Dancing Dinos Kick Out Mystics

Potential playoff games rescheduled

By CHRIS NEEDHAM

Updated 10:31 AM EST, Wed, Sep 9, 2009

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Sometimes the WNBA makes it too easy.

We’ll admit, the jokes aren’t always fair. So you won’t read any jokes about torn knee ligaments, “Attendance Champion” banners, nor the motley crew of people who often fill the stands, as if they just wandered in off the street. And you definitely won’t read about the hypocrisy of an NBA-backed entity that strongly opposes gambling (especially among the league’s refs!) and that markets to children having one of their franchises play in a casino. (Hey, kids! $25 of free slot play with every paid admission!)

OK, so maybe you’ll read one. But you’ll also read about dinosaurs.

It’s the dinosaurs in our lives that are affecting the beloved Washington Mystics.

Should Washington’s favorite professional women’s basketball team make the playoffs, they won’t play their first-round home playoff games at the Verizon Center; they’ll be shuffling off to College Park and the Comcast Center,as the Times notes.

Why? Because of those dinosaurs.

It’s not just any dinosaurs that could get one of the building’s tenants to move their playoff games. These are giant, life-size, animatronic dinosaurs. Your inner 6-year-old can’t wait! "Walking with Dinosaurs" has the arena booked up for a bunch of nights right as the Mystics would be playing.

These dinos prance around on the floor in some sort of choreographed stage show. Whether that’s more entertaining than watching women’s basketball is, perhaps, a matter of personal taste.

So where does getting kicked out of your own barn for Barney rank in terms of embarrassments?

Is it worse than the Penguins having to schedule one of their playoff games with the Caps around a Yanni concert. Yanni? Seriously? (They also had to schedule that series around a Dane Cook show – again, a matter of personal taste.)

So Yanni has more power than the NHL, and rubber dinosaurs have more power than the WNBA and the Washington Mystics. See, the WNBA really does make it too easy.