Sparks defeat Mystics, win season series

LOS ANGELES — There will be no playoffs for the Sparks again but you gotta take your wins where you can get ’em.

And that’s what the Sparks (14-25) did as they defeated a tired Washington Mystics (24-16) team, who are on their second game of a back-to-back. The Sparks defense held the Mystics to 31 points and 36 percent shooting in the second half. Los Angeles also had only nine turnovers the whole game as they defeated Washington, 88-82.

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“Yeah, we were down 17, I think at one point. But these guys have done that all season,” Sparks coach Lynne Roberts said, who celebrated her birthday on Friday. “We have not packed it in. We’ve had some great wins. We’ve had some tough losses but I have not seen them quit. And I think it’s a great team. Even though we were down big, I felt like we were still, and I know that sounds silly, but that we were in it like we were okay. Washington’s a good team and they’ve got a good balanced roster.

“And I thought in that second half, we just tightened up,” Roberts continued. “I thought defensively we were really, really good. Especially in that second quarter, not as good. But that second half we were really good defensively. Connected, talking, flying around. They only had three offensive rebounds in that second half. And they feast on O-boards. They get second chance possessions. We won the possession game holding them to six offensive boards and us only having nine turnovers and having 16. I think that’s where the game was won.”

Nneka Ogwumike admitted that the Mystics frontcourt is a handful.

“This front court is one to deal with. And so it’s a lot,” Ogwumike said. “And it’s like when you turn around, there’s two more that come off the bench. And so we wanted to do our best to make things challenging. In my experience, when you have a front court like that which I was kind of trying to tell (Cameron Brink) and (Dearica Hamby), you’re not going to stop everything but you just want every shot for it to be like a mental process. You…

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Publish date : 2026-08-29 06:07:00

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