Third-year guard out of UCLA Noelle Quinn points the way for her teammates in Los Angeles. Photo by Donald Barnat

LOS ANGELES - The whispers heard when the LA Sparks signed the WNBA’s #2 all-time leading scorer Tina Thompson in March became more full-throated when the team picked up the player Sparks’ GM Penny Toler characterized as “a killer.”

Betty Lennox had led the Atlanta Dream in scoring in 2008 with 17.5 points per game and was known around the women’s game almost as much for her desire to have the ball in her hands as she was for providing a burst of instant offense so notoriously potent that there was even a name for it: Bettyball. Betty and The Ball. No hyphen or space of any kind between them would be appropriate.

Thompson was the Houston Comets’ top scorer six of the last eight seasons. This after sacrificing her own offensive game for four years in service of the greater good of winning that many WNBA championships, allowing for and enabling the more senior members of Houston’s Big Three, Cynthia Cooper and Sheryl Swoopes, to have their many days in the scoring spotlight.

Even before the first tip off back in June those who might be seen on any game night hanging around the Chick Hearn Media Room deep in the bowels of the Staples Center were coughing into their hands asking how, on a team with Thompson, Lennox, Lisa Leslie, Candace Parker, and DeLisha Milton-Jones (who was second in scoring on the Washington Mystics her three years there) was it going to be remotely possible to keep so many potent scorers happy with just one basketball?

Meanwhile, LA made another personnel move which, in the context of the acquisition of Thompson and Lennox, garnered relatively little attention.

The Sparks’ pick up of UCLA graduate Noelle Quinn from the Minnesota Lynx on May 5th was even overshadowed by the team's earlier trade for another Lynx player, Vanessa Hayden, who was yet another big body to squeeze into what was quickly becoming the most formidable front line in the history of women’s basketball.

Fast forward to this week and the Monday afternoon deadline for those voting on the WNBA End-of-Season Awards to get their selections in. Now the player who made so little of a splash when picked up by the Sparks sits as the only real possibility for the team to pick up one of the coveted individual honors awarded by the WNBA.

How did she get here from there? Good question.   

Quinn had a pretty interesting rookie season in 2007. Averaging just 19 minutes she’d managed to end up ranked fourth in the league that season with 4.4 assists per game. And as impressive as that was, in one stretch where she started 14 games for the Lynx she’d actually averaged nearly twice that with an astonishing 7.7 dishes per game.

Despite her success getting the ball into the hands of scorers, Quinn’s offensive contributions were otherwise pretty meager. After two seasons in the league her career scoring average was a little over three points per game and she’d logged only 16.7 minutes per game in ‘08.

The Sparks were certainly in the market (some might say desperate) for a big guard who knew how and where to distribute the basketball.

But somehow the idea that Quinn, who’d averaged under 19 minutes per game in her short career, and who had a reputation in her first two seasons as being somewhat slow, would get a chance to be that player on a team with not only Lennox, but Marie Ferdinand-Harris, another former WNBA All-Star, both sitting at the 2-guard position seemed a dubious proposition at best. 

Now Quinn’s first season with the Sparks is in the books and her accomplishments this summer are a matter of record.

Somehow, she ended up third in minutes on the team behind only Thomson and Milton-Jones. Although she only started nine games, she’s seen far and away more floor time than any other Sparks guard, logging more minutes than Ferdinand-Harris and Kristi Harrower combined, and Harrower, it should be noted, started 26 games at the point-guard position.

The Noelle Quinn who showed up in a Sparks uniform in 2009 was slimmer, faster, and more confident taking the ball to the rack or launching a 3-pointer at crunch time than anyone connected with the team could possibly have expected.

On a squad with so many offensive weapons, drastic reductions in personal scoring production were a given across the board. Of the Sparks stars, only Leslie was able to hold steady at last year’s per-game average of just over 15.

Thompson saw her scoring average drop from just over 18 points per game down to 13. Parker’s scoring drop this year matched Thompson’s. Milton-Jones’s season average now sits at just over ten points per game, down from last year’s near 14 points per game.

