Curtain Call - Shooting Stars

So far through a few entries in the Curtain Call series, the teams serving as subjects have had endings that have been very final for the fans and cities losing a piece of their culture. But it’s equally true that so far, all of the franchises have continued on in some form, just in a new home. Frankly, there just haven’t been that many franchises in the Big 4 North-American pro sports leagues that have truly gone belly-up in recent history. 

Of the 4, the NHL can claim the most recent when the Cleveland Barons ceased operations in 1978 (though even that saw their organization merging with the Minnesota North Stars who now live on in Dallas). Going back two more decades you’ll find the last NBA team to shutter with the original Baltimore Bullets closing up shop just 14 games into the 1954/55 season; and the last NFL team just two years before that when the Dallas Texans shut down after a 1-11 record in 1952, their lone year of existence. As for baseball, you can count the Federal League’s 9 members that closed up along with the league in 1915; but of current leagues, the most recent franchise you could possibly claim would be the Baltimore Orioles iteration that played its last game in 1902. Even they went on to more or less become the New York Highlanders/Yankees the very next season - the last time a team truly ceased to exist in either the National or American League was when 4 teams were contracted in 1899.

In the past half century, the few franchises that are allowed to exist in these closed league systems are simply too valuable to give up on entirely and will always have some new suitor looking to offer a home for any wayward owners or teams. But, there has been one league in North America that, over the past 28 years, has managed to lose an otherwise unheard of six franchises altogether while still remaining in business: the WNBA. And of the half-dozen teams in the W that have boarded up their windows, none are more worthy of a writeup in this space than the one that still holds a share of the record for most championships in league history despite having not existed for more than half of that history. It’s time to talk about the Houston Comets.

Before getting to the genesis of the W and their earliest dynasty, let’s set the stage for women’s hoops in the mid-’90s. Geno Auriemma’s UConn teams had already started dominating sport at the college level; but it was the Huskies’ 1994/95 35-0 title-winning season, the first undefeated one in program history, that had them now also breaking into the national conversation. And luckily for the growth of the sport, that same national conversation would carry over to the Atlanta Summer Olympic Games the following summer with a highly-touted US Women’s National Team.

The much-ballyhooed ballers had come up short in the ‘92 Summer Games as well as the ‘94 World Championships, so with the chance to host the next major international competition on home soil, USA Basketball invested heavily into the team to try and further professionalize it. Not only was the bill for their extensive 52-game tour ahead of the olympics fully footed by the national organization, each player received a $50,000 salary for their time with the team, a heretofore unheard of amount of money for the women’s side.

Even with this cash infusion, there were doubts about the team’s ability to put their past failures behind them against a talented field, but they put those to rest with a sterling undefeated run in Atlanta that saw them outscore opponents by 229 points en route to their first gold medal since 1988. While there could once again be no question that the US women were the best in the world by a wide margin, there was exactly one other question begged by this performance: what were all these players going to do once the Games were over?

To this point, outside of playing for the national team, opportunities hadn’t really existed in the United States for women to play basketball at a high level after graduating from college. Some leagues had attempted to get off the ground throughout the back half of the 20th century; but with all due respect to some failed predecessors (including 1984’s one-and-done season for the Women’s American Basketball Association, the never-really-in-operation National Women’s Basketball Association, and the brief three-year existence from ‘93-’95 of the Women’s Basketball Association), there simply hadn’t been a viable domestic option for the athletes.

As such many who got the chance travelled internationally to play in overseas leagues, but there was an undeniable psychological cost to having to play so far away from home even if it meant access to opportunity and pay that wasn’t available anywhere else. Furthermore, such a massive commitment often affected the availability of the country’s best players for international competition. With this groundswell of support becoming more apparent, and fans more and more wanting a chance to see the best version of the game played on home soil where they could see it and be a part of a growing movement of women in sports, in 1996 it was decided that the time was right to take another shot at a domestic women’s professional basketball league.

Except actually, we took two shots.

In 1996, the American Basketball League or ABL tipped off for the first time, and during that first season news also broke about another league that would become the ABL’s direct competitor during the following 1997 season: the WNBA. An optimist would look at this situation and try to reason that a rising tide can potentially lift all ships. A pessimist, or maybe even pragmatist, would look at the history to that point of women’s sports leagues failing to catch on and worry about the two league’s cannibalizing one another’s bases of support. Even going into this, each league was expecting to take significant financial losses in getting these operations off the ground - were they really going to be able to withstand that kind of sunk cost while also going toe-to-toe right at the outset?

There is a certain truism, often referred to as Betteridge’s law in reference to a TechCrunch article by journalist Ian Betteridge, that goes "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no." The two tried to coexist by avoiding overlap as much as possible - the ABL was focused around markets with strong women’s college programs, while the WNBA was instead based around pre-existing NBA markets - but pretty quickly on it seemed clear that only one was going to be able to survive long term.

