Round 1 of this title bout was not for the meek, mild, fragile, or crash-avoidant.
It was about playing through pain, gutting through a bunch of missed shots, surviving grueling stretches without many points, and continuing to get up after continuing to literally get knocked down. (And about knocking down the other team a whole bunch, too — literally and figuratively.)
It was about Natalie Nakase needing a little more clarity when someone asked about Gabby Williams taking a hit that seemed to bother her for several plays late in the game.
“Which one?” Nakase said. “There were a lot of collisions.”
There sure were. This wasn’t one for an art gallery. There wasn’t much stylish offense. This was a long skirmish. An endurance test.
And the Valkyries pulled out a 68-64 victory over Atlanta in Game 1 of the WNBA Finals at Chase Center on Saturday because they’re absolutely built for brawling.
They’re damn proud of it. And they should be — this is how hard games and hard series and hard titles are won. This is absolutely how the Valkyries came back from a seven-point deficit early in the fourth quarter and a pressure-packed 64-61 Dream lead with 3:12 left.
Not by scoring but by making sure the Dream didn’t. At all. Like: zero.
“Even though we were down with a couple minutes left, I think we had the game right where we wanted it,” Williams said. “Because it just came down to getting stops.”
It is, of course, notable that the Valkyries played such great defense down the stretch against an extremely talented Dream team that at times looked like it might run away in Game 1.
Atlanta, led by Angel Reese and Allisha Gray, is so good that winning this one might’ve given the Dream an open path to the title.
But as this series goes on, it’s even more important that the Valkyries knew they would do this, knew that all the missed shots (they shot only 32.8% on the game, Atlanta shot only 33%) mattered far less than their confidence in themselves in exactly these conditions.
Obviously, Williams’ 16-point burst in the second quarter got the Valkyries going after a slow start and her all-around game (26 points, 4 rebounds, +16 in 33 minutes) lifted them throughout the grittiest moments of the fourth quarter.
The Valkyries have Williams, which is a tie-breaker in almost all big-game occasions.
“Gabby is one of the best players in the world,” Nakase said. “Like, hands down. She’s showing that when we need some buckets. She’s willing to go out there, get to her spots, and take over.
“I think she’s showing it at the perfect time right now.”
But it took a lot more than that to beat the Dream on Saturday and, as you’d expect, the blue-collar Valkyries — led by Williams — mostly wanted to talk about less-starry aspects of this.
Why argue with them? Let’s go through four under-the-radar things that carried the Valkyries through this one …
1. Kaila Charles battled and banged through any Dream player in front of her
This wasn’t a game for Kayla Thornton (only 7 minutes) or super-sub Janelle Salaun (5 minutes) — the Valkyries need somebody going at top bumper-car speed at all times, which meant that Charles subbed in early and hardly ever came out.
She was a key defender, fought her way to a team-leading 10 rebounds, and was a team-best +13 in 3o minutes.
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“Her engine was on full throttle tonight,” Nakase said of Charles. “She’d emptied the tank the minute she stepped on that floor; you could feel her. And you could feel when I took her out we were missing that. … Her fight was unmatched tonight. … Kai was, like, our pure remedy tonight.”
Williams specifically mentioned a huge sequence midway through the fourth quarter when Charles stole the ball and made the resulting layup to cut the Dream lead to three points.
“When our shots aren’t falling,” Williams said, “those are the kinds of plays that are going to win these kinds of games.”
Kaila Charles played 30 minutes off the bench and led Golden State with 10 rebounds. | Source: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images2. Laeticia Amihere, a key voice this week in strategy planning against the Dream, played important minutes defending — and limiting — Reese on Saturday
Amihere, whose playing time went up and mostly down all season, played a total of six minutes in the Valkyries’ first two rounds of the playoffs.
But on Saturday? Before the game, Nakase noted that Amihere’s background with the Dream spurred her to lead a lot of the team strategy discussions in recent days. And then Nakase sent her into the game for key stretches against Reese, who scored 14 first-half points but zero in the second half.
“That matchup — LA had great energy,” Nakase said. “She was kind of our insight with this gameplan. You could tell there was a lot of confidence in that matchup.”
3. It always comes back to Kiah Stokes when you’re talking about quietly important Valkyries moments
Thanks to Amihere’s production, Stokes didn’t have to match up every second with Reese — after Stokes went play-for-play with A’ja Wilson last series.
But Williams made sure to underline Stokes’ huge tip-in of a Williams missed layup, which happened to come right after that Charles steal-and-layup.
“I missed a layup, she went up, got the O-board, got the lid off the basket,” Williams said. “We got going after that.”
Once the Dream lead was down to only 60-59, the game was right in the Valkyries’ hands.
4. Black-and-blue brigade
Williams had the limp going on — that she absolutely didn’t want to talk about afterward. Nakase noted that Veronica Burton “got knocked on the nose” at some point in this game.
Veronica Burton fell to the floor in the third quarter of Saturday’s game after she was hit in the nose attempting to block a shot. | Source: Ezra Shaw/Getty Images
And Tiffany Hayes left the game and didn’t return after taking a hard fall in the second half. She also made only 1 of her 12 shots attempts, which Nakase didn’t mind pointing out to her in the locker room.
“I said, ‘Tough shooting night,’” Nakase said. “She said, ‘It’s only gonna get better.’”
Does it sound like the Valkyries were not at all bothered by all the bruises and hard-scrabble plays it took to win this game? No, they were not. They were proud of them. They knew this is exactly what it takes and they’re ready for it.
And they knew there will be many more of them in this series, as they aim for three more victories. Who cares about the aches and pains when you’re holding a trophy in a parade?