Aliyah Boston's teammate drives so much of the American population insane that it's easy to forget her own talent for getting in other people's heads. Opposing bigs unravel next to her.
Jonquel Jones, possibly the nicest and humblest athlete I've ever spoken to, revealed the limits of her patience two years ago when she tussled with Boston in the Indiana Fever's home opener. Expect a technical foul or two whenever Boston and Brittney Griner play. Remember Boston's playoff spat with Brionna Jones? These bigs might tell you their beef has to do with Boston's prodigious use of elbows in the post. Kelsey Plum's impression of her, done all in good fun at Unrivaled, involved a pair of violent oblique twists before the shot attempt.
There were no techs or flaring tempers Sunday night, but Boston's skill and physicality made A'ja Wilson the latest victim of a Boston brain boom. In the Fever's 109-75 beatdown of the Las Vegas Aces, Wilson had maybe the worst game of her season, finishing 9-of-23 from the field while Boston went 9-of-14. (Granted, Wilson's worst still looks like 20 points, 12 boards, and a couple of blocks.) Unable to get to her spots against Boston, the reigning MVP had to take more jumpers than she wanted. "Twenty-three shots I took—I was probably happy with two of them," Wilson said after the game. When head coach Becky Hammon yanked the starters with a little under five minutes to play, they'd only managed to score four points in the fourth quarter.
A lot went right for the Fever against the Aces; it was an encouraging game on both ends of the floor, and for several individual players. You can see why this team, which can handle the best player in the world one-on-one and puts up 100 points on the reg, has the third-best net rating in the league. Even so, you could probably marshal enough evidence from this month to support any take about the Fever. Their 3-1 West Coast road trip gave both the optimist and the doomer plenty of material to work with. A foremost supplier of ore to the take industry, the team even set up an inflammatory on/off splits experiment by sitting Boston in Caitlin Clark’s first game back from a back injury (a basically unforgivable loss to a Plum-less Sparks on July 8), then resting Clark the next night, when Boston returned and played 38 minutes in a win over the Phoenix Mercury.
The Fever are better equipped to win games without Clark than they are to win games without Boston; that says less about either of them than it does about the rest of the roster. The offense can still get sludgy without a true point guard—in the fourth quarter of that game against the Mercury, the Fever went close to six minutes without scoring—but the rest of the backcourt rotation can mostly pick up the slack. After a rough start to the season, a healthy Ty Harris finally looked the part of veteran backup point guard when she made some huge shots in the nail-biter against Phoenix. Kelsey Mitchell has been a treat to watch lately: so hard to stay in front of, and so efficient. She's averaging 26 points on close to 70 percent true shooting in her last 10 games.
Their problem is that at the end of that Mercury game, with Indiana down 89-88, I had no doubt Mitchell would summon some magic to take the lead. Once she did that, dribbled into traffic and then spun out of it for a one-handed layup, I had much more doubt that the Fever could hold the lead for the final 10 seconds.
They did technically do that, aided by Alyssa Thomas's bad shot selection and a Kahleah Copper foul on the offensive rebound attempt. But that was an opponent down their starting center, and a team that won't be contending in the playoffs this year, barring a miracle. At the most important defensive positions, the Fever don't have the personnel to defend consistently. This season, they're giving up a league-worst 43.7 paint points per game. In the Sparks game that Boston missed, they allowed 60. Their thinness in the frontcourt can leave them vulnerable late in games, when Boston might be working in foul trouble. Against the Dream in June, the Fever used a fourth-quarter Mitchell run to tie things up with five minutes left before letting Atlanta close on a 15-8 run, all 15 of those points scored in the paint or at the free throw line after fouls on drives. (It was one of the four times this season that the Fever have scored 100 points in a loss.) Fever opponents are taking a league-high 24.6 free-throw attempts per game on an also league-high 10.9 trips.
The highs make these lows more frustrating because holy shit, the Fever's offense looks so good when it's clicking. Clark, Boston, and Mitchell, in any combination, can create just about any advantage in the halfcourt. When the team does get stops, the consummate transition point guard can shine. All three of the Fever stars have only kept getting better since entering the league, too. Boston's elbows might still be sharp, but I was taken by her finesse in Sunday's game against the Aces. Her footwork looked clean and quick. This season, she's a 45.8 percent three-point shooter on 2.8 attempts per game. Stretch big was high on Fever fans' offseason wishlist, and in the absence of an outside acquisition, Boston simply became that stretch big herself.
It would be overstating things to paint the Fever as some uniquely erratic outfit. That's just the WNBA these days. The Aces left their Sunday meeting with their own special distinction: They set a record for the greatest point-margin swing on a back-to-back, losing to the Fever by 34 points the day after beating the Mercury by 48. The league has enough competitive teams this season that most games feel matchup-dependent. Much as it was this time last year, only the Minnesota Lynx can say nobody has their number—and look at what happened to last year's Lynx! Can the Fever string together two statement wins in a row? Second in net rating, after Minnesota, are the Golden State Valkyries. They'll play Wednesday night in Indiana. Let's see what they find there.
