The Los Angeles Sparks coaching news landed Friday morning: Lynne Roberts is out after two seasons, dismissed following a second straight year without a playoff berth. Short tenure, familiar ending.
Roberts arrived from the college game, where she had spent nearly a decade building Utah into a program that could win in March, and she walked into a Los Angeles job that has been one of the hardest in the league to hold. The Sparks have been trying to get back for a long time now. The drought was already in place when she took the whistle, and two seasons was not enough time to end it, which is the sentence that follows almost every WNBA coach who gets let go before a third year.
What makes this one sting a little is that the franchise did try to accelerate. They went and got a star guard in Kelsey Plum. They have young pieces they drafted high and believed in. That is a roster built to be relevant, not a roster built to be patient, and when relevance does not show up on the standings page, the coach is the fastest thing to change. It is not always fair. It is almost always what happens.
checked the almanac: this is a three banner organization. 2001 and 2002 with Lisa Leslie in the middle of everything, then 2016, when Nneka Ogwumike dropped in that short jumper with three seconds left in Game 5 in Minnesota and the Sparks took the title on the road. Ten years. Feels longer in Los Angeles.
What comes next is the part worth watching. The Sparks now go into an offseason searching for a fifth chapter in a decade of chapters, and the candidate pool will tell you what they think they are: a veteran fixer if they believe the roster is close, a developmental voice if they know it is not. Roberts, for her part, will not be unemployed long. The college game knows exactly who she is.
I'm watching the hire, not the firing. That is where Los Angeles actually tells us the plan.