Three Fouls in Two Minutes and Nine Seconds

Eight minutes and twenty-eight seconds into Game 4, Allisha Gray reached in on a loose ball and the whistle went. Two minutes later she drew an offensive foul. Seven seconds after that, a personal.

Three fouls. Two minutes and nine seconds of game clock. First quarter, before most of the building had settled.

That is the whole explanation for a night the wire wrote as a shooting slump.

The Associated Press copy that ran everywhere Saturday evening had the right instinct and stopped one sentence short — Angel Reese, it said, like the rest of her teammates, struggled on offense. That is true, and Atlanta shot 18-of-54 to prove it. But Gray's line is a different object than everybody else's. Five points. One-of-seven. Nothing on four attempts from three. Twenty-two minutes. That is not a player who shot badly for a whole game. That is a player who had two bad minutes and then watched most of a Finals game from a folding chair.

Go back through the series and the twenty-two has a shape around it. Game 1 in San Francisco, thirty-three minutes. Game 2, thirty-four. Game 3 at home, twenty-nine. Saturday, twenty-two. She has started all four. The minutes have come down every single time.

One of those drops has its explanation sitting in the play-by-play. The other two do not — not one anybody has said out loud, anyway, and I am not going to invent a coaching intention nobody has confirmed. But a straight line is a straight line, and it is pointing somewhere.

Ten days ago I wrote that the best version of this team was the one where Gray came off the bench. Not to upgrade the starting five. To give Atlanta a bench for the first time since the fourth of October. I said then that I had no quote from Karl Smesko suggesting he was thinking about it that way and that I was not going to pretend otherwise. He wasn't. She has started every game since, including the two this team won by a combined forty.

And then Saturday it happened anyway. By accident. In the worst available version of itself.

Gray off the floor for most of a Finals game. Isobel Borlase in that space, ten points on three-of-six in the same twenty-two minutes Gray played, outscoring three of Atlanta's five starters. DeWanna Bonner — who the ESPN projection I quoted ten days ago had starting, with no Gray anywhere in it — coming off the bench and finishing one-of-five.

And Atlanta won the second half 36-25.

I want to be careful with that sentence, because it is the easiest one in this piece to oversell. Atlanta lost. They lost by five, at home, with a 2-1 series lead in their hands. The second half was dug out of a hole the second quarter put them in — they lost that quarter 15-26, and Golden State's largest lead was sixteen while Atlanta's never got past five. A comeback that falls short is not a vindication of anything. It is a comeback that falls short.

What makes it a question instead of a coincidence is the rest of the box score.

Atlanta went to the free-throw line thirty-one times and made twenty-two. Golden State made eleven of thirteen. Eleven more points at the line, in a five-point loss. Both teams made exactly four threes. Both shot under thirty-seven percent. What separated them was seventeen turnovers against nine, and thirty-eight points in the paint against twenty-eight.

And the shooting, once you stop reading it as a group: four of Atlanta's five starters went eight-for-twenty-nine, which sounds like a lineup-wide collapse right up until you notice Naz Hillmon's two-for-two is inside that number. The problem was Reese at two-of-twelve and Gray at one-of-seven. Rhyne Howard took fourteen shots and scored nineteen of Atlanta's sixty-two. Everybody else was either efficient and barely used, or used and not efficient.

Meanwhile the discourse around this team is still running on single possessions. A Gray step-back three went around Saturday as a highlight — teammates reacting, the whole clip-sized version of a basketball game. Same player, one-of-seven.

Game 5 is Monday at eight o'clock at Chase Center.

What Monday can settle is the thing Saturday only stumbled into. Gray's night was not a decision. It was three whistles inside two minutes and nine seconds, and a coach working around them for thirty-eight more. If the arrangement that produced Atlanta's best stretch of Game 4 is worth anything at all, somebody gets to choose it this time instead of inheriting it.

I would like to see what it looks like on purpose.