Queens on the chessboard: Breanna Stewart vs Elena Delle Donne

Basketball is high-speed chess. We’ve heard this. Unlike chess, though, no two basketball teams show up at the court with anything close to the same set of pieces. This year’s WNBA Finals between the Seattle Storm and Washington Mystics is no different — there are meaningful differences, big and small, all up and down both rosters. But the main reason that these two teams are the ones who made it to the Finals is that both have nearly identical queen pieces in the center of the chessboard: Breanna Stewart and Elena Delle Donne.

In the same way that the queen is the most dominant chess piece, it’s hard to think of a set of basketball skills more ideal than the ones Stewart and Delle Donne possess. They are stretch-4’s who are equally comfortable bombing outside the arc at over 40 percent, or doing efficient solo work by themselves on the low block. They are both heads-up and willing passers — Stewart has a meaningful career edge over Delle Donne in assists per minute, while Delle Donne has established her own tier, by herself, on top of the league’s all-time turnover percentage list despite handling the ball, like, all the time. Even though neither player is quite a lockdown defender, they are still positive defenders who play the less glamorous half with awareness and effort, triggering all sorts of positive domino effects for their teams. Before Game 1 of the Finals, Delle Donne calmly nailed the bottle flip in front of ESPN’s prying cameras. What more do you want from them?

Despite being relatively new players in the league, both Stewart and Delle Donne have already put their names all over the WNBA’s all-time record books. At age 23, Stewart is already a powerful ninth overall in the WNBA’s all-time list of Win Shares Per Minute, vaulting herself ever so slightly above the likes of Candace Parker, Brittney Griner, and Diana Taurasi with this year’s undeniable MVP performance. Delle Donne, having now played into her prime years at age 29, is even another tier higher on the same chart, third overall. The only players who rank higher are Lauren Jackson (a stretch-big who joined with Sue Bird to take the Storm to the Finals, if that sounds familiar) and Cynthia Cooper, who decimated the late-nineties league with the Houston Comets for four ephemeral years.

At the risk of taking the chess metaphor too far: you still can’t win a game with just your queen, even though the queen can do whatever you want, all over the board. (That’s the end of the chess stuff, promise.) The Storm and the Mystics both entered this series with the confidence that they could lean on their franchise centerpiece whenever they needed a bailout late in the shot clock. And there were nights in May or June or July when that elite individual skill level was enough to provide the margin of victory. But in these Finals, there is a virtual mirror image of a Hall of Fame-caliber player on the other side. Going into a game in this Finals looking to trade post-up possessions is effectively conceding defeat.

Here’s what I really mean. The winner of these Finals will be the team who figures out the best way to use their star player as a threat in the pick-and-roll to create offense for the other four players.

So far, Seattle has leveraged the visionary offensive mind of Sue Bird — plus their maniacal home crowd — to build a 2-0 series lead. However, a close Game 2 that very literally came down to a last-ten-seconds jump ball saw the Mystics actively figuring out their own strategic breakthroughs. As the series travels to the East Coast for Game 3 on Wednesday night, there are still series-deciding moves to be played. While the Mystics do have potential solutions in their back pocket, the Storm have already found strategies that have helped the team erupt for hellacious stretches, such as the first five quarters of the series.

What the Mystics can change

1. Let Delle Donne work the mismatches

In early August, the Mystics handed the Storm their season-worst loss, a 100-77 blowout that saw all starters sitting out the fourth quarter. Neither team saw this imposing final score as an indication that the Mystics had “figured out” Seattle, as the game was a virtual lock to be a schedule loss for the Storm (playing an East Coast matinee — meaning body clock time was ready for breakfast at the tip).

Still, in that game the Mystics were able to seize on an advantage in the pick-and-roll which felt entirely divorced from the Storm’s likely fatigue. With the Storm defending the pick-and-roll by switching, the Mystics could create and then exploit an advantageous matchup against a smaller defender. Small forward Alysha Clark is a mainstay in Seattle’s starting lineup thanks to her tenacious defense, but giving up half a foot to a forward with ball-handling skills is probably too much to overcome:

The beauty of Delle Donne’s versatility is that she creates assists for teammates out of these mismatches. In particular, 2018 saw Delle Donne set a clear career high in assist rate, plus it was her first season with an assist-to-turnover ratio higher than 2:1. On this possession, Delle Donne settles into a gigantic mismatch against the smaller Bird, then hits Natasha Cloud with the simple, correct pass when the double comes:

Because Delle Donne creates such efficient offense for herself and others when the Mystics generate these mismatches, the team should make it a priority to let her create whenever this mismatch comes. However, the ball is not always getting to her in these moments in the Finals. Here’s a mismatch in Game 1 against Clark on the same part of the floor (left block) as the example above — but Delle Donne does not receive the ball:

Delle Donne’s usage rate so far in the Finals is below what it was in the regular season. Even if her knee is banged up, I think the Mystics would want to go out knowing they got their best player the rock as much as possible, especially in advantageous moments.

