How Marissa Coleman’s Three Pointer Drives Indiana’s Offense
The slump-busting Game 3 Marissa Coleman put up in the Indiana Fever’s 100-89 victory over the Chicago Sky that lifted the Fever into the Eastern Conference finals for the fifth straight year was prophesized by a teammate.
“Before that game, Bri [January] made a comment to me, ‘Every three you shoot tonight is gonna go in.’,” Coleman said as she stretched along the sideline about an hour before Wednesday night’s game against the New York Liberty. “So after the first couple, I knew it was going to be a good night. It felt good, and after those struggles, those first couple went down and it was like, finally.”
What followed that moment of relief was a 17-point effort that included five three-pointers. It is safe to say that the Fever couldn’t have overcome Elena Delle Donne’s 40-point effort without the transcendent game of Tamika Catchings, of course. But it is equally certain that without Coleman busting out of a shooting slump that lasted nearly a month and dramatically slowed the Fever offense in the final stretch, Indiana wouldn’t have advanced either.
To understand how critical Coleman is to the Indiana offensive attack, consider that while the Fever led the WNBA in three-point accuracy at 36 percent, they aren’t a high-volume long-range team. Many Fever players can shoot the three, with eight different players taking at least 29 of them. But Coleman, with 125, is by far the most prolific. No one else tops 83 attempts on the season.
“There’s a few things,” Fever coach Stephanie White said, by way of explaining this disparity. “One is the way she shoots it, it’s unique. So she’s always going to be able to get it off. I think from a fundamental viewpoint, her form, her release, it’s one of her strengths. But we can also move her around. So we can get her some easy looks on the block. And then we’re able to move her around to the weak side. So automatically, when we get teams in rotation, she’s the extra pass. And we design it that way, because we have the utmost confidence in the way she shoots the basketball.”
All of which made the downturn in Coleman’s perimeter game so problematic for the Fever, who’d gotten off to a 17-11 start. Coleman’s three-point accuracy of 38.5 percent in those 26 games ranked among the leaders in the WNBA. But she shot 5-for-29 in the final eight games of the regular season, including 0-for-12 over the final two games, and the Fever sagged to a 3-5 finish.
The experience perplexed Coleman, who tried without success to discover the problem.
“That was the craziest thing, they all felt good,” Coleman said. “So that’s where frustration comes in. Because usually if you’re off, or you’re missing free throws, you can go back and look at film and see, I wasn’t doing this, I wasn’t doing that. Every one I shot felt good, though, and when I watched film, I was like, ‘Man, I’m shooting my shot.’ So that was the most frustrating thing. I just had to stay confident in my shot, and make sure I didn’t start passing up shots. I had to shoot my way out of it.”
Lest you think Coleman is simply a Steve Novak in Indiana, the reason her success is so vital to the Fever is her ability to mirror what Catchings does on the floor, both when Coleman’s spelling her and when she’s providing an additional versatile threat when White chooses to go small.
That was no accident. It’s what White and Lin Dunn saw in her when they signed her as a free agent back in the spring of 2014, and it’s what Coleman said drew her to Indiana as well.
“I watched her play in college a lot,” White said. “And I watched her play in Washington a lot her rookie year when Monique Currie was hurt, and I watched how they utilized her. She’s very good at posting up, she’s very good at coming off screens. We challenged her to work on her ball handling, a little better off the dribble, and she accepted that challenge. But as a player, I feel like she needed someone to believe in her, someone to encourage her and someone to empower her. And we’ve been able to do that.”
All of which meant that when her struggles from deep continued into the playoffs, her team stayed behind her uniformly—not just emotionally, but schematically, too, getting her shot after shot.
“We’re all going to miss shots,” White said. “It’s all in her mentality. She passed up an open three, one we designed for her, at the end of the game two weeks ago in Washington. And she can’t pass up those shots. We let her know: look, those shots are for you.”
Coleman doesn’t think she would’ve broken through in that decisive Game 3 otherwise. Not only did she make her first a minute-plus into the game, then another quickly followed, but Coleman’s three with 1:06 to go extended the Indiana lead to 93-85 and essentially ended the game right there.
“I kept telling myself, before games, during games, to stay positive,” Coleman said. “Because there was going to come a point where I was going to get a big one. And I had that conversation with my brother after I had that one with a minute left, and he said to me, ‘You see? You spoke it into existence.’ The biggest thing was staying positive and knowing at some point in these playoffs, I was going to hit a big one, and let that carry me forward. I got out of my shooting slump and now the rest is history.”
Coleman did struggle in the Eastern Conference finals Wednesday night, though less from poor shooting than from a team-wide lack of opportunities in an 84-67 Liberty rout. Then again, that’s precisely the position the Fever were in last week, before winning two against the Sky to get here. And Coleman acknowledged in a year of breakthroughs, she’s imagined what the ultimate capper to the season might be.
“You know, you go into seasons hoping things will go a certain way,” Coleman said. “And I had really good vibe coming into these playoffs. So no matter what happens this series, it’s going to be a successful season. But to win the Eastern Conference, get into the WNBA Finals after making all star, it’s definitely not a season I’m ready to let end.”