The best of the WNBA's best

We judge athletes and teams from the past in two ways: We can overestimate their skill and success because of the nostalgia factor. We can underestimate them because we know, like everything else, sports are evolutionary and each generation gets better.

So why rank a team from the WNBA's second season as the best of all 14 league champions? Because I tried to split the difference between those two views. And because the '98 Comets perfectly fit a formula for a successful team as described by legendary former Louisiana Tech coach Leon Barmore: "You give me three who can score, and I'm going to win a whole lot of basketball games." Or as former Comets coach Van Chancellor put it: "Thank God for great players."

Chancellor had three future Hall of Famers from 1997 to 2000: Cynthia Cooper, Sheryl Swoopes and Tina Thompson. The other member of "The Big Four" -- Brazilian Janeth Arcain -- actually came off the bench most of the 1998 season. The other starters were the point guard who blended the talent so well, Kim Perrot, and center Monica Lamb, who had her only productive WNBA season that year.

At 35, Cooper was still in the extended prime of her career in 1998, averaging a league-best 22.7 points and being named MVP for the second season in a row. Swoopes, who gave birth in the summer of 1997, played in nine regular-season games during that first Comets title run but was back at superstar level in '98 at age 27, averaging 15.6 points, 5.1 rebounds and 2.5 steals.

Thompson, a post in her second year out of college, averaged 12.7 points and 7.1 rebounds; Perrot averaged 8.5 points and 4.7 assists and led the way in steals, with 84.

The 1998 Comets outscored their foes by an average of nearly 13 points per game. It was the first year of playoff series in the WNBA, which in '98 seeded the top four teams by record. Houston and Phoenix, both Western Conference teams, were in the WNBA Finals. Houston lost Game 1 in Phoenix, then closed out the title with two victories at home.

In 1998, some of the talent in women's basketball was still dispersed to another league, the ABL, whose players came to the WNBA in 1999. And the Houston bench wasn't deep with impact players. But if you put the '98 Comets team in a time machine and advanced it to now, it would be a strong title contender. Consider that Swoopes returned to the league this season at age 40. Thompson, 36, has never left and just finished her 15th season. Cooper, Swoopes and Thompson were honored this summer as part of the top 15 players in WNBA history.

There is a sadness, though, in remembering the 1998 Comets. The four-time championship franchise folded after the 2008 season. And Perrot was actually in the last year of her life in 1998. The following February, she was diagnosed with cancer and died Aug. 19, 1999.

What more could Seattle have done in 2010 in posting one of the most dominant seasons in league history?

The conventional wisdom is that today's WNBA is a stronger, deeper league with more talent than it had in its early days. Eleven-player rosters have left plenty of talented, capable players on the outside looking in. Making a roster in the world's best league is as difficult as it has ever been.

And yet Seattle was the best team in 2010 by a wide margin. The Storm set the league record for regular-season victories with their 28-6 finish. They finished 21-0 at Key Arena (including the postseason), playing impeccably in front of what can be argued is the league's most supportive fan base.

"It's a rare thing," guard Sue Bird said of the 2010 season. "I just think that season was extremely unique for any WNBA team. Your memory changes over time. You look back at it and you think that it was easy. But it wasn't."

The Storm were a complete team with stars on the inside and the outside in Lauren Jackson and Bird, a front-line No. 3 in Swin Cash and strong play off the bench from veterans Le'Coe Willingham and Svetlana Abrosimova. They were resilient -- winning 13 of their 28 regular-season games despite trailing after three quarters. And, perhaps most importantly, they stayed healthy.

The Western Conference admittedly didn't put up much of a fight, with five of the six teams finishing with a losing record. But the fact that a Phoenix team with Diana Taurasi, Penny Taylor and Candice Dupree couldn't beat Seattle all season speaks volumes.

It was a start-to-finish run for the Storm, who opened 9-1, the franchise's best start, and sported a 13-game winning streak at midseason. With five games left in the regular season, the Storm had their home-court advantage sewn up.

But this was a team with a tough postseason history over the previous five seasons -- a run of five straight first-round losses -- and it made a 180-degree turn, sweeping the postseason with a 7-0 record -- the first team to sweep the postseason since Los Angeles did it in 2002.

The Storm made the postseason a continuation of what they had accomplished all year, running through the playoffs without losing a game and playing in one of the most compelling sweeps in WNBA Finals history.

While the Storm were able to claim what was starting to look like their rightful title in just three games against the talented Atlanta Dream, they were all nail-biters, three games decided by a total of eight points.

Bird propelled the team to a Game 1 victory with jumper with 2.6 seconds to go. In Game 3, Seattle needed a fourth-quarter comeback, led by Finals MVP Jackson, to win the clincher in Atlanta.