Atlanta's Last Four Shots Were All Threes

Allisha Gray's last shot of the night was a step-back from twenty-three feet with 2.1 seconds on the clock and Atlanta four points down. It went up the way a shot goes up when the arithmetic has already decided it has to.

The problem was the three minutes before it.

Atlanta walked into Chase Center on Saturday afternoon for the first WNBA Finals game this franchise has played in thirteen years, and for thirty-seven minutes it looked like the team that got there. Up eight after a quarter. Behind by three at the half. Then a third quarter of seventeen to nine, the kind of defensive stretch that put Washington out in two games and New York out in three.

Atlanta led 56-51 with ten minutes to play. Then the fourth quarter happened, and the fourth quarter was eight points.

Rhyne Howard's two free throws at 3:12 made it 64-61. That was the last time Atlanta scored. Jordin Canada's jumper from thirteen feet at 4:23 was the last time Atlanta made a shot.

What Atlanta did with the ball after Howard's free throws, in order: Veronica Burton blocked Gray's floater and Atlanta kept the rebound, then Canada missed from twenty-six feet. Howard threw a pass away. Gray missed a driving layup. Howard missed from twenty-five feet. Naz Hillmon missed from twenty-six feet. Gray missed from twenty-five feet. Gray missed the step-back from twenty-three.

Four of those seven attempts were three-pointers, and they were the last four shots Atlanta took in the game. They went up on an evening when this team had made four of twenty-five from out there. Sixteen percent.

Nobody drew that up. It is what a possession looks like when a team has run out of the thing that was working and has thirty seconds to find something else. Atlanta got to this Finals by winning by three in overtime at home and by two in Brooklyn — games decided one possession at a time by a seven- and eight-player rotation that did not have a spare idea in it. On Saturday, in the one stretch where it needed to do that again, it reached for the longest shot on the floor, four times.

Golden State did not make a field goal in those last three minutes either. It made seven free throws, and that was the game. Gabby Williams, who finished with twenty-six on eight-of-twenty-two shooting, took six of her seven made free throws inside the final two minutes and fifteen seconds and did not miss one of them. When both teams are shooting in the low thirties, the margin goes to whoever is still willing to walk into a body.

### The lineup question got answered

Gray had not played since eleven minutes of the semifinal opener on October 4. She sat out both closeout games with a left hand injury. On Saturday she started.

Two days ago I argued she should not have — that a four-time All-Star arriving sixth was the only thing on this roster that closed Golden State's bench gap, and that it closed it without disturbing the five that had just won two elimination games. Karl Smesko started her, which is his call and an entirely defensible one. Game 1 of a Finals is not where a coach runs an experiment with his best scorer.

What followed is that she took nineteen shots, more than any other Atlanta player, and made five. One of eight from three. Eight of eight from the line, which is the part that says the hand is fine. And the bench that the lineup decision was meant to protect scored six points. Golden State's scored twenty.

One game, by a player thirteen days off the floor, in the largest game of her career, on a night when neither team could shoot. Nobody should read a verdict into that. But the argument and the evidence showed up in the same place, which happens less often than you would think.

Monday night, same building, eight o'clock. Atlanta has not trailed in a series at any point in these playoffs, and it has also never had to answer the question the last three minutes asked, which is not about shooting percentages. It is about what this team believes it is once the game stops being easy.

Watch the first possession after Golden State's first run of Game 2. That is the series.