By Alan Snel
LVSportsBiz.com
LVSportsBiz.com photos by J. Tyge O’Donnell
Only 12 seconds were left in the Las Vegas Aces games with the Seattle Storm and Aces superfan Mark Davis the NFL Raiders owner stood and clapped.
It looked the Aces were going to squeeze a win out of this ragged-played basketball game, with Las Vegas eventually slipping by defending WNBA champion Storm, 60-56.
The announced attendance was 4,215 and the Aces moved to 6-4 on the 34-game season.
It was a rough shooting night for the Aces’ 2018 All-Stars Kayla McBride and A’ja Wilson as both each shot 4-15 from the field, with McBride the birthday girl shooting 0-7 from three-point land too.
The Aces defeated a depleted Seattle squad, which was missing two stars — Breanna Stewart and Sue Bird.
Laimbeer was surly about the Aces’ performance:
“I’m not happy one bit. I told the players at the halftime that I was embarrassed for our players and our team. I thought we had no life. An important game like this, a game that we needed to win, and we laid an egg in the first half. I was embarrassed. At the end of the game, we won the game but I’m disturbed because any adversity that comes our way we don’t respond to it. We let it bother us. We take quick shots. Gotta do it myself. We don’t finish shots. We don’t do what we’re trained to do and make moves in the post. We turn to mush. That has to change. I told them that. If you want to be a championship ball club or compete for the championship you have to be much more mentally tougher than we are right now. I will take the win. Lucky that we won against a depleted team. We should have lost. That’s a fact. I don’t have practice time to fix it right now. We are in a stretch of a lot of games but its clear that we have some mental toughness issues that we have to find quickly for us to be competitive this season.”
The WNBA All-Star game is set for this arena, Mandalay Bay Events Center, on July 27.
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