By Terry Boehmker
NKyTribune sports reporter
A former Northern Kentucky high school basketball player selected by the Toronto Tempo in the WNBA expansion draft earlier this month was the leading scorer in the new team’s first preseason game on Wednesday in Toronto.
Cooper graduate Lex Held scored 21 points for the Tempo in an 83-78 loss to the Connecticut Sun. It was the first WNBA game played in Canada and the sell-out crowd watched Held make five 3-point shots to account for most of her scoring. The 5-foot-10 guard also had two steals, two assists and one block in the historic game.
“They were active the whole game,” Held said of the boisterous crowd. “I thought they were totally engaged, totally loud through out all 40 minutes of the game and that’s what matters. I thought it was awesome.”
With 39 seconds left in the fourth quarter, Held hit a step-back three from the left corner that trimmed the Suns’ lead to 79-76. But the visitors made their final four free throws to secure the win and ended up outscoring the home team, 26-12, in the final period.
Held was in the Tempo’s starting lineup and played 21 minutes. She had a team-high 12 points at halftime. The nine points she scored in the second half all came on 3-point goals. She was 5-of-8 from behind the arc and her team was 11-of-31.
Toronto has another preseason game on Friday at the Minnesota Lynx with the official season-opener May 8 at home against the Washington Mystics.
Held, 27, signed with the Tempo after being selected in an expansion draft of unprotected players on other WNBA rosters. She made her debut in the league last season with the Phoenix Mercury team that was runner-up in the playoffs.
Last season, Held averaged 5.3 points, 1.1 rebounds and 1.1 assists off the bench for Phoenix. The undrafted rookie was a double-figure scorer in five of the first seven games. In one of them, she netted a career-high 24 points.
Held was averaging 8.7 points, 1.7 rebounds and 1.4 assists when she suffered a partially collapsed lung after colliding with another player. That put her rookie season on hold for five weeks during a painstaking recovery. She returned to play in 18 games during the final three months, averaging 2.6 points, 0.5 rebounds and 0.8 assists during her comeback.
A 2018 graduate of Cooper, Held scored more than 2,400 points during her varsity career and finished her senior season with the state’s second highest scoring average at 28.3 points per game.
She was recruited by DePaul University in Chicago, where she started in 89 consecutive games over three seasons. The Blue Demons compiled a 64-25 record with her in the lineup.
Held started her pro basketball career playing for women’s teams in Australia, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Sweden before landing a WNBA contract with Phoenix last spring.