... Yes, it is true. Sophia Witherspoon did commit the first double-dribble in WNBA history and the WNBA made prominent note of it. In the WNBA News, the WNBA's weekly newsletter, they cited several firsts, including Witherspoon's.
This is an odd departure from the NBA's historic Up With People mentality, where they never say anything bad about their players. The big brother league has never said anything worse than "It was inappropriate" about Dennis Rodman's antics. In NBA scout Marty Blake's analysis of the first round of the draft, he never even approaches saying "This was a stupid pick", saying it was a "surprise" that Houston drafted Roderick Rhodes. For more than 10 years, the NBA collected individual turnovers but didn't publish them because they viewed it as a negative statistic. Now their sister league is publishing prominent double dribbles???
Among the other first's for the WNBA were
Now go quiz your friends.
Preliminary indications are that the best team in the league, the New York Liberty, is winning with defense. The Liberty have not shown the greatest ability to put the ball in the basket, but they are shutting opponents down. Below are the offensive and defensive ratings for the eight clubs, along with their relative rank in the league.
| WNBA Points Per 100 Possessions Ratings, 1997 | |||||||
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Off. Rating | Rank | Def. Rating | Rank | Poss./G | Off. PPG | Def. PPG |
| Charlotte | 79.3 | 7 | 86.3 | 5 | 78.8 | 62.5 | 68.0 |
| Cleveland | 75.4 | 8 | 87.8 | 6 | 79.3 | 59.8 | 69.6 |
| Houston | 91.0 | 1 | 79.5 | 3 | 77.0 | 70.0 | 61.2 |
| Los Angeles | 90.6 | 2 | 85.8 | 4 | 83.3 | 75.5 | 71.5 |
| New York | 86.6 | 4 | 77.9 | 1 | 77.8 | 67.4 | 60.6 |
| Phoenix | 84.0 | 5 | 78.7 | 2 | 79.3 | 66.6 | 62.4 |
| Sacramento | 88.1 | 3 | 92.6 | 8 | 79.7 | 70.2 | 73.8 |
| Utah | 82.9 | 6 | 91.6 | 7 | 82.7 | 68.5 | 75.7 |
| Average | 85.0 | 85.0 | 79.7 | 68.0 | 68.0 | ||
On the individual side, Ruthie Bolton-Holifield won Player of the Week Honors in the first week of play. Here is how she stacks up against some of the other candidates:
By the looks of things, Cynthia Cooper of the Houston Comets -- whose only losses have been to the New York Liberty -- was very worthy of the individual award as well.
Speaking of the Liberty, notice that Rebecca Lobo is really being outplayed by two of her teammates, Vickie Johnson and the double-dribbling Sophia Witherspoon... Just so you know, that is not Witherspoon's picture on the front page. In order to avoid copyright problems, I had to try my hand at artwork.
In loving memory of Gladys Oliver, who will be missed for raspberries and ice cream, for liking sports, for telling me to laugh when I didn't, and for all the important things that are just too sappy to write down.