FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 6 , 2019. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ SU D3
happy to get to the playoffs and
almost like — ‘Whew! We got to the
Finals.’ Coming in this year, we
just had a different mind-set. We
understood we have all the pieces
of the puzzle and everyone just
had to be 1 percent better.”
That mind-set doesn’t include
room for dwelling on statistics
and franchise records. Not with a
different kind of milestone lin-
gering on the horizon — Toliver,
the guard who has missed nine
games with a right knee bruise
but is expected to be back for the
playoffs, is the only player on the
roster with a WNBA champion-
ship. She won with the Los Ange-
les Sparks in 2016.
Thibault, the winningest coach
in WNBA history, has never cap-
tured a title despite making the
finals three times with two teams.
“Those franchise records and
everything are cool, but I couldn’t
even tell you [the records] we’re
going out for this weekend,” Cloud
said. “We set out with a goal. We
want a championship, and what-
ever comes in between is just that.
It’s cool.”
[email protected]already owns the team’s career
record with 606, said the team
assembled at the beginning of the
year with the understanding that
a big leap could happen if every
player improved just slightly.
Delle Donne, the leading candi-
date to win the league MVP award,
which would be another franchise
first, worked on her defense. Back-
up guard Shatori Walker-Kim-
brough tried to become more as-
sertive in her play and got com-
fortable playing light minutes at
point guard. Aerial Powers, ac-
quired from Dallas last summer,
changed the way she thought
about offense after previously
playing in a more selfish system.
They also found motivation in
the memory of losing the WNBA
Finals last year in an ego-bruising
three-game sweep against Seattle.
“When we rebuilt three years
ago and brought Kristi [Toliver]
and Elena in, we weren’t a bad
team. We were just a young team
at that point,” Cloud said. “We
needed some puzzle pieces added,
some franchise players added. We
won our first year, but we weren’t
great. Last year, we were kind ofEvery night we walk in the gym we
feel like that, and that’s just a
different feeling, you know, the
crowd vibe and the support and
the respect that we’re getting. It
was almost zero when I showed
up, and it’s fun to see all of that
change.”
Said Meesseman, who was
drafted in 2013: “After all these
years of rebuilding, there are final-
ly some results. I came here at the
moment the rebuild started....
I’m happy I got to see the growing
process and could be a part of it.
I’m happy. I’m happy that it’s this
team and all the staff around it
because they deserve it. And espe-
cially the fans, everybody that
stuck with it.”
The reason the Mystics are
racking up record after record, the
team says, is because of their
chemistry.
“Every year there are some piec-
es of the puzzle that came to us or
left, and now it’s a puzzle that’s
complete,” Meesseman said.
Starting guard Natasha Cloud,
who needs four assists to break the
franchise season record of 183 set
by Nikki Teasley in 2006 and whowould be joining Delle Donne —
she is shooting 57 percent from the
field, 44.4 percent from three and
90.2 percent from the free throw
line — if she hadn’t taken off a
month this season to play with the
Belgian national team, which kept
her from meeting the minimum
number of shots made in each
category.
Yet with only two home games
remaining before Washington’s
historic regular season is sealed —
against Dallas (10-22) on Friday
and Chicago (19-13) on Sunday —
even the team’s most loquacious
members aren’t keen on talking
about history.
“I ignore it,” Thibault said.
“Mainly because none of that mat-
ters if you don’t win at the end.”
The Mystics (24-8) have shifted
from following the standings and
tracking every other top team in
the league, as they did almost all
season, to focusing on winning a
WNBA title. It showed during
their intense Thursday practice
ahead of a game against playoff-
ineligible Dallas. They were on
court for longer than usual this
late in the season, fine-tuning
their team defense.
Having secured a double bye to
the best-of-five semifinal round of
the playoffs, their first postseason
games will be Sept. 17 and 19 at
Entertainment and Sports Arena.
By then, they will officially be
the best Mystics team ever, with
the most wins in franchise history
(at least 24), highest scoring aver-
age (89 points per game, well
ahead of the mark of 84.5 set last
season), best field goal percentage
(47.0) and most assists per game
(21.8). They already have logged
back-to-back 20-win seasons for
the first time.
Though the Mystics aren’t lin-
gering over those benchmarks,
they acknowledge they matter for
those fans who supported the
team during what Meesseman
calls “the depressing times” — the
10-24 and 16-18 seasons of the late
2000s and, even worse, 6-28 and
5-29 seasons earlier this decade.
“I haven’t even really thought
about it in terms of records. It’s
more like just a complete turn-
around to the whole aura and at-
mosphere of the organization,”
Thibault said, “from being on the
verge of not having a team maybe
seven years ago to now being one
of the best teams in the league.
