LOS ANGELES – Katie Lou Samuelson insists she was weary the past week. It was a lot of mind over matter, a lot of pushing through fatigue.

After finishing an eight-month championship season in Spain, jumping continents and several time zones, landing in L.A. and hitting the ground running right into the physical fray that is the WNBA as a new member of the Sparks, yes, she was, in fact, tired.

The box scores could’ve fooled you.

In the Sparks’ past four games – without the benefit of even one full practice with the squad – the former Santa Ana Mater Dei High School star averaged 15.5 points on 58.3% shooting, including 66.7% on 4.5 3-pointers per game.

A career 17-minutes-per game contributor, she averaged 32.2 minutes in the Sparks’ past four games, including a career-high 38 in Tuesday’s victory against Dallas. The Sparks won three of those four games and improved to 5-6 entering Sunday’s game in Phoenix.

“Last game, before the game, I was like, ‘This has to be the last game of the stretch because I’m just so tired, my legs are tired,’” Samuelson said after her first actual practice with the Sparks on Friday at USC’s Galen Center. “I was trying to hide how I felt physically and stuff by just playing with energy, having fun, focusing on other things allowed me to play through that. But it’s definitely hard …

“Ice is my best friend.”

And practice time might be the Sparks’.

With four days between games this week and five more next week, they’ve finally stepped off a treadmill that had them pounding out 11 games in May, when they were on the road for eight of them and playing every other day between May 23-31 – a stretch that had them in Las Vegas, in L.A., in Indianapolis, in Minneapolis and finally back in L.A.

Now that their team has some time off, the Sparks’ coaches are eager to get to work.

The first order of business: Tightening up their defense.

Sure, the Sparks are scoring an average of 84.8 points per game this season, which isn’t only significantly more than the 72.8 points they put up per game last season but is on pace as the second most in the franchise’s 26-year history, behind only L.A.’s 84.9 points per game average in the 2020 bubble.

But there’s a but: The Sparks are hemorrhaging 87.7 points per game – on pace for the most points allowed on average in the franchise’s history. That’s uncharacteristic for a team that’s finished among the league’s top-five stingiest teams every season since 2015.

“The things that kept coming to mind for us were defensively really basic and fundamental things,” Fisher said Friday, when the Sparks spent some of their practice time focused on improving how they close out on shooters and “recognizing that what you think is close enough isn’t close enough.”

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Also on the to-do list: Better rebounding (they’ve been outdone on the glass 34.7-30.5) and transition defense (the Sparks are being outscored 12.5-9.9 in fastbreak points).

“We’re still learning how to appreciate the challenges of defending random flow basketball,” Fisher said. “We still have a tendency to want to be a little more scripted.”

They hoped some time to regroup and rehearse would help them rewrite the narrative.

“That was a real practice,” Samuelson said. “That was good.”

SPARKS (5-6) at MERCURY (2-8)

When: 3 p.m. Sunday

Where: Footprint Center, Phoenix

TV: Spectrum SportsNet, Facebook

Samuelson has started in four of those seven games, establishing new scoring highs (17 and then 19) twice while shooting 46.9% from 3 — again, without the benefit of practice time.

— Mirjam Swanson (@MirjamSwanson) June 4, 2022