Daggers don’t really belong on a spectrum. They matter so much more for their result—finality, punctuation, hope extinguished—than for their means that it’s kind of silly to compare one to another. Even so, there was something especially vicious about the last shot Alyssa Thomas took Sunday in Game 1 of the Sun-Lynx semifinals. It was the dagger-iest dagger you’ll ever see.
Sure, the Aces-Liberty series can offer fans more in the way of on-court star power, and even off-court star power (the first game of that series featured Spike Lee yapping at Kelsey Plum courtside). But for those locked in on the action, interested only in pure hoop, there is this series. The requisite drama in Sun-Lynx takes place between the lines.
In their regular-season series, Minnesota’s and Connecticut’s styles tended to make the best fights. (The Sun took two of three close games.) Both teams play active, switch-inclined defenses. Anyone trying to plot out the series in advance probably and correctly imagined it as exhausting to watch. The Lynx spent parts of the game shuffling through a rare offensive slump. Kayla McBride, the league’s most consistent three-point shooter this year, finished just 1-of-5 from outside. Call it an off night, not something the Lynx will worry too much about for the rest of the series, or give some credit to the Sun defense, which stayed disciplined enough to deny Minnesota the open looks its offense has generated effortlessly all season.
The combination culminated in a stomach-churning fourth quarter, each team tepidly trading buckets until the final minutes, when no one was really scoring at all. After Bridget Carleton hit a transition layup to bring Minnesota within one point of Connecticut, 69-68 with 3:50 to play, it would be another three minutes until the score changed. Thomas muscled through Alanna Smith for a layup; an exceptionally pleasant Lynx ATO ended with Napheesa Collier galloping through a wide-open lane to make it a one-point game again. But Thomas knew this was not meant to be a series defined by elegance. On the next possession, with the Lynx all sagging off, she did the maddening, amazing thing she can reliably do when given a tiny bit of space at the top of the free-throw line.
It's tough to articulate what I find so devastating about Thomas's dagger—maybe its sheer obviousness in hindsight. Often when people say a game "could only end this way," they do so in a figurative or poetic sense. I think the saying does apply in the figurative sense, but in the case of Thomas, who (say it with me) plays with torn labrums in both shoulders, the phrase is also a literal one. The world's ugliest one-handed push midrange shot is basically the only kind she can physically take. For all its aesthetic deficiencies, there is no shot any Sun fan feels better about in clutch time.
Her performance was not quite as splashy as Marina Mabrey's 20-point night, but Thomas has always been one of those players whose box-score brilliance is only realized after the fact. She finished the game just shy of a triple-double, with 17 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists. End-of-season awards buzz might wrongly suggest that the 32-year-old has had an underwhelming season to follow up last year, when she finished second in MVP voting. (This year, with her fellow power forwards having career seasons and a shiny new phenom in Indianapolis, she might be left off some first-team All-WNBA ballots.) But the story of Alyssa Thomas never changes. She doesn't worry about how, only how many.
