Summary of chat with Jia Perkins

Here's a summary of the chat with Jia Perkins from the Chicago Sky Message Boards

Where was jump shot last season?
Actually my jump shot has always been there. I was playing the point guard so I wasn't trying to be as aggressive offensively. The three pointer I just worked on that in the off season.

On the 39 Pt game:
Of course I was pleased with my stats but more pleased with the Win. That was definetly my coming out game.

Love watching her and her shoot:
Thanks I appreciate that. I try to make a difference right when I step out on the court.

Best advice for up and coming player:
I would tell her to never let anyone or anything discourage you from living your dreams. Always believe in yourself.

About the team:
We have a pretty funny team, I don't think I could just choose one. I would say I hang out with Chasity the most! We love going and getting some Cold Stone icecream.

I love Chicago! I have made some great friends here. I think we can win it as well. You know anything can happen during the playoffs. We have already beaten some good teams.

Can you dunk? No I can't dunk, I'm getting old.

Do you think you will win the 6^th man award?
No I don't think I would win 6th man of the year. I'm really not the sixth man off the bench. I think other players have been playing well the entire season and I just started playing well in July.

About making an all-star team?
No I never thought about that! It would be a blessing though.

Team:
Well I think we need to focus on our team defense. I don't think we have a problem scoring but sometimes we don't focus on making defensive stops. Thats whats going to get us in the playoffs.

About taking the last shot with game on the line?
Very comfortable. If I'm hot why not.

Favorite basketball moment?
My favorite moment was when my dad and I got inducted into the hall of fame at our high school.

My family doesn't treat me any different from anyone else in the family. The biggest obstacle was probably coming back from my pregnancy.

What city should have a wnba team?
Dallas! Thats close to the house.

Heard listen to music before games, any other pre game rituals?
I don't have any other pre-game rituals.

About Charlotte losing its wnba team?
I hating hearing about it because I had friends there and like going back to that city.

Personal
I have two tatoos but I didn't think anyone could see them. The one on my shoulder says Faith and has a chinese symbol. Another one on my lower back that says Blessed!

I really don't have a favorite WNBA player but my favorite NBA player is Allen Iverson.

About daughter:
She is good. Thanks. She is here with me now. My mom just left yesterday and left Lirah with me. I did miss her while she was away but my mom really needed her so that made it easier for me.

Nickname
Actually Candice has given me a nickname that I have had for a while now. I don't think I can say what it is online but ask Candice when you see her and see if she tells you. I Hate It!

I like to go shopping on Michigan Ave. I don't have a car right now because it wouldn't make sense for me to buy one when I am overseas most of the year.

Article updates

I guess summer has been quite busy. I just realized I have a number of links to articles to post. Last week we took SkyDramaQueen to camp, so my mind was a little preoccupied. All four of us went to the Indiana game. Then we drove off to camp the next afternoon. So we missed the San Antonio game. But it looks like the Sky is back in the playoff race.

Here's a few articles detailing the past few weeks.

Games

• Canty delivers twice for Sky in clutch
• OT win gives Sky new hope
• Losing streaks are history as Perkins, Sky top Fever
• Detroit 92, Chicago 84
• Detroit 78, Chicago 65
• Sky (8-12) at Fever (15-4) – Preview
• Indiana 75, Chicago 74
• Chicago 68, Indiana 65
• Sky Rally To Top Fever
• Perkins takes control in fourth quarter of Sky's win
• Chicago 83, Detroit 73
• Sky Scorch Shock; Ford Out
• Phoenix 98, Chicago 96
• Sky would like to take this one back
• Chicago 88, Houston 70
• Dales, Sky beat Comets by largest margin in franchise history
  

Players

• 'Confident' Perkins afire for Sky
• Catchings sisters still a team
• Brooke Wyckoff’s AIM page
• Sky's Dupree plays with stellar approach

Team

• Burke’s Blog: Heading Down the Home Stretch – July 28, 2007
• Sky Prepares for WNBA 2nd Half (video)
  

WNBA

• Detroit rides six-game win streak back to No. 1
• Sparks' Fernandez, Spencer top rookies – Armintie Price is ranked 4th in their rankings
• WNBA.com Power Rankings: July 31, 2007 – Sky are number 8.
• Rookie Rankings: July 25, 2007 – No. 1: Armintie Price – Honorable Mention: Cathy Joens
  

Chicago Sky Chat with Dominque Canty

Here's an attempt at summarizing the points of the Chat with Dominique Canty from the Chicago Sky Message boards. Again, I qualify this as only an attempted summary because of the format of the chat.

