SCRAPS!

Once again, I have emerged with the patented apology. For as much as I intend SCRAPS! to be an outlet for my less formal work, I haven’t been bitten by impulsive bugs as of late to do so. What should be an easy week-to-week production has been difficult to hold onto momentum, especially when I dump most ideas over on The Memory Tourist in the How I Live Now columns. That isn’t to say that’s all that happens in a given period, but that’s what stands out. This area is, objectively, meant to fill in the gaps and I must gravely apologize for not giving you that. Will this be the cold snap that gets things back up and running? Who can tell, but I love having personal documentation of where I am in life. The shortest detail that I can emphasize is that I have been to several WNBA games since I last wrote with the most recent being The Sparks vs. The Valkyries from a few weeks back. If you know me personally, you’ll know that I have been devoted to Los Angeles since 2021 at the earliest, and ...

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 ...