We are zooming ahead to the very end of Wednesday night's semifinal game between the New York Liberty and Atlanta Dream, which the Dream won in overtime, 101-98, to take a 2-0 series lead. After Angel Reese hit two free throws to put the Dream up by three, the Liberty had one more chance to engineer a potential game-tying shot with four seconds to play. This is what they came up with:
An astute observer may notice the little orange tick under the words "New York" on ESPN's box score. That represents the Liberty's remaining reset timeout, which allows a team to advance the ball to half court, but does not allow them to huddle and draw up a play. The reset timeout was put into the WNBA rule book for this very situation—coaches are meant to save them for moments like these, so as to prevent close games from ending on totally hopeless possessions in which the trailing team has very little chance of even getting a shot at the rim. Liberty head coach Chris DeMarco did not call his reset timeout, though, leaving his players to struggle through a hopeless final possession in which Breanna Stewart's shot did not even touch the rim.
So who blew it here? Obviously DeMarco and his assistant coaches, certainly; knowing how many timeouts your team has left is perhaps the whole point of employing a bunch of assistants. But the referees might have as well. After the game, Stewart told reporters that she asked the officials if the Liberty still had a reset timeout before the final possession, and was told they did not.
"This is not blaming the refs," she said. "But when I ask both refs if we have a reset timeout at the end, and they tell us no, and then we leave the game with the reset timeout, it's pretty frustrating."
DeMarco described a similar experience: "Yeah, same thing. They just said we didn't have it. Multiple staff members. It is what it is. We've got to demand more. But it is what it is."
The officiating crew took a little longer than usual to conduct their postgame pool report, which left some time to imagine what strategies they might have been considering to try and get out of this jam. Me personally? I would just make an "I can't hear you" gesture towards my ear after every question, and then look at my phone.
That is not, ultimately, what crew chief Fatou Cissoko-Stephens did. Instead, she tried this on for size: "Stewart was standing behind referee [Kevin] Fahy when he confirmed with his partner between Reese's penalty free throws that New York did indeed have a reset timeout remaining."
When asked if that meant that Stewart was in fact told that the Liberty had a reset timeout remaining, Cissoko-Stephens just repeated the exact same answer. She also said there was "no direct communication" between the officials and the team regarding the reset timeout. Masterfully handled, ma'm!
Anyway, the Liberty are now one loss from elimination, and have apparently made "an official inquiry regarding the situation," whatever that means.
