Jayda Evans covers the Storm for the Seattle Times: she-- and her editors-- have given that paper perhaps the nation's best WNBA coverage, with extensive game notes, an informative blog, and in-person reporting on almost every away game.

Released last month, Evans' book about her team, Game On!, isn't perfect. It can sound rushed, and under-edited, with sentences like this one: "A haphazard series of unlikely events, like a loyal fan base derived from virtually no marketing and players willing to pay their own way, led to a crystallized dream." A chapter on lesbians, gay pride and homophobia, stuck out of chronological order in the middle, feels like a late insert (perhaps Evans fought to include it). And the order the rest of the chapters use-- partly season-by-season, partly personality- and profile-driven-- can lead to confusing overlaps for anyone who doesn't know the history.

That said, it's a must-read for any and all Storm fans-- and for fans of the ABL's Seattle Reign, the University of Washington Huskies, and anything else involving women, a round ball, and a hoop in the Evergreen State. And it's a source of memorable tales, info and, yes, encouragement for WNBA fans anywhere else.

Evans' story begins years before the Storm began; it begins several times, in fact, with Val Ackerman and the start of the WNBA, and with Karen Bryant-- a future Storm exec-- and the founding of the Reign. Evans' beat is Pacific Northwest basketball, and these pages stand out mostly for the regional angle they bring to a national story told, in greater detail, by Sara Corbett.

When the Storm open for business, the book takes off, and the anecdotes fly. Some samples:

--Lin Dunn, the Storm's first coach, used her first-ever draft pick on then-unknown Czech center named Kamila Vodichkova, whom Dunn had seen only on airmailed videotapes. "I hope we're going to receive some information on her," Annie Myers said on-air.

--If Anne Donovan had decided not to coach the Storm-- or if she had never been asked-- Seattle's new coach in '03 would have been... Mike Thibault.

--LJ is "a regular customer at the only Australian pub on the West Coast, the Kangaroo & Kiwi in Seattle's Green Lake."

--Howard Schultz has been (in Evans' account) a superb hands-on owner, able to walk into team meetings and motivate the players without micromanaging his coach and GM.

--Seattle attendance, and the buzz around the team, rose in '03, before the championship year-- partly because of the hype around Bird and Jackson, partly because Seattle had a latent audience for good women's basketball (one not fully drawn by the bad Storm teams of their first years).

--Seattle loves its champions, but not all the champions got to feel the love. Big Shot Betty Lennox left the United States three days after the '04 title game, in order to honor her Italian League contact. As for LJ, after the big win, "for the next two weeks I did not pay for a meal, none of my teammates did... Everywhere we went, people were screaming out of windows."

LJ and Betty get by far the longest and coolest treatments, with extended attention to LJ's teen Goth years and Betty's time out of the league: between Cleveland's folding and Seattle's signing her, she worked in a GM plant in Kansas City. LJ seems perenially lucky, moody, almost devil-may-care; Lennox, hardworking, unlucky, intense and inward by necessity.

Evans even has an explanation for Betty's style of play, which can make her look, on a bad night, like a shot hog: on the playground, "she needed to steal the ball and shoot quickly, otherwise she'd 'never touch it' because no one would pass to a girl."

However you feel about Lennox, Evans' account will make you like her more. Bird gets less space, perhaps because her face is too familiar-- or her life story less interesting-- compared to Seattle's other stars. Just one character in the entire volume comes off badly: Sheri Sam, who blew off August practice to hang out in Athens with her Olympian friends. I can fault coach Donovan for letting Kamila go, or for not hanging on to Tully, but she was right to ditch Sheri.

Though Seattle's championship clearly created the market for the book, Evans makes that big win the end of a longer story: the '04 run starts, and ends, in chapter ten, and very few single games get extended treatments. It's as if Evans wanted to avoid the bane of so many sports books, the stitched-together set of 700-word dispatches.

She did avoid it. This isn't a set of articles, and it's not something you could get by reading the Seattle Times online. Nor is it a cerebral analysis of how to run a league, or a team. It's an informative, colorful book for fans, by a reporter who's also (when appropriate) a fan. Fans should check it out.