How often does the letter "l" occur in:
Seimone Augustus plays for the Los Angeles Sparks now.
I mean, what? Really? How? That would be like if Brett Favre… OK I guess these things happen but wow is that going to be weird.
It’s not just weird because she won four championships in Minnesota and we never thought she would wear any other uniform. It isn’t just bizarre because a generation of ballers grew up in this state trying to perfect the Seimone crossover or that we watched her go from No. 1 pick to 12th all-time in scoring. It’s that Seimone is different.
Think of it this way: Imagine if there was a Hall of Fame for all athletes that ever walked the planet and that Hall of Fame had different wings for different types of legends. Down one Hallway is the greatest of the greatest. Maya is there, Jordan is there, Serena, Tiger, Ali, Gretzky. Seimone isn’t in that hallway but maybe she could have been.
When Augustus came out of high school, Slam Magazine called her the Women’s basketball Michael Jordan. Ignore the cringy WNBA-NBA comparison for a minute and think about how dominant she was. As a senior at LSU she led the nation in scoring and hit 45% of her threes — she was Naismith player of the year, All-American and went to the Final Four three straight times. She was the player who was supposed to skyrocket the Lynx to championship contention. But then they landed Maya Moore — the only player you’ll run across with a more impressive resume than Seimone.
And then the Lynx won like crazy. Four championships in a league stacked with talent.
Seimone was always in the middle of it. She was an All-Star 8 times and averaged 16 points per game in the playoffs. Augustus was All-WNBA second team 5 times, which is kinda perfect. She’s one of the all-time greatest to ever touch a basketball. Lynx/Wolves owner Glen Taylor said upon her exit that her jersey will hang in the rafters of Target Center.
But she didn’t get the Jordan shoe deal like Maya and she wasn’t from Minnesota like Lindsay Whalen. She took on a different role. In that Hall of Fame for all athletes, she is in a different wing — one that has Scottie Pippen and James Worthy and Candice Dupree.
It’s a wing for winners only.
These are the folks who could have gotten all the attention but didn’t.  They chose to stay, to grind, to take on the toughest defensive assignments, to pass when it was the right time to pass, to take only the shots that were there — because they cared about winning more than anything.
Last year she got hurt and spent her time coaching up young players like Lexie Brown — with her patented smile, of course.
So she’s off to L.A. and it’s gonna be weird. She wants to win and the Sparks are stacked while the Lynx are in transition.
How can you be upset with Seimone for that? She’s in the winners wing so she wants to win. And for a player who was so unselfish for so long, let her have this one.
But it’s going to be all kinds of weird to see her crossing over players on the Lynx next year.
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In that passage, there are 102 occurrences of the letter "l."
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