Coach wants to wear Lynx championship ring

On Saturday the Lynx beat Los Angeles 87-68 to clinch a playoff berth. But Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve said she expects her team to keep playing hard and to keep winning.

"What are we 20-6? I want to be 28-6," said Reeve, whose team has eight games left, four at home, four away. "That is what we are going for, that's the number."

The Lynx have won their last two games after a 29-point blowout loss at Connecticut. They play next at Tulsa on Tuesday before returning home Friday to face San Antonio.

After the L.A. victory, Lynx guard Seimone Augustus said she hoped the team could win the WNBA title so Reeve could wear a Lynx championship ring.

"That's a smart girl," Reeve said. "I haven't talked with her about that because I don't know if she knows I don't wear them. I wore them last year."

Reeve has two WNBA championship rings from 2006 and 2008 when she was an assistant coach for the Detroit Shock, before the franchise moved to Tulsa and regressed a bit.

"I don't wear them casually, I don't wear them in games and I don't want to wear them," Reeve said referring to her two championship rings. "I want to wear a Lynx ring."

"We started off a little bit slow," said Seimone Augustus, who led the Lynx with 17 points. "[Our bench] came in and they picked it up for us. I applaud them for that."

"It seems like any given night, there is somebody always stepping up," point guard Lindsay Whalen said. Whalen didn't have her best game. She was 2 of 8 from the field and finished with eight points and five rebounds. She also had five assists offset partly by five turnovers. Very uncharacteristic of her.

LA COACH RIPS BENCH

"Maybe I should have just used our timeouts to give the starters some rest because out bench didn't give us anything [Saturday]," Sparks coach Joe (Jellybean) Bryant said, "while their bench came in and did great. In the first half, their bench had 19 points and we had seven, on top of five turnovers from our bench players, so that really set the tone."

LA's bench finished with 23 points; backup center Jantel Lavender had 10 points and four rebounds and guard Kristi Toliver had eight points. But the bench players also had eight of the team's 17 turnovers which led to 21 points for the Lynx.

"The key thing to being a professional, and that's what I tried to tell them, is consistency. As a coach, you want to sit down and say, 'Okay, I know i'm going to get this from her and this from her.' You can't have the up and down, that's just being a professional. Consistency. You're only as good as your last game."

* "We just stopped doing the things that we need to do to be successful against a team like Minnesota," LA forward Tina Thompson said. "I believe they are No. 1 in the West. They aren't going to lay over and die. They possess some extreme athleticism or whatever and they play really hard, so you can not make mistakes, expecially the ones that you can control."

* "I think we just relaxed a little bit in the second quarter," Sparks center Candace Parker said. The Lynx outscored L.A. 32-14 that quarter.

"I feel like we're a good team, we show glimpses of greatness, but it's hard to win a game when you get outrebounded by 25. They had as many offensive rebounds as we had rebounds total. You're not going to win like that."

TULSA TALK

* Only four Shock players are still on the roster from the 2010 season: Ivory Latta, Tiffany Jackson, Amber Holt and Jennifer Lacy.