Playoff picture ... and a few prayers

I don't usually do a roundup of league events, but I felt compelled to put something together after a pretty eventful night around the league Tuesday. First off, the playoffs are set: Sacramento's win over Seattle eliminated Houston, making its win over the Sun for naught, while the Detroit Shock eliminated the defending champion Mercury themselves. The Shock did it with defense.

New York also lost, and remains 1.5 games back of the Sun and Shock.

Sacramento, like the Sun, is making its sixth straight playoff appearance. The Monarchs called themselves "underdogs" after clinching, and I would agree. I, for one, didn't think they had the team to make a push again this year, but they went on a roll before the Olympic break and rode their veterans to the postseason. Even as the No. 4 seed, their experience makes them dangerous, though I don't know if they have all the weapons to take downs someone like San Antonio.

Also, Seimone Augustus took a serious fall and left the court in a neck brace and a cart, though a CT-Scan came back negative. Candice Wiggins was also hurt, spraining her knee, though at the time it appeared much worse as she left the court in tears, according to reports.

As for the Sun, here's some quick reaction from last night's loss.

Mike Thibault: "They just played better than us. They shot a better percentage than us; we shot poorly, particularly in the second and third quarter. I thought that (Tamecka) Dixon and (Matee) Ajavon were huge, I always know what Tina (Thompson) is going to do, but they were focused and they outplayed us. They made tough shots, they out worked us on some loose balls, they’re trying to stay alive and we didn’t match it."

Thibault added that he doesn't "want to take much from this game. We got into some trouble in July where we were turning the ball over and rushing shots, tonight we had 18 turnovers and they had 22 points off of it and we can’t win a lot of games from that."

Tamika Whitmore: "We just got outhustled, plain and simple. We were lethargic from the beginning, we didn’t take care of the ball and it’s hard to recover from that."