Perth Lynx coach Ryan Petrik says starting the season without reigning MVP Anneli Maley and with star pair Georgia Amoore and Teonni Key only arriving in Australia last week is a sacrifice he’s been prepared to make to have a team that is capable of challenging for the championship in February.
The Lynx will open their WNBL season in a grand final re-match against Townsville at Perth High Performance Centre on Saturday knowing they are long way short of being ready due to the WNBA play-offs in America.
Maley’s New York Liberty were knocked out during the semifinal series on Saturday and she is still in the US.
Amoore’s Washington Mystics were only eliminated two weeks ago and she’s only just arrived in the state. Key landed in Australia last week after playing for Toronto Tempo and has trained with the team twice.
But Petrik said the team was recruited with an eye towards finals instead of worrying about round one.
“You’ve obviously got to win enough games to get there, but if you’re good enough to get there, I want the best players available then,” Petrik told The West Australian.
“To do that, you might not have players for a six-week pre-season. They might even roll in during the week of game one, and that’s what’s happened in this case.
“But we’ll still have nine of them. Georgia will have been at four training sessions by then and Teonni will have had five. We haven’t had more than two starters in a scrimmage yet. So it’s been funky.
“When we get our full starting five, four of them will have WNBA experience, and the fifth one is Alex Ciabattoni, who was in the All-WNBL Second Team last year and has been with me for eight or nine years. So that first five is really intelligent,”
The Lynx have made a raft of changes to the team that lost last season’s grand final with co-captain Amy Atwell, star guard Ally Wilson and import centre Han Xu switching clubs. That has made it impossible to appoint leaders because a large portion of the squad have never met Maley as the incumbent captain.
“That’s been the weird part because obviously Maley is just such a good, natural leader and she’s the one player who hasn’t arrived yet,” Petrik said.
“I’m not going to bother her during a WNBA playoff series. And then if she’s trying to pack her life up and get to Perth, I’m not going to bug her then either. So when she lands, it’s clearly one of the things we’ll talk about. Again it is clearly not ideal to name your captain or leadership group after round one. But it is just the nature of the beast.”