Maddy Siegrist is healthy again. Now, she hopes to help the Wings start winning.
Published in Basketball
NEW YORK — By coincidence, Maddy Siegrist returned from her second long-term injury as a pro on the same court where she returned from her first one.
That the court was at the Barclays Center meant the Siegrist clan could witness the occasion, just as it did last time. But if you give most people the choice, they probably wouldn’t want to have the injury in the first place — especially when it was a broken bone in the right knee.
Siegrist missed 18 games because of that, a year after missing 13 games because of a broken finger.
On Tuesday, she was finally back in action, and she looked good. The former Villanova star scored 13 points on 6-of-9 shooting in 15 minutes off the bench in her Dallas Wings’ 85-76 loss to the New York Liberty.
“I mean, I’m not a fan of broken bones,” Siegrist said with her usual dry humor. “There’s nothing you can do about it. You’ve got to just wait till it heals. So it was a little bit of a pain, but I’m happy to be back.”
Wings coach Chris Koclanes has had enough problems to deal with this year even before injuries. Although Dallas has a veteran star in Arike Ogunbowale and a rookie superstar in Paige Bueckers, Tuesday’s loss sank the Wings’ record to 8-22 — the second-worst mark leaguewide.
Siegrist admitted that the losing has been “tough to watch, obviously, when you feel like you can’t really do anything in the immediate [moment].”
Koclanes had to manage the person as much as the player while Siegrist was sidelined. He hopes that will pay off in production, especially in winnable games this month against the Washington Mystics and Los Angeles Sparks. (The Mystics game, on Sunday in Arlington, Texas, will feature Siegrist facing former Villanova teammate Lucy Olsen for the first time.)
“She’s the ultimate competitor, so helping her navigate having patience — she’s frustrated, she wants to be out on the floor, she wants to be helping this team,” Koclanes said. “When you sit out and you’re on the bench, you just gain different perspective that you can’t see when you are playing. So I’m excited to see what she’s learned from being away and how that can impact her and our team positively on the court.”
The 35-year-old is in his first year as a head coach after assistant stints with Southern Cal, the Los Angeles Sparks, and Connecticut Sun. (Before that, he worked at St. Joseph’s as a video coordinator from 2013 to 2015.) He talks optimistically about the future, as any coach with Bueckers would, but the record is what it is.
“It [stinks], right?” he said “Nobody wants to lose games, and you go in that locker room, and nobody in there is complacent, and they’re not satisfied. But you have to continue to do your job every day and come to work with a mindset, a growth mindset, and an optimism and a positivity. … I’ve appreciated our commitment to this process, which is on the floor and off the floor.”
It’s clear that Bueckers has quickly settled in as a pro after her stellar college years at Connecticut. She and Siegrist get along well and are enjoying being teammates after facing each other in Big East battles.
“I think we have great chemistry,” Bueckers said. “I think we play alike, and we feed off of each other and we know each other’s tendencies because we play a lot of a similar way of basketball. So it has been fun to play with her.”
And Siegrist, in her third pro season, now counts as experienced for a rookie teammate.
“I would say her life as a rookie in the pros is a little different than everybody else’s life,” Siegrist said, proven just by the huge crowd that watched Bueckers’ pregame warmups. “But, no, she’s handled it great. I think any time you come straight from college, it’s a challenge — it’s just a grind that first year because it’s so quick.”
As for Siegrist’s future? She has clearly shown she can play in a league that spits players out remarkably fast because of the 13 current teams’ small rosters. If she can stay healthy, she could be a key part of Dallas’ growth.
“I just think you’ve got to lean into your faith — I mean, I think God puts you through tests for a reason,” she said. “And you know what? If you’ve got to play through injuries early in your career, maybe the next 10 years of my career, I don’t get hurt. So I think you just have to attack every injury like that, and you’ve just got to try to fight for the comeback.”
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