Up until the third quarter on Sunday night, the Seattle Storm were playing a perfect game. Their defense was flawless, they controlled rebounds and they had enough offense to pull ahead of the defending champion Las Vegas Aces. Against the odds, they were 10 minutes away from pulling off an upset win in Game 1 of their first-round playoff series.
And they played a quarter of the worst playoff offense in WNBA history.
The Storm didn’t make a single shot in the fourth quarter, going 0-of-12 from the field and their only two points in the quarter came on two free throws by Skylar Diggins-Smith. The Aces didn’t have a stellar performance down the stretch either, scoring just 14 points in the fourth quarter, but it was enough to take a 78-67 win and a 1-0 series lead.
“I’m still a little shocked after the fourth quarter,” Gabby Williams said.
The Storm’s two points in the fourth quarter tied the fewest points allowed in a quarter in playoff history (the Sacramento Monarchs also scored two in the fourth quarter of Game 4 of the 2006 Finals), and they also became the first team to miss every shot in a quarter since the league changed from a halftime to a quarterly format in 2006.
For those who didn’t watch the game, and even those who did, the obvious question is: why? Why did a team featuring Skylar Diggins-Smith, Nneka Ogwumike, Jewel Loyd and Gabby Williams fail to score a single point in 10 minutes of play? Let’s take a closer look.
The first problem was that the Storm played too slowly, especially early in the frame when they still held the lead.
ESPN
It’s one thing to try to play a low-possession game, especially on the road against the defending champions, but you risk stifling your own offense in the process. It felt like the Storm crossed that line. They often barely made it past the eight-second count, giving them little time to adjust if their initial actions didn’t go well.
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Another issue that was impacted by the lack of pace was that the Aces were very good at keeping guys out of the paint and the rim. Overall, the Storm weren’t a great offensive team in the regular season, but they were good at getting into the paint. They were second in the league in that department with 40.5 points per game, but nearly half of their points (48.7%) came in the paint.
In the fourth quarter, only seven of their 17 attempts touched the paint (eight if you include Victoria Vivians’ toe-off pull-up jump shot in the paint, which we won’t include for the purposes of this exercise). Even when they did get in the paint, they didn’t have much luck on the basket; only one of their 12 shots on frame was in the restricted area. Instead, there were more mid-range jump shots and awkward attempts.
It’s worth noting that Nneka Ogwumike barely played a game in the fourth quarter. Arguably the Storm’s best player this season, Ogwumike scored 13 points on 50 percent shooting in the first half, but failed to score after the break. The Aces didn’t think he could win, and he only took one shot in the fourth quarter.
Finally, the Storm lost the ball too much late in the game. Six of their 13 turnovers came in the fourth quarter. The Aces couldn’t convert those turnovers into points, but the Storm had six possessions they didn’t even get a shot on. Against a team like the Aces, wasting opportunities is just too costly.
“Yeah, we just hustled,” A’ja Wilson said. “We understood the challenge, we knew what it took. I think we realized in the first half that this isn’t going to be easy. This is the playoffs, not a regular-season game. Whatever you do in the regular season, you have to do literally 10 times more in the playoffs… We realized that in the second half.”
