Storm 3, Mercury 2: The margin could not be smaller

For about 48 hours last week, it looked like the rest of the WNBA was at the complete mercy of the Seattle Storm. The team had just gone up, 2-0, in their best-of-five series against the Phoenix Mercury and, on the other side of the playoff bracket, Elena Delle Donne went down with a knee injury. Seattle, on the brink of closing out their own semifinal series, appeared destined to go into a WNBA Finals against a team who was missing their best player, whether it was Delle Donne’s Mystics or Angel McCoughtry’s Dream.

Oh, and Seattle’s head coach, Dan Hughes, thought that his team’s Game 2 victory was a good sign for the Storm’s long-term development. Despite being just a single win away from the WNBA Finals, Hughes modestly and earnestly invoked the dreaded p-word typically used only by basketball’s rebuilders: “I think it’s a growing process for us. Every game, we’re trying to learn something. This experience for this team is about understanding what we’re learning.” It felt not just possible but probable that Seattle would quickly collect the 2018 WNBA Championship, and somehow before their championship window actually opened.

If there are basketball gods, they simply do not allow any fanbase to actually live out this kind of improbably dreamy scenario. For one, Delle Donne missed only a single game with the injury, returning with a limp but still somehow delivering the Mystics a series victory from a 2-1 deficit. A more pressing issue for the Storm: their own series had transformed into a 2-2 tie and, with one quarter remaining in a winner-take-all Game 5, they were on the wrong side of a four-point deficit. They were also on the wrong side of Diana Taurasi, the merciless final boss of WNBA postseason crunchtime. Suddenly it looked like the 2018 Storm had learned how to win regular season games, and not much else.

But then the Storm won.

*****

Despite losing the first two games in the series, Mercury coach Sandy Brondello had discovered some important ways to throw the Storm off their historic offensive rhythm. During Game 2 — the same Game 2 that ultimately landed so rosy for Seattle — Brondello found lineups that could knock two of Seattle’s three most potent offensive weapons off-kilter.

The first move was a savvy tactical adjustment. In Game 1, Brondello used lockdown defensive point guard Briann January against Sue Bird. But for Game 2, Brondello moved January onto Seattle’s All-Star shooting guard, Jewell Loyd. Loyd tends to play bigger than her 5-foot-10 frame, such as when she’s called on to guard Phoenix’s 6-foot-4 All-Star forward, DeWanna Bonner. However, the hounding 5-foot-8 January almost completely erased Loyd from the series, limiting her to 11.0 points per game on 34.6 percent accuracy.

The second move came out of desperation. The Mercury already came into the series with a rejiggered starting lineup: when 14-year veteran and starting power forward Sancho Lyttle tore her ACL in July, Brondello promoted shooting guard Stephanie Talbot and then shuffled around the positions of her healthy starters. But then Talbot herself got knocked out of this series with a concussion, leaving after playing 17 minutes in Game 2, never to return. This left Brondello rummaging around her bench throughout Game 2 for any lineup that could plausibly work.

Brondello found her solution in garbage time: down 17 with six minutes left in the came, she brought Camille Little off the bench for the first time in the series. Little was a member of the Storm from 2008-2014 — a tenure that includes the team’s last championship, in 2010 — but appeared to be in the twilight of her career in 2018, receiving a career-low in minutes, plus being brought off the bench for the first time since her rookie year. Little instantly proved effective at physically locking down league MVP Breanna Stewart on the perimeter. Plus, despite a now-limited individual offensive game, Little’s hard screen-setting for her teammates suddenly gave Phoenix an imposing size advantage against Seattle’s agile five-out lineup. As you can see in the video below, Little (wearing No. 20) provided a crucial action to win almost every possession for Phoenix:

Winning almost every possession means that a 17-point deficit can evaporate, even in six short minutes. The injection of Little — plus the fiery wrath of an angry Taurasi — suddenly turned garbage time into an overtime nail-biter. While Seattle pulled out the win in overtime, fair and square, it required preposterous luck, like winning two jump balls in the final ten seconds of the overtime period.

Even being down 2-0, the Mercury traveled back to Phoenix for the two games on their home court with a bizarre sort of psychological advantage. Now they knew they had strong defensive lineups that Seattle had not yet solved. More vaguely — but more importantly — the singular presence of Taurasi seems to gift her entire team mental ownership of the fourth quarter. Across the first two games, Phoenix obliterated Seattle in the final period by a combined score of 48-24, almost but not quite clawing back from huge early-game deficits.

Now the series shifted into a meta fourth-quarter. In the same way that Seattle built up early leads in their games, they had built up an early lead in the series. But also: in the same way that a Taurasi-led team can confidently erase any in-game lead, the Mercury felt poised to erase the series lead. It almost seemed like getting down in a 2-0 hole was just Phoenix’s adrenaline-junkie way of actually waking up.