MYSTICS FROM D1
the official handover in Decem-
ber, Meyer called Day “elite.” Jus-
tin Fields, a transfer from Georgia
and Dwayne Haskins’s successor
as the Buckeyes’ quarterback, de-
buted with four touchdown pass-
es and one rushing touchdown.
Off they all go again, with a
swell piece of scheduling ahead
this week, calling to mind 2002,
when Ohio State’s national cham-
pionship run included an early
23-19 scare in Cincinnati.
Then there’s Fickell, tucked
amid all this and preventing his
players from media interviews
this week in the name of concen-
tration. “I don’t think about who
we’re playing,” he told reporters
in Cincinnati. “I think about it
being, hey, this is a great pro-
gram, a great team, and this is a
challenge to us, as opposed to it
being, you know, an in-state [pro-
gram] a hundred miles away.
Maybe a lot of our kids grew up as
Ohio State fans. You know, try to
put all those things aside.”
That’s Fickell, going back to the
Horseshoe at Ohio State to play
the second of two weeks opposite
two guys who once engineered
New Hampshire’s 45-44 upset of
Delaware. It’s all some crazy con-
coction, almost as if nobody
knows where any coaching hire
or path might lead, almost as if
investing any emotion into such
things might be irrational.
[email protected]offense in winter 2007, even Kelly
remarked about the oddity of
plucking an FCS coach from
2,548 miles away. When Meyer
chose Day to coach Ohio State’s
quarterbacks and help coordi-
nate the offense in winter 2017,
Ohioans had to cram in studying
his past and its stops with Kelly in
Philadelphia (Eagles) and San
Francisco (49ers).
There went their quiet.
By going 46-7 at Oregon in four
seasons (2009-12) after succeed-
ing Bellotti, Kelly built enough
stature that his return to college
coaching at UCLA can serve as a
barometer: How much did the
game catch up to him while he
was away in the NFL? So far, it has
caught up 10 times out of
13 games, with his offense mud-
dled.
It got 12 first downs and 218 to-
tal yards against Cincinnati.
When a reporter asked Monday in
Los Angeles for something quar-
terback Dorian Thompson-Rob-
inson needed to improve, Kelly
said: “You ask the same question
all the time, and I saw the same
thing. There’s not one thing
where [for example] if he throws
with his left foot opened it’s fan-
tastic and everything’s fixed.”
Day went 3-0 filling in for
Meyer during Meyer’s suspension
in September 2018, then kept his
record spotless Saturday with a
45-21 win over Florida Atlantic. In24-14 loss that sustained Cincin-
nati’s loftiness from last year.
It also will lend further oomph
to Week 2 on Saturday, when
Ryan Day, who played quarter-
back for Manchester (N.H.) Cen-
tral and then for the University of
New Hampshire from 1999 to
2001, when Kelly coached him,
will undergo his first major hasty
evaluation. Day, the only first-
year coach in the Associated Press
top 25, will coach Ohio State (1-0)
opposite Cincinnati Coach Luke
Fickell, who once played nose
guard for, played a Rose Bowl
with a torn pectoral muscle for
and coached 15 seasons for, of
course, Ohio State.
He also spent 2011 with the
horrifying American title “inter-
im head coach,” also at Ohio State.
As Ohio State tries to stay near
the .902 winning percentage of
the seven-season Urban Meyer
era that closed last Rose Bowl —
you might say Day showed either
guts or lunacy just accepting the
job offer — two former New
Hampshire dudes called each
other.
The Day-Kelly conversation, as
Day recollected it to reporters on
Monday in Ohio, provided the
latest sense of the terrible tedium
in which these coaches do dwell.
“You know, we didn’t talk too
much about the [Cincinnati]
game, really,” Day said. “We
talked about my college coach
going through a tough time right
now and a few other things.
Wished him luck against San
Diego State [this week], and we
talked about those kinds of
things. Talked about his team,
talked about our team, kind of
where things are going, and that
was it.”
Way back down the landscape
to 2000, Kelly and Day helped
New Hampshire overcome a 31-3
deficit against second-ranked
Delaware and spring a 45-44
overtime upset. Their Wildcats
did not soar back then. They went
15-18 during the three Kelly-Day
years even with Day’s 7,670 pass-
ing yards. New Hampshire’s stock
rose since, and their head coach
from then, Sean McDonnell, re-
mains in the role just as seven
playoff quarterfinals and two
semifinals will allow.
