Bird Gets Good News on Knee

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Kevin Pelton, stormbasketball.com | June 22, 2010

Seattle Storm guard Sue Bird had her left knee checked out by a specialist Monday after hyperflexing it and leaving Sunday's win over the San Antonio Silver Stars early, and while she will still be monitoring how her knee feels, the news was good and no ligament damage was found.

"My knee is kind of tricky because I've had so many surgeries," said Bird. "It's not as simple as getting an MRI because you can't really see what's going on in there sometimes. The doctor said my ligaments look fine - I look sturdy, if you will. We're just going to see in a week or so if I'm still having pain. If I am, then we'll go from there, but he didn't think anything was wrong, so that's really good news."

"It's just very painful and it takes time to go away. I knew there was nothing to be worried about." Terrence Vaccaro/NBAE/Getty Images

Bird was told to avoid running for another day, keeping her from participating fully as the Storm returned to practice Tuesday after a day off, but she was able to do shooting drills.

"I'm just working on getting my range of motion back and feeling comfortable with it," she said. "I went back into the locker room after the game and tried to jog, run, things like that. I was able to, but the minute I went too far - like if I had to play defense in a stance, I wouldn't have been able to do that. The next day I was fine - I woke up and was able to do those things."

A four-day break in the Storm's schedule allows Bird to take it slow with her recovery. She joked that if a championship was on the line, she "absolutely" would have tried to play. With two more days of practice before the Storm hosts the Indiana Fever on Friday, which happens to be Sue Bird Bobblehead Night (7:00 p.m., 1150 AM KKNW, LiveAccess, ), there's no need to push it.

"It's a perfect time for this to happen," Bird said, "because we have these days off and don't have a game until Friday."

Assuming her knee feels good tomorrow morning, Storm Head Coach Brian Agler expects Bird to be "pretty much full go" for Wednesday's practice, as the team starts to prepare for playing the Fever after Tuesday's session was focused more on refining execution at both ends of the floor.

For Storm fans at KeyArena and even her teammates (Swin Cash and Lauren Jackson both admitted saying quick prayers on her behalf), seeing Bird crumple to the floor and limp to the locker room midway through the third quarter of Sunday's game was a frightening sight. The crowd went silent and later gave Bird an ovation when she returned to the bench late in the game. But Bird, who pointed out that she knows her left knee well after three surgeries (she initially tore her ACL during college, had microfracture surgery after the 2003 season and an arthroscopic procedure in 2007), was never all that concerned herself.

"I knew exactly what happened when it happened," she said. "Like I said after the game, I can't bend all the way (backwards), and when it goes it's painful. When I walked off the court, immediately I said, 'Nothing happened.' It's just very painful and it takes time to go away. I knew there was nothing to be worried about.

"One time I slipped on ice and did it. It happens occasionally; it is what it is."

Either way, having Bird back on the court will be a relief for the Storm. The team extended its lead over San Antonio after her departure, pulling away for an eventual 21-point win, but Bird's strong play has been key for the Storm all season long. She leads the WNBA with 6.2 assists per game and is second in the league in assist-to-turnover ratio, a career-high 3.24.

Six on a Side

The Storm closed practice with a drill that hearkened back to an unfortunate chapter of women's basketball history - 6-on-6, with 3-on-3 action at each end of the court. Once a common format for women's basketball, 6-on-6 basketball survived into the 1990s in high schools in Iowa and Oklahoma (where former Storm guard Betty Lennox was a high-scoring offense-only player growing up) but is now merely an artifact of the time when it was believed to protect women from the physical nature of the game.

While media, who see only the final portion of practice, were seeing the drill for the first time, Agler said afterwards that it is something he commonly uses.

"We do it quite a bit," he said. "If we have a stretch of 10 practices, we'll probably do that at least seven times. We don't do it long periods of time. We usually have either a six-minute game or a couple three- and four-minute games. It's a good thing to do early in practice."

When he started his coaching career at Northeast Oklahoma A&M Junior College, Agler was recruiting local high school players who were playing 6-on-6, so he's familiar with the game and sees some benefits to the unique challenges it offers in terms of preparing during practice.

"It helps our defense because to me the hardest thing to defend in a team setting is 3-on-3 because you have so much court to cover," said Agler. "You have less help out there, so it helps our defense. Offensively, it sort of gets us in a rhythm of playing together. You have to play against a press, you have to press a little bit and you have to play as a team - get the ball up the floor, throw it across."