PHOENIX — On paper, all the havoc of a basketball game becomes something neat and unfeeling. However spiritually untrue it seems, this is actually true: In Game 3 of the WNBA Finals, there was only one lead change. Nor was it really a lead change to remember: It happened well before the game got interesting, when A’ja Wilson hit a three to put the Aces up 9-8 early in the first quarter. But the cruel fact of the Las Vegas Aces in these Finals is they never let games get too interesting. For every flicker of hope, they bring the extinguisher. Never in doubt, the Aces closed out their third win, 90-88.
Early in the fourth quarter, the Mercury had the Aces right where they wanted them: Phoenix trailed Vegas by 17. They’d played their best ball trailing the Lynx by 20 in the epic Game 2 semifinal comeback. Generate turnovers and open looks at the rate the Mercury do, and you’re never out of a game. Before they came all the way back, they’d have to weather some emotional swings. With a little over four minutes to play, Satou Sabally left with what looked like a bad head injury, at which point Kahleah Copper commandeered the entire game. Few players in the league are faster. In the span of 90 seconds, she scored 11 straight Mercury points, the last one a three to cut the Aces' lead to 84-83.
DeWanna Bonner, whose shots fall only in the funniest circumstances, sewed up the rest of the gap with an eclectic fourth-quarter show of her own. She had 25 points and 10 rebounds, and nearly a game-saving turnaround tip-in shot at the buzzer. What the Mercury didn’t account for is all the unconventional answers the Aces have supplied in this series, too. Wilson, Jackie Young, Chelsea Gray—they’re at the top of the scouting report. Not so with Dana Evans, the Game 1 hero, whose defense and shooting have given Vegas a rare bench advantage in the Finals. Jewell Loyd, the intense scorer reborn as a scrappy role player this postseason, hit four early threes and then took all manner of elbows and shoulders under the basket to buy her team extra possessions. The afternoon before, she’d explained to me her suddenly prolific rebounding: “You want to inject some life into your team.”
This matters because any team that plays the Aces has already made the one concession they can afford: A’ja Wilson is going to get hers. She finished Wednesday night’s game with 34 points and 14 rebounds, already her fourth 30-point game this postseason. Her talent robs games of their suspense. In the rundown of statistical highlights in the game notes, her section was naturally the longest. She passed Breanna Stewart, Diana Taurasi, Lisa Leslie, Napheesa Collier, Candace Parker, and Tamika Catchings in some category or another. Decent, appropriate company.
It isn’t playoff basketball without someone invoking the cliché of a chess match—on Wednesday, it was Aces head coach Becky Hammon in her pregame presser—but sometimes the game seems much simpler than that. Bonner had just made a pair of game-tying free throws when Wilson dropped a pass from Young on a backdoor cut and turned the ball back over to the Mercury with 40 seconds left. All the juice coursed Phoenix’s way. But Alyssa Thomas’s driving attempt rimmed out to give the Aces the final possession. Hammon called a timeout after Young dribbled the clock down to five seconds.
The queen can move any way in any direction. In the end, the shot Wilson took was difficult. It asked her to see through and shoot over the arms of both Thomas and Bonner. But letting Wilson take a shot is courting danger already. That building knows what it's like to watch one of the greatest scorers ever with the ball in her hands; they know exactly how this goes. When Wilson’s midrange jumper rattled in to give the Aces the lead with less than half a second remaining, the crowd’s quiet was less shock than resignation. They’d seen this coming all along.
To their credit, Phoenix has kept a kind of cool self-belief during this series, however frustrating the close losses have been. Natasha Mack sounded confident in her play and in her team’s prospects after Mercury practice on Tuesday. It was a right she’d earned: In two losses—one close, one not—she’d been a plus in the box score, and she’d shared in the unglamorous work of trying to guard the best player in the world. At some point in our conversation, I referred to Wilson as an “impossible” defensive challenge. Mack shrugged. “Nothing’s impossible,” she said.
Three games into this series, I’m not convinced. A’ja Wilson is impossibly skilled, impossibly calm, impossibly great, impossible to stop. Her head coach looked up from the chessboard and knew she’d already won. “Give the ball to A’ja and get out of the way,” Hammon said. “That’s all the play was.”
