harding to the Atlanta Dream for point guard Kelly Miller, a 2012 first-round pick to replace the one they dealt for Anosike, and the No. 8 pick in this year’s draft, which the Mystics used to take 6-6 center Ta’Shia Phillips from Xavier.
So Anosike wasn’t the only new face when training camp began on May 11, and that includes the woman who put Anosike in a Mystics uniform. Head coach and general manager Trudi Lacey is in her first season after working previously as the Mystics’ assistant coach and director of basketball operations.
“There’s not a lot of players who are returning from last season,” said Anosike. “I think there’s four or five new players. So we’re all going through the same struggle which helps because we have that understanding and we try to make it as easy on each other as we can.”
She’s hoping for it will pay off in a playoff trip. Last season Washington had the best record in the Eastern Conference, but lost in the first round of the playoffs to Atlanta. After winning two national championships at Tennessee, Anosike watched injuries sabotage the Lynx as her three seasons in Minnesota passed without a playoff berth.
“I’ve won at every level that I’ve played at,” said Anosike. “In high school we were always winning. In college obviously we won two national championships. It’s just WNBA, I cannot seem to, you know, get it together. So this is definitely why I chose to come here and why the team wanted me here.”
The winning atmosphere that Anosike grew accustomed to started at St. Peter’s, where she took a lead role in extending the Eagles’ long chain of championships.
When news broke in February that the school would close at the end of this school year, the finest Eagle of them all would have liked to have been among the alumni flooding the stands of those last games to say good-bye.
“I just felt helpless,” said Anosike. “I wanted to go to the rally where everyone wanted to save the school. Unfortunately I was overseas. Really, it’s just a feeling of helplessness because I feel like the school gave me so much and kind of shaped me for the person I am now. And just to see it going down and not really be able to do anything, it was tough.”
Anosike will carry that legacy through her WNBA career. When Wednesday’s game ended, a group of girls in their St. Peter’s jerseys, including Advance All-Star guard Jamie O’Hare, were waiting at the edge of the court for Anosike. They followed her back into the tunnel, where Anosike signed their jerseys and posed for pictures.
“It’s awesome,” said Anosike. “When I was their age I went to watch Ayanna Phillips play at Seton Hall, I went to watch Jen Derevjanik play at George Mason. And I looked up to those guys. They made me believe, hey, I went to St. Peter’s too, I’m doing pretty well, I can get there too and I can play college ball too. Just being that person now for these young girls is unbelievable. It’s an unbelievable feeling.”