Mercury Meter: Summer League Is Cute And All... But 10-Game Winning Streaks Are Pretty Awesome

In the span of 82 games last year the entire NBA went 0/32 on teams with a 10-game winning streak. This is the second longest home winning streak (11-games in 1999) in franchise history and the team has not lost in over a month. Ten games represents 29.4% of the WNBA season. So, the Mercury are rolling.

Part of this 10-game winning streak has been Penny Taylor starting all ten of these games after playing off the bench in the first nine games.

Another part has been the defenses steady improvement. On a week-over-week scale the Mercury have shaved three points per game against in a week and are the third best defensive team in the league. In the 10-games they have given up 80+ points only twice, won by a margin of 11.8 points per game, and ran five teams out of the gym.

No NBA team did this last year. Not the San Antonio Spurs. Not the Miami Heat. Not even the MonStars. Up next for the Mercury is the Minnesota Lynx 2012 13-game winning streak and the bell toll for winning streaks is the Houston Comets 15 game winning streak from 1998.

Diana Taurasi has been making history. Candice Dupree made some history herself this year. As the writing starts to appear on the wall Brittney Griner so far through two seasons has 161 total blocks in just 45 games. An average of 3.4 blocks per game, which is nearly a full block more than Margo Dydek and a block and a half more than the icon Lisa Leslie. By seasons end, after just two WNBA seasons, Griner could be hovering around 220 total blocks. How impressive is that?

It took 400 games for Swin Cash to net 239 blocks. Griner will do that in 61 games in all likelihood.

Her pace is absolutely incredible. Think of it this way: If Griner simply plays () games at her current 3.4 blocks per game pace she will pass Leslie in her 7th season (around 215 games) for second All-Time in blocks. The next season she would eviscerate the record in blocks. It took Margo (323 games) to get the record and Leslie 363 games to find her place in history.

Think about that for a minute.

******************************

Last season the Phoenix Suns hit the six game mark once and the five game mark twice in terms of winning streaks, different types of seasons, but why not take a look at that while we are here. The Mercury have played 19-gmaes which is 55.8% of the WNBA season, or roughly 46 NBA games.

At the 46 game mark the Suns were 28-18 (60.8%) playing some of the best basketball of their season as a whole.

This has been one hell of a year for basketball in the state of Arizona as a whole, considering. The Suns shocked the world, the Mercury are making history, the Arizona Wildcats flirted with a National Championship run, and the Arizona State Sun Devils made the tournament in general.