The ABL had a number of things going for it: fewer professional teams competing for eyeballs in its various towns, a massive-for-the-time sponsorship deal with Reebok, a higher average salary compared to what the WNBA could offer, and all but 5 of the Olympians that had just played a starring role in the ‘96 Games. But in the end, it didn’t have the one thing the WNBA offered above all: stability. While both leagues were indeed going to bleed money presumably for a while, the WNBA was more prepared to take that on the chin thanks to the backing of the backing and support of the NBA. What’s more, their relationship with the NBA also got them onto ESPN and ABC (in addition to Lifetime) for the first season as well. After two years of running on parallel tracks, stability would win out as the ABL would eventually give out after three seasons to the WNBA.

So with that as preface to how the W and all of its teams outlasted the ABL, let’s see how Houston has done during these first two years.

The Comets absolutely dominated the first two years of league play, going a combined 45-13 over those two season not to mention 6-1 in the playoffs en route to back-to-back titles. We said that all but five of the 1996 UWSNT players went to the ABL, but one very important member of the quintet was former Texas Tech standout Sheryl Swoopes. Before the WNBA even held their first draft, 16 women were assigned to the 8 teams in an initial player allocation that like the NBA’s “Bird rights” tried to keep some of the top stars geographically close to where they had already made their names. Swoopes, a Texas native, was one of the two players sent to the Houston club that would shortly thereafter be christened the Comets.

Swoopes was just one of the superstars that Houston was lucky enough to land at the outset.: the other player from that initial allocation was Cynthia Cooper, who became the league’s first ever MVP in ‘97 and their first ever two-time MVP in ‘98 (and two-times Finals MVP to boot). With these two leading the charge, supplemented by secondary stars like Tina Thompson and Sidney Perrot, the team had made their mark in just two short years. For the Houston faithful, who had just gotten to experience a similar two-year run with their Rockets in the same decade, it was a storybook beginning to the city’s WNBA legacy.

There is though an unfortunate undercurrent in a lot of early WNBA history surrounding missed opportunities. Cynthia Cooper won that first MVP in what was technically a rookie season, but she did so at the age of 34. Because there had been no such domestic league for such a long portion of some of these athletes’ lives, this wasn’t some luminary beginning to a youngster’s career. It was almost bittersweet to think that these MVP seasons might represent the tail-end of a prime that fans would never get a chance to see in full.

This was just one example of the many careers cut short by a delayed start, but there were some more tragic unexpected endings as well, especially for Houston. The aforementioned Kim Perrot had been “the heart and soul of the two-time WNBA champs” after those first two years, but ahead of their second title defense she received devastating news in the form of a cancer diagnosis. She would never again take the court for the Comets, and passed away after the disease spread to her brain in August of that year. The team, fanbase, and city were shocked by the sudden turn of events, by the absence of the hub around which spun the spokes of the budding dynasty’s wheel. It would have been all-too-understandable had if they’d failed to reach the same heights as before in the wake of their loss. But that’s not what happened.

We were now four years into the WNBA’s existence, and it was still only Houston that had managed to reach the mountaintop. And just as the WNBA had managed to outlast the ABL by dint of their stability, so too did the core of this Houston franchise manage to outlast its competitors season after season because of their continuity. Cooper was now a four-time Finals MVP; Swoopes had finally won her first regular season MVP award; and the third member of their Big 3, Tina Thompson, made each of their first two All-Star Games, winning the game’s MVP award in that 4th straight title-winning season. On top of all that, Head Coach Van Chancellor was the steady hand holding the clipboard for the whole run so far and would continue to do so for several more years.

But in the end, things can only remain so stable for so long. Their two foundational stars could only shine for so long: Cooper retired following the four-peat at the age of 38 (there would be a four game return in 2003 but otherwise the 2000 Finals were the end for her); and after the 2007 season, Swoopes left the only home-state she’d ever had when she signed on with the Seattle Storm. Even Coach Chancellor finally moved on after original owner Leslie Alexander sold the team off in January of 2007.

By 2008, they’d hired a new coach in Karleen Thompson, and the unrelated Tina Thompson was still as productive as ever; but the team failed to make the playoffs in her first season and only marginally improved in 2008. For all the stability that the league had originally represented, and for all the continuity that had sustained this Comets franchise, both they and the W were suddenly on shaky ground. By this point four different franchises had already closed shop: 2 of the original six, with the Cleveland Rockers shutting down after 2003 and the Charlotte Sting in 2006; and two expansion teams, the Miami Sol and Portland Fire, had each lasted for only three years from 2000-02. Even with as storied of a history as Houston had, it had become clear that if they didn’t manage to reverse their current fortunes, they might suffer the same ignominious fate. And that at long last brings us to Erica White.

One of the issues that is still present today in the WNBA, and was even more of a problem early on with fewer teams if anything, is that the overall talent level is incredibly high with so few roster spots available leaguewide. Now to be clear, this is not an issue for the fans who get to watch high-level competition night in and night out between teams that have an embrassment of riches on the court. But where it does become an issue is in places like the draft, where all of a sudden unproven players who have excelled at the lower levels like college have to figure out how to carve out a role on teams filled with potential All-Stars and establish themselves against proven veterans.

