Does first-year Storm head coach Gary Kloppenburg think his team is on the verge of a fourth WNBA title in the franchise's 20 years?

“Of course, I do. Absolutely,’’ Kloppenburg said via video conference.  “We feel really confident. We especially are getting back to full strength as we have this week.

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Ed Pepple did a most amazing thing as the boys' high school basketball coach at affluent Mercer Island, which outsiders have had no problem calling Mercedes Island, for obvious reasons.

For 42 seasons, Pepple took teenage basketball players who were never left wanting for anything -- luxury cars, expensive jeans, breathless water views -- and made them play as if their existences depended on every trip up and down the floor.

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The best-kept sports secret in town is the Seattle Storm -- partly because they haven't been kept in Seattle.

The WNBA has surrounded the Storm and the rest of its teams in Bradenton, FL., with a bubble that has kept them from COVID-19 so far in a shortened 22-game regular season.

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Since the Seattle Storm won the WNBA championship in 2018, the hoops storm rarely has ceased.

The three-time champs lost their Seattle Center home court for two seasons, now likely three. In 2019, they lost to injury their two star players, Sue Bird and Breanna Stewart. Their head coach had health setbacks and won't be on the sidelines.

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In a time when no competitions were staged by America's most popular sports, a whole lot of sports is being watched -- through an entirely different prism.

Much of the industry is now inextricably intertwined with the racial politics of a polarized nation under an administration that seeks to keep it that way. The tension is as thick as it is unavoidable.

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If pro athletes need training camps before the re-start of sports, so do fans.

Here's a prep question for what I'm calling the new covid-based sports world (What? You thought the virus was going away, like a miracle?) to get your sports brain and heart going again:

Will you accept, with understanding, a decision by any of your favorite team's players to sit out games, and perhaps whatever passes for a season, for reasons of personal safety?

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Never before-seen scenes. Spectacular hoops video. Candid insights. Dramatic storytelling.

The Last Dance was a marvelously riveting, 10-hour valentine about the greatest dynasty in modern sports, the six-time NBA champion Chicago Bulls of the 1990s. It also made a point that everyone inside and around basketball knows, but typically is afraid to say.

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Due to COVID-19, there's no Mariners games. Or Sounders games. Or NBA games. Or the NHL or Final Four. If you’re sad that you can’t see any big-time sports this month (and maybe not for awhile) you can still enjoy sports  -- a step removed -- at DJ’s SportsCards, 1630 Duvall Ave. NE in Renton. You can also enjoy playing casino games at 666 Casino, where online gaming is always open.

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Below in italics is what I started writing Thursday night for posting Friday morning:

Hey, PGA Tour: The sports nation turns its lonely eyes to you.

Following the most grimly astonishing 24 hours in American sports history -- a least, where no one died -- it appears the golfers have the fruited plain to themselves.

For awhile, anyway.

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After flying to Springfield, MA., to attend the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame ceremonies in September for the induction of former Sonics center Jack Sikma, I was chatting up the driver of the airport shuttle.

"So what do you hear about the size the crowd expected here?" I said.

"Good," he said, "but nothing like it will be next year."

"Why?"

"Kobe. It'll be nuts."

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I owe David Stern a thank you.

It's a little late for that realization, since he died Wednesday. But emotional contradiction is often the case when it comes to complex characters. Such people can exhilarate and infuriate, sometimes in the same paragraph. It becomes difficult to know whether to salute or slug.

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SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- For a town dead to the NBA, Seattle showed it could still light up the game.

The two most exuberant moments in the induction ceremonies for the class of 2019 at the Naismith Memorial National Basketball Hall of Fame were reserved for ex-Seattle SuperSonics star Jack Sikma.

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SPRINGFIELD, Mass. -- Growing up on a farm in Illinois, Jack Sikma daily awoke to the sounds of birds and the scent of flowers. Growing up in New York City, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar daily awoke to the sounds of birds coughing and the smell of trash.

From disparate worlds, the rivals spent 12 years in each other's grills, farm kid and Harlem kid meeting regularly in the low post in Seattle and Los Angeles. Friday night they meet again in more hospitable and salutary circumstances.

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On the one hand, no one should be surprised that Steve Ballmer upended the NBA last week. He already did it once in 2014, when he paid $2 billion to buy the Los Angeles Clippers, a then-unimaginable sum in pro basketball, even for an industry pickled with Foghorn Leghorn personalities steeped in cash as well as the art of bombast.

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Mariners fans alert: Sports-franchise enfeeblement is not a permanent condition.

Probably you knew that. But when the local nine leads the solar system in errors, strikeouts and double-digit losses, sometimes it's important to hear the reminder over the Benny Hill-theme music playing on an endless loop in your minds.

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The NBA had itself some drama Monday night. The two-time defending champs, down 3-1, celebrate the return after 32 days of their star big man, who plays 14 brilliant minutes, only to go down with a more serious injury. Yet Golden State wins. By one. On the road.

The Toronto Raptors, feeling the weight of everyone from Hudson's Bay to Whitehorse on their backs, slavering for a first championship, can't shoot a lick, yet come from 14 down to six up inside the final four minutes. Then they ease ever so slightly, and lose. By one. At home.

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There was a time in Seattle when the SuperSonics were the biggest deal. Now they are no deal.

So when the time came Saturday for the 40th anniversary of Seattle's first modern major sports championship, melancholy nibbled at the edges.

To be sure, many cheers and laughs pickled the one public celebration, when coach Lenny Wilkens and six players made it to a pre-game ceremony at T-Mobile Park to have a go at the ceremonial first pitch.

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Knowing how the dwindling knot of Mariners fans are repulsed annually by the bellicose Canadians who commandeer T-ball Park for the annual series with the Blue Jays, this notion may be hard to take. But since the NBA Finals features the Toronto Raptors for the first time in their existence, they are automatic darlings of the North American pro sports spring.

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Surprisingly, the great University of Connecticut basketball coach Geno Auriemma was at the Seattle Storm practice Tuesday afternoon where he met up with two of his former great UConn players: Guard Sue Bird and forward Breanna Stewart.

Not that Stewart was playing.

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BY CHRIS TOMASSON

MINNEAPOLIS -- Jack Sikma was talking Saturday about the top centers he faced in his NBA career. Then he mentioned Shaquille O’Neal.

“I missed him by a couple of years,’’ Sikma, who retired in 1991, said of O’Neal, who entered the league in 1992.

Sikma paused.

“Put it this way: He missed me,’’ Sikma said, smiling.

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