Shelden Williams defends his wife Candace Parker in an understandable post-loss Twitter rant
Our mates at BuzzFeed alerted us to this wonderful bit of WNBA whimsey, as the league's most famous husband -- former NBA journeyman Shelden Williams -- took to Twitter to complain after his wife's Los Angeles Sparks were eliminated from the WNBA playoffs on Sunday.
The Sparks, who lost an 80-79 nail-biter in the closing moments to the Minnesota Lynx, were knocked out of the Western Conference finals in spite of Candace Parker's brilliant 33-point, 15-rebound, five-assist and four-block performance. Parker, who has been married to Williams for nearly four years, immediately chafed at the fact that the Sparks somehow failed to put the ball in Parker's hands as the clock wound down to end the contest.
The admitted misstep can be spied here, at around the 1:50 mark:
Following the crushing loss, Sparks coach Carol Ross took a bit of the heat personally, as her go-to star failed to receive the rock in the closing seconds:
''We were going to drive and Candace was going to follow to the rim,'' Sparks coach Carol Ross said, ''or Beard the option to get it to Parker on the pick and roll. It wasn't a good play or it wasn't executed too well.''
She kind of couched it with the "or" part. Still, last-second plays are notoriously hard to draw up and execute.
Williams, who last played in the NBA with the then-New Jersey Nets in 2011-12 and now bangs with a team in France, was having none of it. From his Twitter feed, via BuzzFeed, watch the proud husband's frustrations spill out in 140 characters or less:
We can poke fun all we want, or dismiss the idea of "hero ball" as something to shy away from in the last seconds of a close game, but as someone who has spent 47 percent of his own Twitter career complaining about last-second shots, let me stand right in line with Shelden as he complains. Not only was it the end of his favorite team's season, and not only is his wife on the team, but his wife was the one that dropped 33 points in just 40 minutes and wasn't even featured in the Sparks' final play.
Sometimes, Twitter is your only resource when it comes to venting. It's better than throwing a mini-basketball against the side of your house for two hours following a tough loss from your favorite team, as my father sometimes did. And my dad wasn't even married to Scottie Pippen.