SCRAPS!

A lot has happened since the last time I’ve attended a WNBA game. For starters, my ongoing skepticism with The Fever has proven to be founded on mostly bad timing. While I appreciate Caitlin Clark putting in effort that close to an injury, it’s been awkward ever since being like, “Imagine if my nieces were at THIS game” so that they could see one of their favorite players absolutely reflect why she’s considered one of the league’s best. As it stands, I’m mostly grateful to have seen her in the same way I was to see a young Sabrina Ionescu or Rhyne Howard before they started building heavy-hitters around her.  I wish the same could be said for The Sparks, the team I’ve been touting for months now as the underdogs with the potential to go further and reach higher than they had. In 2025, they were one game shy of making the playoffs. By acquiring Nneka Ogwumike again, I reached a hallucinatory state where I thought, maybe this will happen. First the 30th anniversary game came down to ...

At the risk of this subject overpowering my traditional rundown of the recent Sparks vs. Valkyries game, I thought that I would briefly touch on what “the elephant in the room” looks like after only a week. Outside of online spaces, today was the first encounter I had with the aftermath, the first real observation of what fans were thinking of the Kelsey Plum trade midseason. To provide my own developing opinion first, I am stuck in a state of dissonance. The simple truth is that I support any player going where their heart wants them to. Selfishly, I would like Plum to be in Los Angeles, but it’s clear that whatever she wanted was not here. As it stands, I have A LOT of criticisms around them benching players this season (ex: Kate Martin) that I will get to at a different time. For now, I am willing to assume there were valid causes for KP moving to the desert and giving The Mercury a chance, especially after they had a phenomenal finish last season. Does it hurt? Yes, especially give...

Last time that I was in the same room as The Sparks, it was the 30th anniversary game in which, thanks to a well-timed buzzer beater, Nneka Ogwumike carried the team to a win against The Liberty. It remains one of those highs that don’t come around often but, when they do, leaves you wanting more. You walk out of the building believing that this will be the year that things turn around, that after three seasons of stumbling, things are finally locking into place.  Never mind any reasoning that would refute this. The most evident is the continued absence of crucial players like Cameron Brink as well as Kelsey Plum. Small setbacks like this could explain why the brief window between that game and when I next saw them has largely been missed opportunities. Not only missed, but the soul-draining kind of collapses that make you question your own sanity. As a longtime Sparks fan, I can weather this storm, but going into The Fever match-up was rough given that they had lost to them weeks ...

More than any year so far in my 30s, I’ve been self-aware about the passage of time. Part of it comes from the inevitability. In your mind, you started the decade only two years ago, and there’s plenty of road ahead. And yet, tomorrow I turn 37 and have to accept something that I haven’t been the best about acknowledging: I am officially in my late 30s. Whereas you could defend 34-36 as the “middle” years, I am officially entering a period when everything is starting to close up shop, and it’s time to start looking ahead. The days of being young and vital are fading in the cultural sense (forget the “age is just a number” motif), and I must consider that the next stage of any legacy is taking root. A question I’ve asked myself is how I can age without losing passion. There have been many times when I became dismayed at knowing something that once felt so vital is close to 15 years old… and it’s still after high school. I try not to ruminate on the past too much, but you can’t help but ...

The last time I attended a Sparks game was the final home game of the season. Aside from the context of the game itself, there was something of a defeated feeling attached to the experience. Basically, I had spent most of the past two weeks clocking the WNBA season standings as if it was the stock market, hoping by some measure that certain teams would drop off just enough that Los Angeles would pull through. I even remember besmirching the name of The Fever at one point – which turned out to be a bit of a judgment error on my part. Even if I still remain an overall skeptic, Indiana’s post-season run came shockingly close to changing the course of Finals history. If their A-Team had been healthy, they would’ve stopped a dynasty from being cemented and giving A’ja Wilson her second year of being MVP without making it to the end of the line. Long story short, The Sparks just couldn’t cover the spread enough to make the playoffs. It was a very slim margin, and one that came down to the pe...

Sometime midsummer last year, I found myself becoming engrossed in the history of Saturday Night Live . While I missed the SNL50 coverage, there were still highlight reels popping up on Facebook giving me brief snippets of what the later cast members had been up to. I remember being especially charmed by Jane Wickline, though there were enough laughs at other points to make them a welcome addition to my scrolling. I grew enough affection that, with over a month to ponder how serious I was about such a commitment, I decided to do something I hadn’t ever done before. I would watch a full season of the comedy institution. I’m not a purist by any measure. There isn’t a “golden era” so much as the perfect embodiment of American sketch comedy. Some hits. Some flops. Coming up with 90 minutes of material on a weekly basis is a challenge I could never achieve, so I’ve always admired the comedians on that level. If the highlights weren’t enough to win me over, I had begun seeing other cast memb...