The Portland Fire disappeared in the second quarter and chased the game the rest of the way in a 95-77 road loss to the Golden State Valkyries on Tuesday night.<\/p>\n
After a first period that saw a pair of lead changes and the teams battling within a bucket of each other most of the way, Portland came out flat in the second and never fully recovered.<\/p>\n
Golden State set the tone early when Janelle Salaun pulled down a pair of offensive rebounds that turned initial misses into 3-pointers for the Valkyries. She then stepped behind the arc herself and buried a triple, followed by converting a traditional three-point play in the lane on the next trip down the floor. That floor boosted the Valkyries to an eight-point lead, and it would only grow.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe game went away from us in that second quarter — giving up offensive rebounds really hurt us in that first half,\u201d Portland coach Alex Sarama said.<\/p>\n
Golden State sank eight triples in the quarter, and a Veronica Burton layup with two ticks left sent Golden State to the locker room in command with a 56-36 lead.<\/p>\n
Megan Gustafson topped the Fire in scoring with 13 points.<\/p>\n
Portland (6-5) returns home to face Phoenix (2-8) at 7 p.m. Friday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Portland Fire disappeared in the second quarter and chased the game the rest of the way in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":681372,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434],"class_list":["post-681371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=681371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/681371\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/681372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=681371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=681371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=681371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}