With the Lakers and the rest of the NBA on hiatus for the time being, this is all the pro-basketball we're being supplied with around here.
The Staples Center is at the Pico stop on the LA Metro Blue line, the subway near our house, so we didn't have to drive or park, which is pretty sweet, especially since the city's okay'd the plans to build the football stadium right behind Staples Center, so if we ever get to those games...and if LA ever gets a team, which is taken as an inevitability everywhere around here.
In any case, the Staples Center is on one edge of downtown, now a nice and shiny part of town, probably lifted by the arena over the course of a decade.
When we got to there, we found our section, and then started looking for our seats, which were in Row F. All the seats we could find were labeled with numerals, not letters. We asked an usher, and he said, "Oh, see, you guys are down there," pointing down behind one of the hoops. The seats were the nice, padded, folding guys, set up each day by somebody.
From there you could really get a sense of "WOW! Those young lady's are, uh...athletic." Corrie, at one point, jokingly said, "I bet that big girl right there could probably kick your ass," nodding towards a giant that could have stepped on my head a few times. I scoffed and spoke the truth, "Honey, the littlest girl out there could probably kick my ass."
The lights inside made my camera not take as awesome of pictures as I would have liked, but you might be able to get the sense of how close we were.
There was a group of young, yarmulke clad men who were aggressively taunting the opposing team, the Atlanta Dream, and since the house wasn't exactly full, they could be heard by, probably, the entire crowd. You could see angry parents with their little daughters trying to enjoy themselves sending the stink-eye their direction.
The Dream haven't been playing so well recently, but neither have the Sparks. Our Sparks did get back star forward Candace Parker from and injury that's kept her out for the last 15 games, but she got ejected with literally less than one second to play for arguing a bad call and getting two technical fouls in a row.
The game went back and forth, the lead changed many times. For a while the Sparks were up by as many as 8, and just as quickly they'd be down 6. At one point I remember thinking that the Dream were in control, only to glance at the scoreboard and see they were losing by 5.
The Sparks were down by two with 27.4 seconds to go, and possession on their side of the court, and in those 27 seconds, a few offensive boards were overshadowed by the tossing of bricks at the hoop. After the third miss, a Dream player scooped up the rebound and bolted for a quick layup with less than a second to go. That's when Candace started her argument, and the free-thrower for the dream made only one of her two free-throws for the technicals, putting the game at the final, 84-79. If you look close at the action shot above, you can see one that last brick (the clock behind her says 4.0 seconds, and quickly going down).
Taking the subway there and home felt right. I'll have a better post about the train sometime soon, highlighting just what LA looks like, as well as how ridiculously close to homes the train actually gets at times.
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