Liberty 80
Sun 66
Less than 24 hours after watching the Liberty lose badly in Detroit, GM Carol Blazejowski was still singing the praises of interim head coach Pat Coyle.
“The players have responded well to her,” Blazejowski said before the Libs faced the Connecticut Sun last night in front of an announced sellout crowd of 5,495 at Radio City. “I’m pleased. She’s got them focused.”
That was rarely more evident than last night, when the team inched above .500 for the first time since Richie Adubato was fired nearly a month ago. Using a 9-0 run early in the second half, the Liberty won for the fourth time in five games, putting away Connecticut 80-66 in the teams’ final game before the league shuts down until September because of the Olympics.
Becky Hammon scored a game-high 24 points as the Liberty improved to 13-12, while the Sun fell to 13-14. Just as important, the Libs are 6-3 since Coyle took over after more than five years as an assistant.
“The transition has gone as smoothly as possible,” Hammon said, after she shot 6-of-12 from the floor, handed out six assists and committed only one turnover. “We’re so familiar with her and she’s made things really easy for us. We’ve got a lot of momentum now.”
That momentum very well could be lost once the league gets up and running again, but Coyle hopes to alleviate some of the problem by working out the team starting on Aug. 11.
“It will be like a mini-training camp,” Coyle said. “Just to work on drills. Hopefully, we’ll pick up where we left off.”
According to Blazejowski, however, Coyle won’t have the “interim” removed from her title during the season.
“Certainly, if we win, that helps,” Blazejowski said.
Hammon helped make sure of that. She drilled a three-pointer with 4:12 to go to give the Liberty a 68-60 lead to put the game away.
“I could hardly sleep after last night’s game,” Hammon said. “We were [ticked] off because they knocked us around [in Detroit]. We had to recover from that.”
Crystal Robinson would agree. Despite playing with 15 stitches in her mouth after getting an elbow in the face from Detroit’s Swin Cash on Friday, she scored 17 points on 6-of-8 shooting.
“We wanted to go into the break with a good feeling,” said Coyle, who hopes to have Tari Phillips back from a fractured hand in September. “Now we have a chance to get healthy.”
Hammon was looking forward to the time off, which she’ll begin after playing in Thursday’s All-Star Game at Radio City.
“I think it will help us more than anyone else,” Hammon said. “When we come back, we have to have this same intensity.”
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Connecticut’s Jen Derevjanek, who starred at St. Peter’s on Staten Island, made a brief appearance at the end of the game.