• Played in Detroit 4 years. Houston – 4 years. Overseas a lot and coached at Chicago State University for 2 years.
• Ankle is better, but not yet 100%.
• About playing with Tina Thompson, Sheryl Swoopes, and Dawn Staley – Loved playing with them. Learned how to be a leader from Tina. Tina is competitive in practice and games and made Dominique play as hard as possible. Dawn taught her a lot about the post position. Sheryl is sweet and cares a lot about people. She misses playing with all of them.
• Play in Gydnia in the off season. Holdsclaw will play with her.
• Favorite players were MJ (Michael Jordon) and Scottie Pippen.
• Didn’t really pattern her game after anyone. Played a lot with guys.
• Advice to anyone wanting to play: My advice to any one that wants to play ball is to practice how you play. Become a gym rat stay ahead of everyone else.
• Parents always supported her, although her mother didn’t want her to play at first. Her father convinced her mother.
• She didn’t know there would be a WNBA when younger, so she looked forward to playing overseas.
• Chicago is beautiful.
  

Personality & background

• Attended Manierre on the North Side – grammer school
• Laid back. Pretty much same personality on and off court.
• Doesn’t say a lot, but if she has something to say she will say it.
• Loves being back home in Chicago. Hasn’t played in front of family and friends since high school.
• City is great, team is great, fans are wonderful.
• Doesn’t have a favorite song to listen to before the game.
• Drives a Dodge Durango.
• If stuck on an island for a month 3 things she would bring: Tupac CD, Water, and her basketball.
• Sky blue is her favorite color.
  

Sky

• Good chance at the playoffs. Every team in the East is neck to neck. Playing Detroit and Indiana may have helped. Top teams in the East and they played well fought games.
• Loves playing with the Sky. Young team that will do whatever it takes to win.
  

What would it take to get to the playoffs?

I don’t believe the Sky is mathematically eliminated from the playoffs yet, but it is going to be an uphill struggle to make the playoffs. Can they do it? What will it take?

• Free throws – We have had too many games where our lack of making the free throws has hurt.
• Physical play – At the beginning of the year, the Sky looked much more physical under the basket than they do now. I’m not sure what happened. I haven’t gone back and looked at rebounding statistics and compared games, but lately it seems they aren’t in position to rebound.
• Someone to get hot at the other Forward position – Candice is great as the one forward. The other forward position just seems to be absent. No one seems to be a really consistent scorer from that position, and they aren’t really rebounding either.
• Play the whole game – Just seems like the focus gets lost in the third and/or fourth quarter. I thought the overtime wins would have taught the Sky how to close out the game, but they don’t seem to be there quite yet.

We may not make the playoffs, but I’m a Chicago sports fan, so that’s nothing new in this city. For a new team, the Sky hasn’t looked bad. And if we don’t make the playoffs, “There’s always next year.”

Chat with Candice Dupree

The Chicago Sky just had a chat session with Candice Dupree on their message board. I’m not really sure if the message board is a best tool for a chat session. Maybe more training is needed by the Sky to make it efficient.

Here’s some of what we learned:

• Candice started playing basketball at about the age of 10. She did play basketball before college.
• Candice has a fraternal twin sister. Candice is the younger of the two. They are complete opposites.
• On being compared to Tim Duncan. – She doesn’t know who first started comparing her to Tim Duncan, but it was first brought up during college.
• Candy Jo isn’t her favorite nickname, “It started out as a joke last season and now I'm stuck w/ it for life.”
• Her high school number was 24. When she got to college, 24 was taken, and 2 was also taken. She decided to go with number 4.
• Prefers Philly cheese steak sandwich over Chicago deep dish pizza.
• She doesn’t go out much in Chicago, except to shop on Michigan Avenue. She does not have a favorite shoe.
• She’s never been on the Chicago Sky message board before today.
• Listens to pretty much any kind of music.
• On fans: ” Thanks, it's good to know that I have fans all over the world. I need to go to Brazil one day. I've heard it's beautiful!! “
• Still trying to figure out her dream car.
• Doesn’t follow the NBA much except for individual players. Heard that the Bulls did well.
  

Professional

• She is proud of being an all-star for 2 years in a row.
• What she thinks about before the game: “I just think about the game and how aggressive I'm going to be. Try to focus on knocking down shots.”
• About playing against Kamesha – “Well we didn't really get to play "against" each other. Our teams played each other. It was neat seeing her out on floor, but this time on the opposing team. She played really well so I was happy for her.”
• On the Detroit game (July 10, 2007) – “I thought I played like trash...lol. Umm the highs were that competed really well w/ Detroit. The lows, we weren't able to get stops are crucial points in the game.”
• One word to describe Stacy Dales – hilarious.
• When asked how the team felt about playing the Fever and Shock some many times in a row – “Intimidated...NEVER. We're excited about rising to the challenge and looking forward to proving ourselves.”
• She doesn’t come out after games because she has to do things like deal with the media and other stuff.
  

