107-23: Here’s what it’s like to play basketball against a WNBA coaching staff

OAKLAND – Kasib Powell could have dunked on me. What a way that would have been to start my Saturday morning. Instead, the 6-foot-7 former NBA Development League MVP mercifully decided to lay the ball up for probably his 20th point in a game that the Valkyries coaches won 107-23. And by we, I mean a collection of writers and broadcasters who groggily shuffled into the team’s downtown Oakland training facility at 7:30 a.m. to the sight of the entire Golden State coaching staff going through a real warmup program. Head coach Natalie Nakase, intently stretching after knocking down one midrange jumper after another, looked like she could have put on her No. 1 UCLA jersey one more time and dictated the Bruins’ offense to perfection. She had been anticipating this exact moment for months. Literally. Her good friend Joe Mazzulla, the Boston Celtics’ coach, did something similar to the beat writers there, crushing an unsuspecting press corps 57-4 in just 12 minutes in October. At least Nakase graciously gave us plenty of warning about the impending beatdown. During the premiere of the Steph Curry-produced “Goat” at the acclaimed Grand Lake Theater in February, Nakase made sure to tell me to “be ready” for a coaches-versus-media game. I didn’t think much of it at the time, since Curry soon followed her on the red carpet, and a warm meal at Hunan Village beckoned next door. It was no joking matter for Nakase. Throughout training camp and the early portion of the regular season, the coach has made repeated references to playing against the reporters. Her assistant coaches, including former All-Star Sugar Rodgers, onetime Idaho standout Landon Tatum and team personnel Daisy Feder, Boki Wang and Kenny Wolfe, all far more talented than us, took it just as seriously. Their warmups were a parade of perfect jump shots. Meanwhile, I alternated between launching bricks that echoed through the Marriott connected to the facility and hurling airballs in the general vicinity of the rim. It was going to be a long morning. Once Powell easily won the opening tipoff (a “jump ball” usually requires both parties to jump, but this one didn’t), the Valkyries’ coaching staff actually missed their first shot. The fourth estate had a chance to take a lead. Instead, we turned it over. The coaches scored. It only got worse from there. I was matched up a few times with Nakase, who has undergone knee surgery and is now well past her playing days. She dribbled by me like I wasn’t there. I vividly remember a possession where she held the ball near the corner, and I thought it would be a good idea to shade her baseline into a crowd. Before I finished that thought, she had already teleported past me and dished the ball to Rodgers for a wide-open look. That was how almost the entire 40-minute game went. It’s not like we didn’t have any talent on the roster. My colleague and Bay Area News Group Valkyries beat writer Nathan Canilao played for one of NorCal’s premier high school programs in Granada, and several others had similar backgrounds. It didn’t matter. The gap between a former high school player and someone with Division I or pro credentials and a full-time job in the WNBA is vast. Even going at half-speed (or more like quarter-speed), the coaching staff moved at thrice our pace. The overall pace of play was another real killer. While we were hardly able to get an open shot in the allotted 24 seconds, the Valkyries’ coaches were running real sets and dusting us in transition. “I was tired, I was dead,” ClutchPoints reporter Kenzo Fukuda, himself a former high school hooper, said of the constant running. “I was lying on the floor for a good 10 minutes there in the third quarter.” While we were trying to keep our lungs from imploding, Nakase was barking orders and defensive assignments like this was a casual jog through Golden Gate Park for her. “It was really scary when Natalie looked at me, dead in the eye, and said, ‘I’ve got Marisa,’” Marisa Ingemi of Valkyries Beat said. It wasn’t all negative for the press, who undeniably had an absolute blast. I grabbed a rebound and made a few nice passes that could have been assists, and the one jumper I took rimmed out. Not bad for someone who hadn’t played 5-on-5 since graduating from intramurals at Tennessee-Chattanooga back in 2019. Canilao scored four points, his last bucket being the more memorable of the two. “I found the mismatch, I looked off (team broadcaster) Morgan (Ragan), and I was like, whatever, I’m about to shoot this shot,” Canilao remembered. “Then, boom, I hit the shot.” Fukuda didn’t make a basket, but he picked off two steals and channeled his inner Draymond Green by somehow grabbing two offensive rebounds despite being only 5-6. Freelancer Jane Kenny dusted off her smooth jump shot to nail a few long-range shots, but it was actually a miss that stood out to her the most. “My favorite memory was getting my shot off with Kasib Powell closing out on me, even though I airballed,” Kenny, also 5-6, said. There were no hard fouls and plenty of sportsmanship. Nakase and a few other members of the coaching staff brought out armfuls of Gatorade bottles for us at halftime and we posed for a group photo in front of the scoreboard afterwards. Nakase let us know that she enjoyed the competition and hoped that playing a full 5-on-5 game would inform some of the questions we ask. Seeing how poorly we played without practice time together, she hoped we might now understand why a new player doesn’t immediately enter the starting lineup. And as our lungs burned, perhaps we would now relate to why steady substitutions are necessary in a full-speed WNBA game. But while I am flattered by Nakase’s implication that we could have made it more competitive with a few practice sessions together, I dare to disagree that even a full training camp for us writers would have done more than swing a few points our direction to keep the losing margin under 80 against the professionals.