SUPER BOWL 2012

Turning the Other Cheek

On Friday, the Mystics announced that they had received another medical hardship exception from the WNBA, allowing them to add an additional player to their 11-woman roster. Upon receiving that exception, the Mystics signed Joy Cheek from -- big surprise -- Duke University! Which means that on what is now a 12-person roster, the Mystics have 5 players from a single college. And three of them played together.

We have absolutely nothing against Joy Cheek. By all accounts, she’s a really nice person. And heaven knows, Lang – who’s been playing far too many minutes, in the BCs’ opinion – could use the help of another PF (like Joy) coming off the bench.

Joy was drafted by the Indiana Fever in the third round of last year’s draft. She’s a 6’1” Forward who played in 7 games for Indy last season. We welcome her to the Mystics and hope she does well here in D.C.

The problem we’re having is that regardless of what school she’s from, it just strikes us that 5 players from the same place are too many. Our readers know, of course, that the BCs are die-hard Terps fans. During the college season, we have no love for the Blue Devils. Period. The End. But as our readers have also probably noticed, when it comes to the WNBA, how we feel about any particular player has very little to do with where she went to school.

Yes, we hope all the Terps do well in the pros. That goes without saying. But we don’t root against the Dukies in the WNBA and we don’t cut a WNBA player too much slack (if she’s not performing) just because she went to Maryland. (Best example: we loved having Lindsey Harding on the Mystics, and miss her terribly.)

And another thing . . . call us crazy (we aren’t named the BasketCases for nothing), but come summer, we like our pro basketball to provide some variety from the college basketball season. So we really enjoy watching players from non-ACC schools, precisely because they are not players we saw a lot of during their college careers.

As a side note, as far as we know, Alana and Mo are the only Mystics currently unable to play, which means that 9 players were still available to suit up before yesterday’s hardship addition. Indeed, the only injured players cited in the Mystics’ announcement yesterday were Alana and Mo. To the best of our knowledge, teams have only been allowed to exceed the 11-player limit when they were down to 8 uninjured players. So was this an exception to the exception? Or is another player injured that the Mystics haven’t mentioned? Or have we missed something in the history of exceptions?

At any rate, whether this was an exceptional-league-exception or just a routine-exception, once the Mystics were granted the exception, we would still have been happier with a little variety. Nothing against Joy or the Dukies (at least until the college season rolls around). But -- 5 players from the same school on the Mystics -- we’re not overly excited about this. Oh well, guess we’ll just have to turn the other cheek.