Karl Smesko Keeps Putting Naz Hillmon Back Out There

Nine seconds left in a closeout game in Brooklyn, and Breanna Stewart has the ball with room to work. She drives. The forward who meets her at the rim is 6-foot-2 and has not scored all night.

Stewart misses. Atlanta wins the game and the series.

Naz Hillmon finished that night 0-of-7 from the field in 32 minutes. It was the second time in five playoff games she had not scored at all, and Karl Smesko had started her in all five. He started her in the sixth too, and the sixth was the Finals.

What the sixth one said

Golden State 68, Atlanta 64, Saturday afternoon at Chase Center. Hillmon played 30 minutes, took four shots, made two, and finished with five points.

She was also plus-seven.

Nobody else in an Atlanta uniform was above plus-two. Jordin Canada played 38 minutes and was minus-eleven. DeWanna Bonner played 13 and was minus-fourteen. Atlanta lost the game by four and won Hillmon's thirty minutes by seven, which means the ten minutes she sat went the other way by eleven.

One game of plus-minus is a small number sitting on top of a smaller sample, and I am not going to tell you it settles anything. But the question this week was why a coach keeps starting a forward who does not score, and Saturday is the first night the box score tried to answer it instead of deepening it.

The answer he already gave

He was asked about her after Brooklyn. Per Grant Afseth of Yahoo Sports: "We were in foul trouble, and Naz was unselfish, coming in and out and playing great defense on Stewie." Then: "She didn't score, but she showed up in many ways, including guarding her straight up on the last possession." And: "We need players like that."

That answer is more specific than it sounds. Michael Waterloo of The IX laid the job out: Hillmon had Leonie Fiebich when that series opened and took over Stewart once Allisha Gray, a game-time decision for the opener, left it with a hand injury. The mechanics are angles, screen calls, switches, quick contests. Rhyne Howard named the part with no column. "You don't get an assist for [screening] on the stat sheet, but we also keep track of screens." Hillmon's own account of the defense is talking. "I think the reason our defense is so good is because of communication, the way we talk to each other."

So 5.2 points a game is not her level, and it is being read as one. In 43 regular-season games this year she started 41, played 28.8 minutes, scored 9.1 and shot 46.1%, and she did not fail to score once. Not one night in 43. Across six postseason games she is at 35.1% from the field and 4-of-20 from three, on 32.8 minutes a night. She played 34 a night in last year's playoffs and scored 11, so the role is a season old and the drought belongs to this month.

The easy skeptical line does not survive contact either. She had no blocks at all in her first 167 postseason minutes, which reads like it ought to settle the question against her, and then she blocked a shot on Saturday. She also had none in 30 of her 43 regular-season games, and 16 all year. A blocks column was never going to answer this question in either direction.

A year ago the league voted her its best bench player, 44 votes of 72 for Sixth Player of the Year, the first in Dream history, for roughly what Smesko is still describing. Then Atlanta promoted her, and the virtues that win an award for a reserve do not photograph in a starter's box score. ClutchPoints called her the longest-tenured voice in that locker room this week, a second-round pick from 2022 who never left. Atlanta knows this shape. The person who makes the thing work is rarely in the account of it.

The other scouting report

The argument for a player like this is writable, and ESPN's Finals preview wrote it last week about Kiah Stokes, Golden State's center, who was averaging 3.2 points in these playoffs going in. Beside Atlanta's forward it printed 5.2.

Stokes scored nine on Saturday.

Before the series, Nekias Duncan of Yahoo Sports expected Golden State to go to "Thornton-on-Canada minutes, with Burton roaming off of Hillmon." Veronica Burton is a 5-9 guard. That was Duncan's read of a plan rather than a report of one, and the logic is hard to argue with: a forward shooting 20% from three in the postseason is a forward you can leave, and leaving her frees a guard to help somewhere that matters. In three regular-season meetings with Golden State this year, Hillmon played 69 minutes and scored seven points, and Atlanta lost all three.

What the box score will support about Saturday is narrow: she took three from distance and made one. Whether Burton was the one leaving her is not something a box score can tell you, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.

Both scouting reports can be right at once. Atlanta needs her to take the hardest forward assignment on the floor and set the screens the staff counts privately. Golden State would like her shot to keep not mattering.

Game 2

The one thing nobody has explained is the start. Not the minutes; those have an answer now, on the record, from her coach. The start. Nothing published this week has put it to Smesko: why does a forward who scored nothing go back into the first five the next time out?

Monday night, 8 o'clock, Chase Center again, and Atlanta is down one with two games at home waiting behind it. She could take nine shots, miss eight, and this team can still win, and her line would read the way it read in Brooklyn.

Watch who she picks up on the first possession. Saturday says that is where it gets decided, and the sheet will only tell you afterward if you know which column to read.