Even as the W plans to expand further in the coming years, there simply are not enough roster spots for deserving players, and this leads to a lot of otherwise very talented prospects failing to catch on due to the circumstances they find themselves drafted into. Much like with Cynthia Cooper, this leads us to often find players that very well may have had much more illustrious careers than circumstances allowed them to have because of the relatively limited opportunities that the W has been able to provide over the past quarter century. And there’s not many worse bad-breaks that circumstances can hand you than being a draft pick of a franchise that is crashing to earth.

Erica White had just wrapped up a four-year career at LSU where she had played alongside Sylvia Fowles as the Lady Tigers made the NCAA Final Four every single season, even if they’d failed to win a title during that stretch. That was enough tape for the Rockets to select her in the 2nd round of the 2008 Draft, and she followed that up with a perfectly solid rookie season - she appeared in all 34 games, averaging 3.6 ppg in 12.5 minutes a night. The good news is that if you’re a player looking for increased opportunity, the final game of a season in which you’ve already been eliminated from playoff contention is as good of an opportunity as any. So with 6:48 remaining in the 4th quarter of a September 15 game against the Sacramento Monarchs, White checked in for one last shift with the Comets.

One thing White had been pretty good at all year was free throws, shooting them at an 89.7% clip (albeit with just over two attempts per game); and for whatever reason, Sacramento put that to the test on this particular day. White, already having played nearly 19 minutes on this particular day, would be fouled six different times resulting in five trips to the free-throw line. This wasn’t like the game was far out of hand when she entered - Sacramento only trailed by two points in the 68-66 game when White first checked in, but the Monarchs and Ticha Penicheiro in particular just. Kept. Fouling. The last foul resulted in two final free throw attempts for White with 14.9 seconds remaining to give her the “honor” of recording the final statistic for a member of the Houston Comets.

She sank both, and a bad pass by Charlotte’s Charel Allen on the ensuing possession sealed it. White, with her nearly 90% free throw percentage, had sunk 9 of 10 for all 9 of her points in 25 minutes of game time. The Comets won their last ever game by exactly 9 points, with a final score of 90-81.

One factor worth mentioning is that this ending coincides with the Great Financial Recession of 2008, which was a particularly bad time for the franchise to be looking for a new buyer. Maybe if this downfall had occurred at any other time in league history, someone else with deep-enough pockets would have felt compelled to do something, anything, to preserve this franchise that had in no small part helped build this league up from the beginning. But like so many of Houston’s players, circumstances once again cut opportunities short.

Hopefully the overall health of the league can serve as some small consolation here. A new budding dynasty was taking shape in Detroit, where the Shockers had made 4 of the previous 6 Finals with Pistons legend Bill Laimbeer at the helm. And over in Los Angeles, another play had claimed MVP in her debut season just as Cynthia Cooper had a decade ago: future three-time NBA champion Candace Parker.

The league was slowly but steadily growing beyond what it had been in those nascent years dominated by the Comets. It could stand on its own without them now - but if they didn’t need Houston anymore, well that was just one more reason that this otherwise unthinkable erasure could occur. Erica White’s final bucket in front of the home crowd against the Monarchs is still, to this day, the last WNBA play to occur in the city of Houston.

As for Erica White, she became one of many WNBA players to be drafted multiple times throughout their career thanks to the magic of Expansion and Dispersal drafts. White was selected by the Indiana Fever and would appear in a grand total of two games for them the following season. Even that is overselling it a little bit: her second appearance was for a single minute in an eventual win over the Seattle Storm. Courtesy of ESPN, here is the entirety of that minute in the 3rd quarter of the June 9th matchup.

A steal, a missed layup, and that was it. Erica White would tack on a few more pro years in Israel, but that was the end of her WNBA career. But even then, it could be argued that she outlasted the Comets, this dynasty that now exists in a strange liminal space with no real claimant to its legacy. Plenty of teams that have moved from town to town can still at least keep the flame burning for their predecessors from previous locations. If the franchise hasn’t just left town, but for all intents and purposes left this mortal plane, how can someone make sure that some memory continues.

Sports one some level are an exercise in communal storytelling. The players write their own script with every play in which they’re involved, but the fans participate too in their own way by chronicling which things that they watch in the moment will matter later on. The players might tell the story the first time, but the fans are the ones who pass it down. So what do you do to make sure that people don’t forget you were here? What about someone like Kim Perrot - how could her teammates, her friends, make sure that everything she did wouldn’t just be lost to time? The question plagued Cynthia Cooper, now a coach at the college level, as the end finally came for the organization they had built together.

Cooper and Perrot were the only two players to have their jerseys retired by the franchise during its run, along with a #1 jersey dedicated to “The Fans”. Those three hang in the rafters of the Houston Rockets’ Toyota Center still to this day, along with the banners for their four championships; but unless you know the roles they played in those four titles, there’s no such honor for Sheryl Swoopes, or Tina Thompson, or Van Chancellor, or even Erica White. The evidence of this team is still there for you to find, even if the team itself isn’t, but it’s sure not easy to find it. Whether or not it’s worth remembering a team that no longer exists in any fashion, and may never have anyone else pick up its legacy - that’s up to you to determine. At the very least, if you do choose to remember the Houston Comets, this all makes it just a little bit easier to do so.