Normally I'm very much against players who quit their losing teams, implying that they'll leave the sport if they're not traded, then somehow turn up on the rosters where they want to be.

I'll make an exception, however, for Stacey Lovelace: a player with a high offensive IQ (at least when I've seen her) and a genuine outside shot (35% career from downtown), she's too thin to be an effective low post pro, but so tall that coaches don't see her as anything else.

Having played for terrible first-year expansion teams in Seattle, Chicago and Atlanta; having taken two years off (in part due to motherhood); and having played on an over-.500 team only once (the 2004 Lynx) in the previous six years of her career, she chose last month to walk away from Atlanta, and now gets minutes off the bench with the Shock.

UPDATE AND CLARIFICATION: there's no official confirmation that she quit, but it's hard for me to draw any other conclusions: all we know for sure is that she missed two games, and then got waived. Coach Meadors told reporters at the time that Stacey sat out for personal reasons-- she sure wasn't waived for lack of playing time. It feels a lot like two years ago, when Elaine Powell left the Sky. And by the way, Lovelace is from Detroit.

Again, if she had come to the Dream from a championship team; if she were a second-year player still used to racking up wins in college (she did win a couple of rings at Purdue)-- then I'd consider this set of events less than classy.

As it is-- and given the shape of her career thus far-- I say, "Let she who has played on three first-year expansion teams, and on a couple of other quite bad ones, and is now raising a child far from any of her relatives, cast the first stone."