Monarchs Can Wrap Up The Crown. Yes, it's a school night, and the game won't tip off till about 9 P.M., which is really stretching it for the BasketCases, but we do intend to be up watching as Sacramento takes on the Shock for game 4 of the best-of-five WNBA Championship series at home in Arco (ESPN 2) . With Sac ahead 2-1, the Monarchs can pull off a title re-peat tonight with a win. Which the BasketCases hope they do, for many reasons. Among other things, we really like Sacramento as a team. Not just because of our home-town girls, Kara Lawson and Becky Brunson (and, blog readers, we've written about them enough so we won't say any more), but also because the Monarchs have a whole roster of terrific players who have class and talent. And we'd really like to see Yo, one of the greatest players ever, get another title before she retires. (While we'll miss Yo if she really does hang it up, which she is hinting she might not, we won't miss the tiresome announcers telling us for the ten zillionth time that she used to repo cars for a living. Oh, and did you know that Kara played pee wee football when she was a kid?)

It is also a factor for us that the Monarchs are playing Detroit. Because the BasketCases have never been anything but honest with you, our loyal blog readers, we'll be candid here. We just don't like Detroit. It starts with their Coach, Cave Man Bill. One of the good things about having microphones on the coaches as ESPN 2 has had for this series is that more and more people are seeing Bill Laimbeer for what he has become as a coach: a whiner who tries to bully and intimidate the refs during games (and in our opinion who often succeeds), a constant complainer about the officiating when the Shock lose (he was just fined by the league for his most recent tirade), someone who is often cold or obnoxious toward his players, and someone who sits back and visibly checks out of games with plenty of time left when the going gets rough. He has an enormously talented team, and yet when they get blown out, as has happened twice in the finals, he's reluctant to accept any responsibility for how they play. He is fond of saying, as he did after the Shock were routed by Sac on Sunday, that his team didn't come out "ready to play" as hard as they should. Well, Coach, isn't is part of your responsibility to make sure that they do?? (And hey, if you are as tired of Ruth Riley as you seem to be, send her here to D.C., the Mystics could use her!)

Go Monarchs!!

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Shame on the Washington Post. It's bad enough that the Post has pretty much been ignoring the WNBA Championship series (except for AP post-game stories). It wouldn't have taken much creativity to do a feature, for example, on the Monarchs' DC-area connections. But apparently that was asking too much. Today takes the cake, however. Neither the "On the Air'" box in the Sports section shows that Game 4 is being televised, nor does the Sports portion of the "Highlights" box on the TV page in the Style section. As far as the Post is concerned, it's not happening. Boo on them.