When Oregon Coach Mike Bel-
lotti chose Kelly to coordinate theBY GENE WANG BUCKEYES FROM D1Virginia Tech wide receiver Tay-
vion Robinson was a high school
senior watching from the stands
last year as his future team fell in
one of the more improbable re-
sults of the college football season.
The native of Virginia Beach
watched in disbelief as the 13th-
ranked Hokies lost, 49-35, in Nor-
folk to an Old Dominion program
that had been playing major col-
lege football for only four years
and did not even exist for decades
until it was restarted in 2009. The
Monarchs, who had never beaten
a team from a Power Five confer-
ence, entered the game 0-3 and
would finish the season 4-8.
“I was shocked,” Robinson said
about that outcome as the Hokies,
who were a four-touchdown favor-
ite, prepared for the rematch Sat-
urday afternoon at Lane Stadium.
Coincidentally or not, the igno-
minious defeat was a pivot point
for Virginia Tech. The game got
away from the Hokies after start-
ing quarterback Josh Jackson left
early in the fourth quarter with
the score tied at 28. Two days later,
Coach Justin Fuente revealed
Jackson would be out indefinitely
with a broken fibula.
The redshirt sophomore did
not take another snap at Virginia
Tech and transferred to Maryland
this past offseason.
Additional fallout came when
Fuente announced the day after
the stunning loss that Trevon Hill
was being dismissed for failing to
meet team standards. The junior
defensive end had been among the
best pass rushers for the Hokies,
who allowed 495 passing yards
and five total touchdowns to a
quarterback, Blake LaRussa, who
started the game on the bench.
Virginia Tech permitted 632 to-
tal yards to Old Dominion, the
most in Bud Foster’s 24 years as
Virginia Tech’s decorated defen-
sive coordinator.
The Hokies went on to lose five
of their next seven games, includ-
ing four in a row, and ended with
their first losing record since 1992
amid a patchwork defense beset
by injuries and inexperience. In-
cluding last week’s season-open-
ing loss at Boston College, Virginia
Tech has lost eight of 12 games
going back to that loss to the Mon-
archs.
“I mean, that was obviously a
big event,” Fuente said of the loss
to ODU, though he also pointed
out that Virginia Tech played per-
haps its most complete game of
the year the following week in a
31-14 win against Duke. “How
we’ve handled adversity, I think
our guys have done a great job of it.
“I’m not trying to get corny, but
things don’t always go your way in
football, in life, and you can’t just
sit around and complain about it.
You’ve got to stand up, roll your
sleeves up and go back to work. I
think our guys understand that. I
think they’re anxious to go play
again.”
Apart from the Hokies (0-1)
seeking redemption in their home
opener, another layer of intrigue
surrounding the intrastate show-
down includes two former Vir-
ginia Tech players and one assis-
tant who are now with the Mon-
archs (1-0), who beat Norfolk
State, 24-21, at home in their open-
er. Old Dominion Coach Bobby
Wilder announced Monday that
Chris Cunningham and Eric Ku-
mah, both of whom began their
careers at Virginia Tech, would be
captains for the game, joining reg-
ular captains Lawrence Garner
and Isaac Weaver.
Kumah, a wide receiver, and
Cunningham, a tight end, both
declared their intention via social
media posts in January to transfer
out of Virginia Tech.
Wilder even addressed a pub-
lished report in which anonymous
sources suggested that several
players no longer in the program
were partly to blame for the
Hokies’ downward spiral.
“That was bothersome andhurtful to both of those players to
be associated with a situation
where they might have been con-
sidered responsible for the lack of
wins last year,” Wilder said. “You
look at those two guys, and I think
you can say they both were playing
their tails off for Virginia Tech last
year.”
Cunningham’s position coach
this season is first-year assistant
Bryan Stinespring, whose history
with the Hokies covers more than
a quarter-century, beginning as a
graduate assistant in 1990.
Hired to be ODU’s tight ends
coach and running game coordi-
nator, Stinespring spent 26 years
at Virginia Tech, serving as the
Hokies’ offensive coordinator
from 2002 to 2012 and recruiting
coordinator and tight ends coach
from 2012 to 2015.
Stinespring was Maryland’s of-
fensive line coach last season.
“Obviously you cross over a lot
in this business,” Foster said. “Bry-
an and my situation is probably
different because we were togeth-
er for 25-plus years. I have the
utmost respect for Bryan as a foot-
ball coach, as a person, and love
him as a friend.”
One player the Hokies won’t be
going up against: LaRussa. The
quarterback, who took over the
starting role for the Monarchs af-
ter the upset, announced after the
season he would forgo his final
season of eligibility to attend semi-
nary.
