The 2008 WNBA Season Preview: Expect Great?

Sure, it’s easy to make fun of commercials like this, even if Candace Parker’s among the most physically stunning human beings to ever pick up a basketball.

But maybe, just maybe, you can expect this WNBA to…well, not grate. And because I’ve got a soft spot for women’s basketball, I wrote a season preview.

Since no one really knows anything about the WNBA, other than it’s what happens when too many UConn and Tennessee players graduate from college (not exactly a worry on the men’s side, thank God), here’s the bare minimum you need to know.

• There are two conferences, the Eastern and Western, with seven teams apiece.
• Each team plays 34 games in the regular season, which, this year, runs from mid-May to mid-September, with a break for most of August for the Olympics.
• The playoffs take the top four teams from each conference and power seed them, so the top team plays the fourth and the second-place team matches up with the third. Conference playoffs are best-of-three, with home court switching each game, and the WNBA Finals are best-of-five, in a 2-2-1 format.
• The defending champions are the Phoenix Mercury.
• Only one Eastern Conference team, the Detroit Shock, has won a title in the league’s years, capturing the championship in 2003 and 2006.

Now that you’ve glazed over that, how about quick, snap judgments that will be horrifically wrong?

Eastern Conference

1. Detroit Shock: Coached by sometime Bad Boy Bill Laimbeer, the Shock are the WNBA’s answer to those late ’80s/early ’90s Pistons squads, hard-nosed and bruising inside. Their guards, though, will be the key to this season, as stalwart but fragile big Swin Cash departed for Seattle after a rather vocal falling out with Laimbeer; that means Katie Smith and 2006 Finals MVP Deanna Nolan, the only two players to hit a three-pointer for Detroit last year, will need to take some of the scoring load off Cheryl Ford, who will continue making Karl Malone proud of two-thirds of his illegitimate progeny. Still, in a weak East, that could well be enough.
2. Indiana Fever: They boast maybe the league’s best one-woman show in Tamika Catchings, but she’ll be out for much of the season, rehabbing a torn ACL and working towards the Olympics. It’ll be up to Katie Douglas to keep the Fever in the playoff mix, but Catchings could be fresher for a playoff run than she’s ever been after Allen Iverson-like shoulderings of the load, and that’s promising.
3. Connecticut Sun: Yeah, they’re owned by the same tribe that owns the Mohegan Sun casino, and yeah, they’re the only show in town in Connecticut as far as professional sports go, but they have four former Huskies from down the road, the gritty Lindsay Whalen at guard, and a coach, Mike Thibault, whose name rhymes with a certain messianic quarterback from the University of Florida. So there’s that. Seriously, though, the Sun are perennial playoff entrants, but probably don’t have enough to seriously contend for a title.
4. Washington Mystics: None other than Tree Rollins coaches this group, and after he rose to the position midway through the 2007 season, the Mystics ran off a 14-8 stretch run. This