ATLANTA — The last refuge of a desperate coach is the technical foul. Tantrum size depends on the circumstances. But it’s always at least enough to earn the official reprimand and, most important, it’s usually an attempt to throw both hands into the mud and yank out a team sinking fast. A way to wring something, anything, out of a whole lot of nothing.
See me? The one yelling a lot over here? Can you guys maybe try to do the basketball player version of that, out there on the floor?
This was Natalie Nakase, up to her shoulders in the mire on Wednesday night and looking for anything to hold on to. Or for any signs of sustained vitality from her club in Game 3 of the WNBA Finals. A virile protest of an offensive foul call, a slap on the wrist from a referee, and an impassioned huddle with her Golden State Valkyries on the sideline. It didn’t work. Add it to the increasingly ominous list.
There aren’t many answers left when you make promises you don’t keep, which is the story of a 97-71 loss to the Atlanta Dream that reads like a draft of an obituary. This would be the “best fight” the Valkyries had shown all season, their head coach announced before the game. Guaranteed. They would not get outworked and outpunched again this series. Cross her heart.
It wasn’t anywhere in the same universe as enough. The offense no-showed to start, when any hint of effectiveness could’ve helped mute a red-hot sellout crowd of 17,099. When the Valkyries at last discovered some shooting, it was at the expense of its effectiveness on the defensive end. In a blink, Golden State looked fatally exposed. Too limited. Too binary. A team that can do only one thing well at once, flailing against an opponent that figured out how to do whatever it wants.
“Yeah, sometimes promises aren’t kept,” Nakase mused after the game.
“I mean, the beauty of this is the openness they had right after the game of being super coachable and wanting information. I don’t ever (say) they don’t want it, or that they don’t want to fight. How do we make sure we can do it all together? There’s sometimes individual punches, some people with great spurts, and some people have great energy. It’s like, well, how can we do it all together? That’s on me. The will is there. The want-to is there. But the fight together, I’m missing the piece of putting it together.”
When you make everything a life-or-death situation, the old coaching saying goes, you run into problems. For one thing, you’ll be dead a lot.
But that was the setup Wednesday. That was the line the coach drew. Nakase put the night in unequivocal terms. Her team couldn’t meet the demand of the moment, and got bludgeoned. So what now? How many times can you try to set off the alarms, before you realize all the batteries are dead?
“This game, they wanted it more than us,” Valkyries guard Tiffany Hayes said. “That’s not who we are. That’s not who we’ve been. That’s not how we got here.”
It’s a go-to postgame appraisal, but in this situation it’s an indictment, to begin with. If the Valkyries don’t have that, they don’t have much.
Maybe more startling — if that’s a 14-year-veteran telling the truth, more than dipping into the answers that get you out of a post-loss news conference as efficiently as possible — it’s also a contradiction. Nakase walked into the same room a few minutes later and said her team played as hard as it could. She said that in these situations, her team is resilient, and typically comes together even tighter.
But Game 3 was already one of those situations. Resilience and togetherness were already supposed to be on the menu. Instead, Golden State never held a lead on Wednesday. Afterward, Nakase, Hayes and Gabby Williams all used some form of the word “undisciplined” as they reflected on what happened, and what didn’t.
“It’s very uncharacteristic of us,” Hayes said.
It’s very, very weird to think of the Golden State Valkyries not being on the same page. That’s sort of the premise of them. They understand the plan, surrender to their roles in it and execute with precision. It can be aesthetically challenging at times, but that’s fine. As long as the string tying the group together doesn’t have much give.
After Game 3, that string seems frayed.
The Dream have done an excellent job of pulling on the loose ends for the last two games, due to coach Karl Smesko pushing buttons with more success than Nakase and Angel Reese effectively out-wanting everyone else on the floor. “In my heart, I’m not letting you take this from us,” Reese declared after a 21-point, 12-rebound effort that also featured three steals and two 3-pointers. “I think it becomes contagious within the team. They feel that confidence, too.”
But when things unraveled a bit for the Dream in Game 3, early in the second half, it wasn’t willpower or white-board wizardry that tightened them up. As Smesko put it: His players simply came together and decided to clean it up. They huddled. They regrouped. They made winning plays with composure, shot 49 percent against the best defense in the WNBA and blew their opponents out of the gym.
That’s supposed to be the Valkyries. Or at least it’s also supposed to be them.
But they’ve lost themselves a bit right now, at a time of the year when you don’t want to start looking for what’s missing.
There will be double-doses of film here over the next two days anyway — as a team and as individuals, per Nakase — because you stay on the hunt until told otherwise. And maybe the reemergence of Janelle Salaün as an offensive threat, for one example, is a harbinger instead of a blip. Golden State won the first game of this series because it’s good enough to win games in the WNBA Finals. It can win more of them.
The Valkyries contingent was right to say it’s a long series. They just sounded a little somber when they said it.
“We’re resilient,” Nakase said. “We’ve done it before. They know that. Again, it’s on my shoulders. I gotta figure out maybe a couple different schemes that could be a little more aggressive. I could be a little more clear, make sure we’re fighting with the right units. This is on me.”
Full marks for the Valkyries coach taking ownership. It’s what a good coach does.
It’s also what any coach says after she’s done everything else she can think of, and her team is still wondering where it lost its footing in the middle of the fall.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Atlanta Dream, Golden State Valkyries, WNBA
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