Wonder how much Cooper is enjoying coaching his last season in the W.

And I wonder if LJ paid attention to all the pre-season MVP votes Lisa got. Behind her 32 pts and 8 rebounds, the Storm avoided a Liberty-esque meltdown and defeated the Sparks, 69-67. Seattle is now 6-2 (great shot of Swin stripping the ball from Tina as time expired) and LA is 2-5.

Sparks owner Kathy Goodman blogged in the LA Times: Sparks vs. Storm: I knew it would be tough . . .

I was sitting in ridiculous bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405 fighting my way to LAX on Friday afternoon with my Jackson 5 anthology album in my CD player like most of the country, thinking, "I really don't want to fly to Seattle this afternoon." Mostly I was sad about Michael Jackson, as I reminisced about cutting Jackson 5 singles off the back of boxes of Honeycomb cereal when I was a kid and playing them on our Close 'N Play record player, lip-syncing along and trying to imitate their dance moves. And the traffic wasn't helping. And, of course, there was looming above all that the prospect of another road game. The Sparks have not exactly played well on the road this season. And we were playing the Storm. Who are playing really well. Anywhere.

There's no question our team is talented. We arguably have the most individually talented team in the WNBA from top to bottom. But we also have only five players returning from last season, and two of them are sitting home recovering from injury and pregnancy, so, what with basketball being a team sport and all, it has made the start of the season a little rockier than we anticipated. And the road is definitely not our friend.