Temple and Dawn Staley

• Misses the camaraderie of the team and coach.
• Staley prepared Dupree physically and mentally for the playing in the league
• She stays in touch with Dawn Staley, and will see her at the all star game.
• Coach Chaney would sometimes go to the women’s basketball practices and do some coaching.
• Play center in college.
  

She thanked all her fans at the end of the hour. Her sister was also online and there was some interplay between both of them. From the chat, you get the feeling she is a very hard working and humble young lady.

There were a lot of unanswered questions. Some of them were about playing in Poland, players on the Sky, and young ladies asking for advice about how to get to the WNBA. It would have been nice to get some answers to those kind of questions, but the chat was only one hour long, and I’m still not sure this is the best method to hold a chat (although I am not sure what is the best method). Now, it would be nice if the Sky web person or someone in the communications department would go through the topic, come up with a list of unanswered questions. See if they could get Candice to answer them, and then just post a message with the answers or put together some article answering the questions.

Chicago Sky vs Detroit Shock

I’m not even going to discuss the Sky loss to the Detroit Shock. All I have to say is that the Sky needs to put a full game together. I thought after the 2 overtime wins that maybe the Sky was over the daze they seem to get into during the 2nd half of a game, but it looks like I was wrong.

As for media coverage, the Sky/Shock game was on ESPN2. Our satellite was out. I listened to the game on WVON. I don’t mind listening to the games, but you do need to know some basketball terminology and it’s hard to picture how a team is playing. Now, usually when I listen to the game, I bring up the scoreboard on the WNBA site. I guess since this was an ESPN2 game, they don’t update the scoreboard on the WNBA site until the game is over. ESPN2 has a scoreboard, but it was slow to update even though I had it set to autoupdate every 30 seconds. They were just really behind in the action. I also like the WNBA interface better. It looks like neither of the Chicago online versions of the paper had a reporter covering the game because only one paper has the associated press article, and the other paper didn’t have any article yet.

Disappointing Losses

With 6 minutes to go on Saturday, July 7, you had the feeling that the Sky could beat the Washington Mystics. With 5 minutes to go, you knew the Sky had lost the game. The Sky did look rather blasé as they came out to the court at the beginning of the game. Washington was an important game. The Sky’s next five games are with the conference leading Indiana Fever and Detroit Shock. The Sky just seem to lose focus as the game continued. At one point, the Sky had an 11 point lead. Our free throw percentage was up to 76.9%. Just think a few more free throws and we win the game.

In this game, we also seem to have problems with physical players. Sanford seem to be all over the Sky players on Saturday night. She didn’t score a lot or rebound a lot, but she did a lot of holding, pushing, and playing physically. I also think the refs weren’t focusing on some of the stuff that was going on there, but we could have been doing the same thing and I would have thought that we weren’t fouling.

I did not listen to the Sky Fever game on July 8. From the comments I read on the Sky message board, it was a good thing that I missed the game. The Sky scored only 9 points in the 2nd quarter. We only made 35.4 of our field goal attempts. The Sky didn’t make a field goal for the first 3:19 minutes of the game and the first 5:35 minutes of the second quarter. I expect things like that in a junior high game, not a professional game. The Sky ended up losing big time to the Fever 86-70.

Since the games were local, the online versions of the Chicago Tribune must have covered the game. The Chicago Sun-Times only has the AP articles about the games. Figures that the games we win aren’t covered, and the games we lose are. Here are the articles from the Chicago Tribune.

• For Sky player, father knows best
• Sky fail to hold late lead vs. Mystics
• Rocky start to rough stretch for Sky
• Sky's Dupree added to All-Star roster
  

Here are some other articles of interest:

• Keep the change: Order stays the same in power rankings - (Nancy Lieberman says Coach Bo might need to be considered Coach of the Year).
• Rookie Rankings: June 27, 2007 - Armintie is ranked no. 3.
• Lauren Jackson and Jia Perkins Named Western and Eastern Conference Players of the Week - Perkins is the first player to tally 30+ points and 10+ assists in a single game. 39 points mark the most points scored by a WNBA player this season.
• Sky Re-Signs Cathy Joens
• WNBA Announces Reserves For 2007 All-Star Game
• Preview: Sky (8-10) at Shock (12-5)
• In East, others are more deserving than DeForge, Braxton
• Day In The Life Of Jia Perkins
• Washington 77, Chicago 73
• Indiana 86, Chicago 70