Posted by Mechelle Voepel
These are the kinds of games after which Indiana coach Lin Dunn wakes up in the middle of the night screaming. If she went to sleep in the first place, that is.
Ron Hoskins/NBAE via Getty Images
Fever leading scorer Katie Douglas (17.6 ppg) missed Wednesday's game with a left ankle sprain.
There wasn't a lot of defense from her Fever on Wednesday night at Conseco Fieldhouse in a game between the East and West leaders. Of course, every defense in the league is tested when playing Phoenix. But the Mercury weren't stopped at all in their 106-90 victory.
Phoenix shot 58.6 percent overall (41-of-70) and 55.6 percent from behind the arc (10-of-18). Cappie Pondexter did the most damage with 25 points, but all 10 Mercury players who got on the floor scored.
Afterward, Dunn called her team's defense soft and unfocused, and if you know her, you can imagine those words tasted bitter coming out. There were extenuating circumstances, in that Indiana's Katie Douglas didn't play because of a left ankle sprain. Douglas provides so much energy and leadership to the Fever (not to mention a team-high 17.6 points per game), it's nearly impossible for them to make up for her absence.
Thus, we've had the misfortune of seeing two marquee games recently in which it was hard to gauge Phoenix's foe because a key player was missing with an injury. When the Mercury won 98-90 on Aug. 27 at Los Angeles in what could have been a preview of the Western Conference finals, the Sparks' Candace Parker was out.
Wednesday's game might have been a foreshadowing of the WNBA Finals, but it's not the same matchup without Douglas.
For the Mercury, though, what mattered was bouncing back from a two-point loss Tuesday at Detroit. The Shock took advantage of the Mercury's interior defense in that game, something Phoenix knows it always has to guard against.
Now, the Mercury have three games left in the regular season: home against Atlanta, at Seattle and home against L.A. All of them are intriguing for different reasons, but mostly because we want to see whether Phoenix plays well enough the rest of the way to establish itself as the true favorite for the championship.
Meanwhile, Indiana has five games left -- four of them on the road and all against Eastern Conference opponents who (at least for now) are still desperate to secure playoff spots. Which means Indiana will face teams that might "need" the victories more than it does.
What the Fever need is to stop the feeling that the team is finishing the regular season on a slide rather than a roll. Indiana has lost four of its past five games -- although all of those were to Western Conference foes.
Indiana is done with the West for 2009 unless the Fever make the WNBA Finals. Indiana has lost just twice to East foes this season: July 19 at Connecticut and in the season opener June 6 at Atlanta.
If the Fever can keep up their mastery of the East for these remaining games, Indiana will enter the playoffs feeling it has got a good shot at making the franchise's first trip to the league finals.
But if Indiana struggles in closing out the regular season, there might be no East favorite for the playoffs.
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