[email protected]Hokies seek redemption against ODU Ohio clash has links to New Hampshire
BY CANDACE BUCKNERIn the third quarter of Thurs-
day’s game between the United
States and Japan at the FIBA
World Cup in Shanghai, Rui
Hachimura shoved off an NBA
all-star with his left forearm and
approached one of the league’s top
shot blockers at the rim. These
were some of the best players in
the world, but Hachimura dis-
played no timidity. In one play, he
showed he could soon belong.
Hachimura, the new face of
Japanese basketball and the
Washington Wizards’ top incom-
ing rookie, blew past Milwaukee
Bucks forward Khris Middleton
and dunked in the face of Indiana
Pacers center Myles Turner for his
single highlight of the Americans’
98-45 blowout win.
The clip played well on social
media, as dunks do, just like
Hachimura’s other highlight from
earlier in the FIBA tournament
when he taught another NBA play-
er, Ersan Ilyasova of Turkey, not to
test him at the basket. But as
spectacular as those highlights
were, they did not depict
Hachimura’s overall perform-
ance, especially his struggles
Thursday in his first test against a
roster of seasoned NBA players.
He won’t get another in this
tournament. Japan and the Wiz-
ards announced Thursday night
that he would sit out the final two
games because of “knee discom-
fort and general fatigue.”
Hachimura started and played
24 minutes against the United
States, and he finished with just
four points on 2-for-8 shooting.
He recorded four rebounds and
one assist, but his plus-minus rat-
ing was a dismal minus-48, show-
ing his team was heavily outscored
during his time on the court.
Both of his made field goals —
the dunk and a pull-up midrange
jumper — came in the third quar-
ter, after he had settled into the
game and showed more aggres-
sion. Before that, however,
Hachimura was not the best Japa-
nese-born NBA player on the floor.
That distinction belonged to
Yuta Watanabe, who last year split
time with the Memphis Grizzlies
and their G League affiliate. Wa-
tanabe, who played in college at
George Washington, scored four
of his national team’s first six
points. Though Japan was clearlyovermatched — it trailed 18-6 at
that point — he looked comfort-
able against his American NBA
peers, whose team lacks star pow-
er but still has the deepest roster
in the tournament.
Still, Watanabe finished with
just nine points in 27 minutes and
was the only Japanese player to
post a lower net rating than
Hachimura at minus-49. Yudai
Baba, who suited up for the Dallas
Mavericks in July’s Las Vegas
Summer League, led Japan with
18 points and was the only Japa-
nese player to crack double digits.
Celtics swingman Jaylen Brown
paced the United States with 20
points and added seven rebounds,
making up for the absence of his
Boston teammate Jayson Tatum,
who sprained his left ankle in the
Americans’ previous game. Kem-
ba Walker added 15 points and
eight assists, and Harrison Barnes
of the Sacramento Kings had
14 points and eight rebounds. The
United States next will face reign-
ing NBA MVP Giannis Antetok-
ounmpo and Greece on Saturday
in the second round of the World
Cup.
Aside from his dunk, Hachimu-
ra did not stand out Thursday. Not
in Japan’s zone defense that pulled
him to the perimeter and forced
him to pick up a bad foul by hack-
ing Brook Lopez from behind after
he scored at the rim. And not on
the offensive end, either, where
Hachimura’s first shot attempt —
a turnaround jumper — came
when his team trailed 8-0 and led
to a three-pointer on the other end
that padded the score.
In the final two minutes of the
first quarter, Hachimura finally
got aggressive when the smaller
Derrick White, a point guard for
the San Antonio Spurs, switched
to him. Hachimura backed White
down and was fouled before mak-
ing the shot. The two points didn’t
count, though, and Japan didn’t
score on the possession. Hachimu-
ra went scoreless in the first half
and was a minus-28 at the break.
Hachimura looked like a differ-
ent player after halftime when he
created his highlight moment.
Still, while Hachimura soon will
join the game’s elite in the NBA,
his debut against this level of tal-
ent was an up-and-down display
for a rookie who still is learning to
play with the world’s best.
[email protected]Hachimura’s dunk goes
viral despite ugly outing
Mystics narrow focus to winning crown
JASON HIRSCHFELD/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Old Dominion totaled 632 yards in its 49-35 upset of Virginia Tech
last year. Entering Saturday’s rematch, the Hokies are 4-8 since.MICHAEL HICKEY/GETTY IMAGES
UCLA Coach Chip Kelly, above, and Ohio State Coach Ryan Day
played quarterback for the same high school in New Hampshire.TONI L. SANDYS/THE WASHINGTON POST
Mike Thibault is the winningest coach in WNBA history but has yet to capture a league championship.Old Dominion at Virginia Tech
Tomorrow, noon, ESPNU