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Saturday, Jun. 17 10:00pm ET
Fire lose fifth in row | |||||
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RECAP
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BOX SCORE
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- Losing to one expansion team was understandable. Two in a row would have been unthinkable for the Los Angeles Sparks. Mwadi Mabika scored a career-high 26 points to help the Sparks stop a two-game losing streak with a 94-81 victory over the Portland Fire on Saturday night. "Teams shouldn't be outplaying us and outhustling us, and I think we did a much better job of that tonight," said Lisa Leslie, whose team had started 4-0 before losing to the Sacramento Monarchs and the new Seattle Storm at the start of a three-game trip. "I think the game with Seattle really sends a bad message for our team, because then it feels like, `Well, the Sparks are beatable,"' Leslie added. "And that gives other teams a lot of momentum." Portland trailed by 10 at halftime but cut the lead to 61-60 on a driving layup by rookie Stacey Thomas with 13:35 to go. The Sparks didn't let up, however, and they steadily built their lead from there. A 16-foot jumper by the 6-foot-5 Leslie made it 80-71 with 3:58 left. "The one word I used for our team -- I wrote on the board over there -- is poise," Sparks coach Michael Cooper said. "We kept our poise and we didn't get rattled, we didn't get shaken. That was the biggest difference, is that we didn't wilt under anything that they threw at us." With Leslie and fellow Olympian DeLisha Milton in foul trouble, the smaller players picked up the slack for Los Angeles. Guard Tamecka Dixon scored 24 points and Mabika added 10 rebounds. "We just wanted to come aggressive, and from the beginning run the floor, and that's what we did," said Mabika, a fourth-year forward from Congo whose previous high was 21 points. "I knew my team needed me, and I just wanted to come hard and take the open shot and try to go a little more one-on-one." Sylvia Crawley scored 17 points and Sophia Witherspoon and Vanessa Nygaard each had 16 to lead the Fire, which lost its fifth straight and fell to 1-6, the worst record in the Western Conference. "No one really expects us to win games anyway, but we do, and that's the aggressiveness that we want to have," Witherspoon said. "We expect to win; we expected to win this game tonight." Leslie, who scored just five points in the first half after picking up her third foul with 6:29 left, finished with 15 points. Milton played just 17 minutes and had three points. "I'm just glad that we stayed together and just played hard, even when those two were not in the game," Mabika said. The Fire took an early 9-8 lead, but Los Angeles went ahead for good with an 18-4 run. Portland closed to 44-40 on two free throws by Tully Bevilaqua with 1:16 left in the first half, but the Sparks got a short jumper from Dixon and four straight points by Ukari Figgs to make it 50-40 at halftime. The Fire again had trouble with bad passes and misdirected plays. Portland, leading the league in turnovers per game at 23.8, committed 20 to the Sparks' 17. | ALSO SEE WNBA Scoreboard RECAPS Minnesota 69 Phoenix 62
Los Angeles 94
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