Well, here we are. Back again at the Barclay’s Center for what hopes to be less of a thrashing than it was two nights ago. After a restful 48 hours from being humbled on the hardwood, the V’s are back playing the Libs in NY. In Tuesday’s game, the Valk’s lost by 28 pts. Breanna Stewart (forward, NYL) had 24 pts and led all scorers, and not expected but now on our radar, Marine Johannes came off the bench for New York and dropped 18 pts (a season high), as the Liberty shot 50% from the floor and 40% from beyond the arc.

 

That said, it was honestly a lot closer than the final score suggests…If you ignore the fact that we were down 17 after 10 minutes.  Quarterly breakdown of the game shows: Libs win Q1 27-10, Libs win Q2 21-19, Valk’s win Q3 22-19, Libs win Q4 28-16. So we see what we’ve seen all along this season: The Valkyries need to get ahead to play ball; we can’t play from behind. Case and point: the largest lead of the game for New York was 33 points…

 

…THIRTY FREAKING THREE. Excuse me while I go throw up.

 

 This leads us to T’s Keys for the Vs:

1. Attack from the jump
   1. We are not a play-from-behind team…yet. We need to get out in front and stay there. It’s impossible to stop their weapons, but we cannot go down 17 points after the first ten minutes; There’s no way for us to dig ourselves out of that pit. We don’t have Monique Billings to help us out on defense, so others need to step in and show out.
2. Slow down the game
   1. I know there’s a shot clock, but we need to use every second of that shot clock. The less time New York has the ball, the less time they can put the ball through the hoop. It’s basic physics.
   1. Within that, we have to give ourselves time for plays to develop and for us to make smart basketball moves. We turned the ball over 23 times on Tuesday and gave up 32 points from those turnovers. New York? 13 turnovers. We need to be more careful on offense because we can’t have 1 turnover every 90 seconds and survive against the Liberty.
3. Be aggressive—gotta be aggressive.
   1. Cue the high school spirit squad, because we need to “B-E A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E! BE AGGRESSIVE, GOTTA BE AGGRESSIVE!” New York only had 13 turnovers. That’s bonkers! We need to cause more chaos. We need our hands to be active, we need to force them into bad positions where they make bad decisions.

*and one

• If we can’t win the game on the hardwood, we need to win the game in the tunnel
  • Fits need to be on point. Cut the sleeves off and flex on ‘em, break out the heels, where those jumpsuit romper things….I don’t care. We need to look fly as hell because Valkyries don’t walk.

 

Vs up,

Trav