Last-place Mercury fire coach Nygaard amid skid

The Phoenix Mercury have fired head coach Vanessa Nygaard after a league-worst 2-10 start to the season.

“We have chosen to make a change at head coach,” Mercury general manager Jim Pitman said in a statement Sunday. “We thank Vanessa Nygaard for the way she endured and managed the adversity of the last year-plus. Our organization and our fans have high expectations for this team, and we have not reached those with our performance this year.”

Assistant coach Nikki Blue will serve as the team’s interim head coach for the rest of the season.

The move comes a day after a 97-74 loss to the rebuilding Seattle Storm, a game that saw both Brittney Griner and Diana Taurasi return from three-game injury absences.

“What’s happening isn’t going to cut it,” Griner said after the loss, the team’s fifth straight. “It’s the first time I’ve ever had a record like this. It’s really frustrating.

“I don’t know. I guess tear it down and rebuild it back up. I really don’t get it. It’s not going the way we want it to go. It’s not the Phoenix Mercury basketball we all know.”

Nygaard, 48, finished with a 17-31 record in regular-season play with the Mercury and went 0-2 in the playoffs. This season’s start ties the franchise’s worst through 12 games, which happened in 2003, when Phoenix finished 8-26. The Mercury drafted Taurasi No. 1 the next season and have won three titles since, in 2007, 2009 and 2014. Phoenix lost to the Chicago Sky in the WNBA Finals in 2021, the season before Nygaard took over.

Nygaard played for three women’s Final Four teams at Stanford from 1995 to 1997, but her college career ended when she tore an ACL shortly before the 1998 NCAA tournament. Drafted by the New York Liberty in 1998, she sat out that season rehabbing her knee and then played in the WNBA from 1999 to 2003 with Cleveland, Portland, Miami and Los Angeles.

In 2003, she began her coaching career at the collegiate level at Long Beach State and then Pepperdine. In 2008, she worked as a WNBA assistant before moving to the high school ranks. From 2008 to 2021, she was an assistant and then head coach at Windward School in Los Angeles, one of the top prep programs in California. Among the players she coached there was current WNBA player Jordin Canada.

In 2021, Nygaard also served as an assistant with the Las Vegas Aces. In January 2022, Nygaard was named head coach of the Mercury, replacing Sandy Brondello, who had been let go after eight seasons in Phoenix.

Less than a month after Nygaard was hired, though, Griner was arrested in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport when she was returning to Russia to continue her overseas basketball season there. Russian customs officials said they found vape canisters with cannabis oil in her luggage, which she acknowledged packing in haste.

The Mercury’s entire 2022 season was overshadowed by Griner’s absence. The Mercury still made the playoffs with a 15-21 record but didn’t have either Taurasi (injury) or Sklyar Diggins-Smith (left team for personal reasons) in the postseason. Phoenix was swept by eventual champion Las Vegas in the first round.

Diggins-Smith gave birth in the offseason and is still on maternity leave, with her status for the remainder of this season unknown.

Griner, who returned to the United States in December 2022, has had a successful return to the court this season and was named an All-Star starter Sunday. But as a team, the Mercury have struggled. Asked what she felt went wrong in the Mercury’s loss Saturday, Nygaard said, “I need to watch the game, probably, before I comment on that. But, yeah, we’ve got to get better.”

Blue, 39, was an all-Pac-12 guard from 2002 to 2006 for the UCLA Bruins, and was a teammate for three years there with Seattle Storm coach Noelle Quinn. Blue was the 19th pick in the 2006 WNBA draft by the Washington Mystics, playing four seasons for them and one with the Liberty.

Blue began her coaching career in 2008 as an assistant with UNLV while she was still playing in the WNBA. She then moved to Cal State Bakersfield (in her hometown), Grand Canyon and Arizona State before joining Nygaard’s staff last year with the Mercury. Her first game as head coach will be Tuesday in Phoenix against the Dallas Wings.

ESPN’s M.A. Voepel contributed to this report.

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