One of the highest honors an athlete can achieve, at least in my piddling personal head canon, is the descriptor "relaxing." It's not the only virtue for an athlete to pursue—its total opposite, jarring unpredictability, is also pretty cool—but watching a relaxing athlete can lower your own heart rate. Maybe you don't even think they'll win the game, but you do know that every gesture is backed by some intent.
The relaxing player wins with the cumulative crush of a thousand sound decisions, rather than a handful of spectacularly fate-altering ones. They are in "the right place at the right time" so often, it provokes suspicion. They seem to have taken up permanent residence somewhere between wisdom and luck. The more you watch them, the more the aspect of luck falls away; it only looked like luck at first because they're seeing seams we'll never see.
Wednesday night's WNBA playoff action was a double dose of relaxation, even as the games were pretty thrilling on a pure scoreboard basis. Alyssa Thomas, the do-everything hub of the Connecticut Sun, is the quintessential relaxing athlete to me, basically a good-shot factory, but the feeling was even more pronounced as I watched the Minnesota Lynx's Napheesa Collier continue her spectacular postseason. The MVP runner-up tied the WNBA playoff single-game point record with 42 points while eliminating the Phoenix Mercury from the playoffs, 101-88.
At no phase of the game did it look as though Collier's heart rate spiked out of steady-state cardio. Maybe that evenly distributed cool allows her to somehow remain on the floor for entire playoff games: She only rested for two minutes in Game 2; in Game 1, she spent just 10 seconds on the bench. In those combined 78 minutes of play, she's scored 80 points on 64 percent from the field, 62 percent from the arc, 89 percent from the line. There's no one playing more composed basketball.
Before Game 2, head coach Cheryl Reeve jokingly told the team that Collier wasn't going to score 38 points again, suggesting more of a group effort to beat Phoenix. Per The Athletic, when Reeve took Collier off the floor at the end, the forward said, "Coach, you were right."
Game 2 was the picture of relaxation: not much dribbling, and a whole corpus of elegant, deadly work off the ball. On the Lynx's first bucket of the game, Collier back-cut her defender so severely that Kahleah Copper collided into Brittney Griner at some speed; both were still grimacing as Collier collected a pass and plopped in an uncontested layup. The feeling I had, in various forms throughout the game, was that she'd already done the hard part before even receiving the ball. She established post position and sealed her unsuspecting defender out of the play, before they'd even realized there was a play to be worried about. She slipped the screen and popped into an open space for an unhurried catch-and-shoot. She clocked the height mismatch, the ball-watching perimeter defender, the over-enthusiastic big in the pick-and-roll—all of it exploitable, with a couple of decisive and well-timed movements that only look easy in retrospect. Collier can play bigger or smaller than her 6-foot-1 height; always she seems to adapt correctly, as if she'd somehow been given game tape of the very game she's currently playing.
A third-quarter play like this one, with Collier as screener, roller, and finisher, is a deep-tissue massage for the basketball-watching brain:
Built around a player like that, it's no accident that the Lynx have played some harmonious team ball this postseason. It wasn't terribly surprising to look at the box score after the game and see that they'd logged 28 assists on 34 made field goals. While I especially enjoyed the downhill attacks from Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman in the backcourt, the real collective feat is how well all of Minnesota's pieces seemed to fit together, and how unobtrusively their superstar secures her buckets in the flow of the game.
With about three minutes left in Game 2, Collier had a chance to make a free throw and own the WNBA playoff scoring record outright; she bricked it. Perhaps it's because I was primed to look for it by the possibility of the record, but this was the only time when I started to notice Collier lightly break out of the Lynx's natural rhythms and linger around the ball, calling for the rock. And that was, hilariously, the only part of the game when her teammates seemed content to not get her the ball. Instead, they stuck to their process and carried the lead to the finish. Maybe, on a grand enough occasion, even a relaxing superstar can briefly lose her chill.