Out of the five games in the series, Game 3 was the only one without a manic fourth quarter: the Mercury simply blew the doors off the Storm. The reason is simple enough: Phoenix played like they had a fourth superstar alongside Bonner, Taurasi, and Brittney Griner. That player was Yvonne Turner — Talbot’s ultimate replacement in the starting lineup — who now served as Bird’s defensive nemesis, holding Seattle’s point guard to a scoreless night. Now Phoenix’s roster looked like an optical illusion: how could there only be 10 healthy players in there when a new, previously unused role player was transforming the game each night?

Game 4 was as close to a parable as a basketball game could ever be. In their hour of greatest need, the Storm’s young nucleus had to proceed without their spiritual center, Bird. The reason was tragicomic: in the second quarter, an inadvertent elbow from teammate Stewart broke Bird’s nose. If this was a parable for Seattle, it was one of the dark, medieval ones: the Storm went a powerful +17 in the 10 short minutes Bird was on the floor, and slowly gave the entire lead back.

Still, having banked so many early points, Game 4 was winnable for the Storm. In the game’s most crucial moments, though, Phoenix’s imposing size was the margin of victory. The bucket that would ultimately be the game-winner went in because Phoenix was essentially able to play keep-away in the post, including a mega offensive rebound by Little:

Griner’s eager tip-in still left a comfortable 14 seconds left on the clock for Seattle to get off their own look. However, their play — which appeared to be drawn up by a tissue-stuffed Bird, and not Hughes, in the huddle — went right back into Phoenix’s domain in the post. Griner prevented Seattle from even attempting a shot before the final buzzer:

It’s important to remember that, while spaced-out offenses in the NBA tend to be more elegantly built than their old-school, low-post counterparts, there is nothing inherently superior about a five-out team. There is still a battle that must be waged between the agility and shooting ability of the floor-spacers (in this case the Storm) and the physicality and at-the-rim efficiency of the post-dwellers (in this case the Mercury). I predicted, before the series, that the Storm would have the better of the Mercury because their floor-spacing lineup could bring Griner to uncomfortable places on the perimeter. But these moments show that Griner and the Mercury are not helpless simply because their 5 doesn’t shoot 3-pointers. Because of the high skill level, physicality, and experience of the Phoenix bigs, they are still capable of exerting their style as the superior one.

Even though Bird was crucially able to play (while masked) in Game 5, Phoenix dominated the first half since they fully unlocked how to use Griner as an offensive weapon. With Phoenix using a high pick-and-roll to give Griner momentum going downhill to the basket, she would either quickly score a bucket or quickly pass out of a double team — ultimately leading the Mercury in assists, with six:

The Mercury had won the spacing battle. They had the Storm on the back foot, and it wasn’t even the fourth quarter yet.

A WNBA playoff series is set up to be profoundly psychological, especially compared to an NBA playoff series. For one, a WNBA series can last, at most, 200 minutes, while a seven-game NBA series goes 336 minutes. Meaning: the sample size is just that much smaller, and random bounces and strokes of good and bad luck have such a bigger impact. Also there is the nature of this generation of professional women’s basketball, which unfairly forces the world’s best into a year-round grind of WNBA, national, and international play. This creates an even deeper intimacy than the NBA’s vast network of transactions: in the women’s game you are probably playing with a teammate who is simultaneously an opponent, for some other organization, and at least one of your opponents is probably a teammate. It all creates a tremendously complicated web where your every tendency is known through year after year of playing with and against. Figuring out how to win a WNBA playoff series against somebody who might literally be your airplane seat buddy on the way to this month’s FIBA World Cup in Spain seems, I think we can agree, more difficult to answer analytically than most sports questions.

Here is what happened, more or less, in the fourth quarter of Game 5. After four entire games and three other quarters, the only thing that separated the Mercury and the Storm was: Sue Bird decided that the Storm would not lose.

I know, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. And yes, Taurasi is usually the person who decides that her team will not lose in these kinds of games. Also: the Mercury were the team, like I was just saying, who had uncovered the most good strategies over the series. But this is simply what happened. Bird, whose everlasting signature is the unselfish pass, simply decided to start firing 3-pointers, slicing them through the net using, somehow, anger.

Here is the moment that, in retrospect, was the fork in the road of the series — the moment that decided whether the Mercury would win or the Storm would win. There are three minutes to go and the Storm have a five-point lead, meaning they were well within the Taurasi Danger Zone. The Mercury blitz a pick-and-roll and Bird and two Mercury players end up on the ground. Bird’s facemask and the broken nose beneath that mask get bumped and she is, well, upset:

Isn’t it kind of bizarre, actually, that so many of the great ones can do this so well, and so often — turn their anger into shots that seem connected, by a string, to the bottom of the net? The resulting jump ball gets tapped around before falling into the Storm’s hands. The ball gets to Bird about five feet behind the 3-point line. She jumps into a shot.

You know what happens next.