On Fan Appreciation Night, the Storm lost against the San Antonio Silver Stars 59-58.  It was San Antonio’s first and only win of the season and the last regular season game of WNBA basketball this year.

With this loss, the Storm will have the highest odds of getting next year’s number one draft pick, Breanna Stewart, on September 24th when the results of the draft lottery will be announced.  

Because the losing team would get the best odds for the number one pick (44% vs. 27%), both teams rested their starters.  Storm Head Coach Jenny Boucek was particularly aggressive about it, only playing 5 players more than 10 minutes.  This essentially meant that by midway through the third quarter, every player on both sides of the floor (and on the Storm end in particular) was completely burned out.

The game started normally enough, except Sue didn’t suit up.  Jewel had a fun alley oop from Angel Goodrich, Crystal scored 8 points on Jayne Appel, and both teams shot a respectable 47%.  About 3 minutes from the end of the first quarter, though, Boucek made wholesale substitutions, basically using her reserve line-up of Goodrich, Mosqueda-Lewis, Gatling, Hollingsworth, Tokashiki, and O’Hea for the rest of the game.  O’Hea didn’t end up playing much either, checking out about 10 minutes later with 3 minutes to go in the second quarter.

With all of the reserves in for Seattle, play got a lot slower.  Turnovers and missed shots abounded, and by the half, the Storm dropped to shooting 37.1% and had 5 turnovers while the Stars dropped to shooting 29.7% and had 4 turnovers.  Even so, the Storm led 34-27 at halftime behind 11 points from sharp-shooting Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis.

The second half was pretty ugly, as San Antonio outscored Seattle at the sluggish pace of 32-24.  The 5 Storm players on the floor became steadily more and more exhausted, finally losing the lead midway through the third quarter.  From then on, the game was a slow back-and-forth with players on both sides struggling to score (with a few notable exceptions, if you check out the tables below), finally resulting in a 59-58 Silver Stars victory.  Much worse, Kaleena went down with about 30 seconds left in the game and was last seen limping off the court.  No word on how bad the injury is yet.

This was the final WNBA game in Sophia Young-Malcolm’s career, over which she averaged 14.4 points, 6.1 rebounds and 1.59 steals.  Without her, the Silver Stars will be left with almost no scoring power in their front court, so that’s something they’ll probably be looking to acquire in the off-season.

Before the game, Boucek said that she would never ask any of her players to “do less than their best,” but that she would give her younger players lots of playing time and “trust what’s meant to be to be.”  I guess she was trying to make the best of a bad situation.  Unfortunately, the overplaying of her rookies may have helped to cause Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis’s fourth quarter injury.  I guess hindsight’s 20-20, but I really, really hope we get Stewart after all this misery.

Angel Goodrich and Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis both had career highs again tonight, Kaleena in points (19), and Angel in rebounds (10).  It was Angel’s first double-double in the WNBA.