No Sparks player’s point production, however, has taken a bigger hit in 2009 than Lennox’s. The one-time WNBA finals MVP has spoken about her desire to put aside personal scoring concerns for the team goal of winning a WNBA championship and Betty has proven to be as good as her word. Lennox has gone from scoring 17.5 points per game in ’08 to barely cracking double figures this year at just over 10 points per game.

Only one Sparks player has managed to up her scoring average over last year and that is Quinn. She has more than doubled her points per game average in 2009 from where it was in either of the last two seasons, and she’s accomplished this on a team where the major concern going into the season among many observers was how only one ball could possibly serve the needs of so many scorers.

Will Quinn’s rise in LA be enough for her to be voted Most Improved Player of the Year? Probably not. But that will be an unfortunate and maybe unavoidable oversight by those burdened with selecting the players for these end-of-season awards. Most voters have not witnessed firsthand the impact Quinn’s play has had on the Sparks.

Doubtless voters will be looking hard at the Atlanta Dream’s Sancho Lyttle and Erika de Souza, two much more likely winners of the MIP award in 2009.

The 6-foot-5 center de Souza started all 34 games for the Dream this season, a big improvement over her just eight starts in 2008. She netted a 50-percent increase in her rebound production from 6.6 to 9.1 boards per game while kicking up her scoring to 11.8 from 9.3 per game, an increase of roughly 20 percent.  

Lyttle’s scoring showed a more marked improvement in 2009 as she upped her points-per-game average from 8.2 to an even 13, an over-50-percent jump. The 6-foot-4 forward’s rebounding production increase was much more modest, however, as she went from 6.2 boards per game to 7.5. Lyttle’s minutes per game increased in 2009 to 27.4, up from 18 last season which was right at her career minutes-per-game average of 18.1.

While Quinn’s jump in minutes this season was roughly the same as Lyttle’s (de Souza’s minutes-per-game increase was more modest, going from 23 to just over 27) the context wherein these players would accomplish their increases in playing time and production could not be more different.

Both Lyttle and de Souza were acquired in either expansion or dispersal drafts by the Dream, a WNBA expansion team playing just its second season, with no star posts to speak of and coming off an inaugural year in which it was only able to manage four wins in 34 tries.

The situation for Noelle Quinn could not have been any more different on the Sparks.

Quinn’s rise occurred on a team with almost as many former WNBA all-stars sitting in front of her at just the guard position than existed on the entire Atlanta Dream roster going into the '09 season.

Coming into the new season in Los Angeles there were questions. Lots of them. Questions like...

With Thompson now on the Sparks’ roster, where would the minutes come from for Sparks stalwart Milton-Jones once Parker returned from having a baby in May?

Or…

With Leslie, Milton-Jones, and now fireballing Betty Lennox on the team, where would the Sparks find enough shots in the offense for Thompson to be contented with after being her team’s leading scorer for half the last decade?

It’s doubtful that anyone associated with the Sparks -- including and maybe especially Quinn herself, who was elated just to be back home in Los Angeles playing in front of family and friends -- was thinking about where her minutes or points were going to come from in 2009.

Yet anyone who has watched the Sparks this season knows the impact the unassuming third-year player with the sing-song voice has had on the team’s fortunes. With five of the greatest players in women’s basketball wearing the same uniform, it has been Quinn, ironically, who has often looked like the Olympic gold medalist for the Sparks.

Quinn has more than doubled her scoring average in 2009, but it has been her production late in games, her penchant for fourth-quarter heroics, that has brought the Staples Center crowd to its feet more than the play of any other member of the Los Angeles Sparks this season.

The six-foot guard isn’t likely to win the WNBA’s Most Improved Player award in 2009. But it’s hard to recall a young player who has improved her game so dramatically after stepping onto a team where the most likely outcome would have been for that player to be completely overshadowed by the women’s basketball glitterati on the roster with her.

Quinn may not win the MIP award. But that doesn’t mean she doesn’t deserve it.