Sparks star Kelsey Plum spoke about the team’s tough schedule recently amid a conituning push for the playoffs.

Ever since the Los Angeles Sparks came out hot to start the second half of the season at 6-1, they’ve hit a little bit of a rough patch going 2-3 over their last five games. The Sparks’ most recent loss, 95-86 to the Washington Mystics, comes as the team is trying to make a late season push for the playoffs. It also comes during a tough stretch of the schedule, but Sparks All-Star guard Kelsey Plum was quick to shoot down any notion that the schedule should play a factor in the team’s performance.

The Mystics game was the Sparks’ seventh game in 13 days. They have two days of rest before facing off  against the Dallas Wings on Wednesday. The team will then have nearly a week off before resuming play against the Phoenix Mercury on Aug. 26. Following the Sparks’ loss to the Mystics, Kelsey Plum downplayed the thought that the tough schedule should have anything to do with the team’s play.

“Some things I’ve learned in this league is [whether it’s] two days, one day or six days [of rest], no one feels bad for anyone,” Plum said. “So it doesn’t matter, at the end of the day you gotta show up and play basketball.”

For the most part, the Sparks had been playing fairly good basketball as of late. This was a team that was on pace to miss the postseason for the fifth consecutive season for sure. Now, the team is firmly in the mix for the playoffs, even with their recent hiccups. They still remain only half a game behind the Seattle Storm for the eighth and final playoff spot, and they currently hold the tiebreaker over the Storm with one game remaining in the head-to-head series.

Plum was the Sparks’ lone All-Star this season, and she’s been as good as advertised. The Sparks shifted to more of a win-now situation when they traded the No. 2 overall pick in this past draft in a sign-and-trade to acquire Plum.

She’s appeared in 33 out of 34 games for the Sparks at a little over 35 minutes per game. She’s been averaging a career-high 20.4 points, 3.3 rebounds, 6.1 assists and 1.3 steals with splits of 43.2 percent shooting from the field, 37.2 percent shooting from the three-point line and 89.7 percent shooting from the free-throw line. Her rebounds, assists and steals are all career-highs as well.

There’s been a learning curve for Plum this year as she navigates being the lead guard and top option for the Sparks. Her presence is one of the key reasons why head coach Lynne Roberts isn’t too concerned following the Mystics loss.

“The message we learned. . .is we can’t come out and think it’s going to be easy. . .We can’t panic or think that the sky is falling, and we’ve had tough losses before and we’ve always bounced back,” Roberts said after the Mystics game. “So I believe in this group, and trust them, and these two [Kelsey Plum and Dearica Hamby] sitting next to me are as reliable as they come. And when your best players are like that, then you have every reason to be confident.”