The WNBA playoffs are not about intricate offensive sets, squeezing efficiency from your ninth and 10th players, or winning the game on the margins—at least not as much as they are about Real Hoops. Arike Ogunbowale taught the Golden State Valkyries that painful lesson Wednesday night, gouging their would-be smothering defense for a WNBA playoff-record 45 points and forcing her Dallas Wings through to a deciding Game 3 in the process.
That Ogunbowale had both the talent and temperament for this sort of explosion should never have been in doubt. She's notched 41 before, and takes on the burden of volume scoring with a Waitersesque flair. It's impressive, yes, though not always part of a winning formula, and subject to wild variance depending on whether Ogunbowale makes or misses the bad shots she can't help but jack. This year, she's taken a relative backseat as Paige Bueckers has spent her sophomore campaign with the ball in her hands. Game 1 was their season in miniature: Bueckers poured in a hyper-efficient 21 points, while Ogunbowale took only seven shots and wound up a game-worst minus-31. The Valks won by 24. Something had to change. It was Ogunbowale's time.
Game 2 was fantastic, a 108-100 overtime win for the Wings in which Dallas posed serious questions about the championship viability of the top remaining seed, dictated the tempo, and overcame both a career-high 36 points from Gabby Williams and a 3-for-13 night from Bueckers. It was all because of Ogunbowale.
Once it became clear that Bueckers didn't have it going under immense pressure from Williams and Veronica Burton, the Wings ran everything through Ogunbowale. She was undeniable. Dallas would start her off the ball and make Williams run through a double-drag, they would have Alysha Clark set high screens and play out of that, and they'd simply clear out and let Ogunbowale work.
It wasn't always the smoothest thing to watch, especially when Ogunbowale wasn't feeling the jumper. She would get through those stretches by bumping and smashing her way to the rim and forcing someone to foul her. She got to the line 18 times and hit 16 of them, a Jimmy Butlerian performance of sheer, cussed determination.
This is not to say it wasn't extremely impressive. Ogunbowale's handle was so tight, and she tormented basically every defender she worked against in space, keeping them on a yo-yo until it was time to kill them. It was especially impressive since it came against a Valkyries defense that paced the league this year. What made Golden State special on that side of the ball was coordination and aggression, hounding opponents on the perimeter and preventing them from getting what they wanted by making every pass difficult. A strategy like Ogunbowale putting her head down and forcing any defender in isolation to stop her is only effective if someone as skilled and physically gifted as Ogunbowale is doing the bashing, and will necessarily disrupt the rhythm the Valkyries want to establish.
That was a crucial component of the Wings' victory. Golden State posted good offensive numbers, though the Valkyries' offensive process was stilted and desperate for the whole second half and overtime. Were it not for Williams's shooting heroics, they would have lost by a lot more, as they spent a concerning number of possessions vacuously dribbling around the perimeter until the shot clock forced someone to take a relative heave.
I spell this out mostly to contrast with the brutal simplicity of what Ogunbowale was doing to their defense. Williams put in a superstar performance, though she can't operate with the pure self-sufficiency of Ogunbowale. This is what the playoffs are all about: dictating the way you want to play, and getting buckets. The Valkyries are a great team and a legit contender, but their halfcourt offense is too dependent on streaky three-point production to be reliable against good defenses. The solution is buckets, which Ogunbowale provides for Dallas.
This game was there for the taking for the Valkyries. They led by three points with 4.1 seconds left, which is when Ogunbowale hit the most audacious shot of the night (4:00 in the above highlight reel). Running to her left with Williams all over her, Ogunbowale nailed a tough three to functionally send the game to overtime. On the first possession of OT, she took what would otherwise be a horrible shot, a running three going to her right, and banked it in. It was that sort of night for her, and after a couple of agonizing replay reviews, the Wings walked away with a huge win.
"We felt like we got pushed around out there when we played in San Francisco, and especially me, personally, I don't feel like I was aggressive," Ogunbowale said. "I didn't know what I would score. I was going to shoot regardless because I just feel like seven shots isn't enough to win playoffs and I have to be aggressive whether it's going in or not." Probably she won't hit as many closely defended shots in Game 3, but the beauty of a game like Ogunbowale's is that you can't scheme for it. She was getting buckets long before the Golden State Valkyries existed, and she'll continue getting them as long as she's in the W.
