West 79, East 61NEW YORK -- In the warmups, when everybody was watching the celebrities arriving at Madison Square Garden for the first-ever WNBA All-Star game, Lisa Leslie dunked.
She took off, went up over the top of the rim and slammed the ball through the basket.
And nobody seemed to notice.
Dunks are ho-hum stuff for the guys. But in the three years the WNBA has been in business, no woman has converted one. This seemed to be the perfect setting for the first, and Leslie knew it.
So when she did it, nobody was watching.
"I was pretty surprised," Leslie said. "No one noticed because they weren't paying attention. It was a good one, wasn't it?"
So was the game for her. She scored 13 points and was the MVP in the Western Conference's 79-61 victory over the East.
It was a costly first All-Star game for Chamique Holdsclaw of the Washington Mystics. She suffered a chip fracture of her left index finger in the first half and played just 11 minutes.
"I think it was within the first three minutes," Holdsclaw said. "It was the first time I went in. Theresa Weatherspoon passed me the ball and Michele Timms tried to steal it and the ball just hit me dead on, on the top of my finger."
Holdsclaw said she was in pain after the game but thought she would be able to play when Washington visits Charlotte on Saturday. She will be re-evaluated by team doctors on Friday.
It was an unfortunate incident in an otherwise showpiece evening for the WNBA, which sold out Madison Square Garden for the event. The Garden was jammed with celebrities.
The crowd included soccer stars Mia Hamm and Brandi Chastain; courtside regular Spike Lee; Gregory Hines, dancing with youngsters in the halftime show; Joan Jett; Lisa Minelli; and Robin Leach.
They saw an All-Star game with something original -- defense.
"Our defense was about 300 percent better than I ever dreamed it would be in an All-Star game," West coach Van Chancellor said. "We were switching on screens. We looked like we had been working on defense for a long time."
Playing with purpose, the West limited the East to 35.1 percent shooting.
The West had a size advantage inside and made the most of it, outrebounding the East 48-36. Natalie Wiliams of the Utah Starzz scored a game-high 14 points for the West.
"There wasn't much we could do to combat that when you don't have size on your bench," said East coach Linda Hill-MacDonald of Cleveland. "The tallest player on our team was 6-foot-3. Next tallest after that was 6-2. We had three post players; they had five. There's not much you can do."
That left Leslie, at 6-foot-5, free to roam.
The game included a full supply of layups and breakaways, 3-pointers and no-look passes.
But sorry, still no dunks.
The West led from the start, opening the margin to as much as 20 points and seeing it shrink to a few as two, but never yielding to the East stars.
Leslie and Sheryl Swoopes led a 10-0 spurt at the start of the game. After a basket by Holdsclaw interrupted that run, the West upped its lead to 17-2.
With 4 1/2 minutes left in the half, the lead was down to 31-29. Then the West took off again, as Yolanda Griffith and Leslie led a 12-0 spurt that included a breakaway by Swoopes with 17 seconds left in the half.
After a steal by two-time league MVP Cynthia Cooper, the West called a timeout with 0.9 seconds left on the clock.
"I thought we'd get a play set up for Lisa," Chancellor said. "If we had more time, maybe 1 1/2 seconds, maybe she could get a dunk."
Timms tried a length-of-the-court pass with Leslie poised underneath. But the pass went awry and Leslie had no chance for that bit of history.
NOTES: The players received what league president Val Ackerman described as "modest bonuses" for participating in the game. "The proceeds of the game help us pay for the game," she said. . . . The league closed a city block adjacent to the Garden for a daylong interactive street fair. . . . Sears made a contribution of $25,000 to the March of Dimes and UNICEF in honor of Swoopes, top vote-getter in fan balloting. Swoopes received 85,632 votes and joked that she thought the donation was going to the Jordan Foundation, a reference to her son. . . . The game was televised to 125 countries in 20 languages.