2. Change up the lineups — I think

Unfortunately for the Mystics, two of their regular starters — point guard Natasha Cloud and center LaToya Sanders — have played below their typical skill level in the Finals. Sanders was limited to a scoreless 16-minute outing in Game 1, while Cloud was limited to two points in only 10 minutes in Game 2. Sanders did improve her offensive output in Game 2, but was still at a decided speed mismatch when forced to guard Stewart. The result was a lot of quick fouls, such as this crucial moment with a minute left in the game:

The Mystics built their first run of the series in the second quarter of Game 2 when playing Tierra Ruffin-Pratt at the point and rookie Myisha Hines-Allen at center. (The Mystics also have Shatori Walker-Kimbrough coming off the bench, making them the basketball team that most sounds like a law firm.) Hines-Allen in particular has helped the Mystics seize control of the paint on both sides of the floor, sharply cutting open for close looks while going 7-7 from the field.

Mystics coach Mike Thibault, however, provided a meaningful counterpoint to this idea, which is a lot easier to say than to actually implement. After Game 2, when asked about the possibility of changing his starting lineup, he responded that he would keep the starting lineup the same going into Game 3, noting that the lineup of Cloud and Sanders did bring the Mystics to the Finals, after all.

There is a bulletproof logic to what Thibault is saying. Wouldn’t it have the feel of desperation if he began tinkering with lineups at the moment the team was on the brink of elimination? On the other hand, if matchup issues are limiting starters to playing well under half of the game in the biggest moments of the season, lineup changes are being forced on the Mystics whether they want them or not.

3. Let Delle Donne pick-and-pop.

One look for the Mystics in the pick-and-roll that I haven’t seen Seattle solve is when Delle Donne pops to the perimeter. Throughout her entire career, Delle Donne has been pretty much right at 40 percent on 3-point accuracy — her shot is a major weapon. This shot, from the dying embers of Game 1, does not go in. But the important part is that it is an open look for Delle Donne from deep, and it will go in most of the time:

Regardless of how they get Delle Donne outside looks, the Mystics are going to want to make sure that she shoots a bit more often than her combined three attempts from deep across the first two games.

Advantages the Storm have built

1. Playing with speed and urgency.

While I’m not always sure what to look at when basketball players and coaches talk about “execution,” there was a big execution difference between the Storm and Mystics in Game 1, and it pretty much all came down to speed. Under the direction of Bird, Seattle frequently enters their sets early in the shot clock and with momentum, creating the effect that the Storm offense is rolling downhill:

By contrast, look at how slowly the Mystics move in this Game 1 possession. Across about ten seconds, the only action that the offense generates is a single pick-and-roll. The elite Storm defense can swallow up one action at a time all day:

For one game at least in the history of basketball, now we can point to something specific about the “execution” that separated two teams.

2. Making Delle Donne fight through off-ball screens.

On the first possession of Game 2, Seattle made Delle Donne fight through a screen right as her defensive assignment — Stewart — receives the ball. Delle Donne makes an admirable recovery, but the all-important sliver of daylight has already been created for Stewart:

It’s not that Delle Donne is incapable of defending this action, but man is it a meaningful bit of extra work for a player who is fighting through a knee injury. Seattle freed up Stewart again with a similar action a few minutes later:

That’s good stuff. Plus Natasha Howard gets a nice little boost in the assist column. Thanks, Stewie.

3. Using Stewart as a decoy.

It may sound sarcastic, but here is a completely serious belief I hold: The most elite offensive weapons in basketball are maximized when their team gets buckets because their threatening presence is on the floor, but they do not touch the ball. The Warriors have absolutely achieved this place of nirvana with Stephen Curry. And the Storm are also there with Stewart.

Here is what is easily one of the top-ten assists I have ever seen in untold hours of watching basketball. Bird and Stewart run a pick-and-roll on top of the arc and the Mystics, justifiably concerned about the possibility of Stewart rolling to the hoop, all crash in to defend her. In microseconds, Bird deduces that extra help is coming, which means that somebody, somewhere, is open:

It would take a lot to defeat a team who is playing basketball that well. It would require, one would imagine, one of the top three most productive per-minute players in league history, or something like that.