Through three quarters on Sunday night, the Seattle Storm were playing the perfect game. Their defense was on point, they were controlling the glass and finding just enough offense to stay in front of the defending champion Las Vegas Aces. Against the odds, they were just 10 minutes from pulling off an upset win in Game 1 of their first-round playoff series.
And then, they turned in the worst quarter of playoff offense in WNBA history.
The Storm did not make a single shot in the fourth quarter. They went 0-of-12 from the field, and their only two points in the frame came on a pair of free throws by Skylar Diggins-Smith. It’s not as if the Aces were spectacular down the stretch themselves. They only managed 14 points in the fourth, but it was more than enough to pull away for a 78-67 win and a 1-0 series lead.
“I’m still kinda shocked after that fourth quarter,” Gabby Williams said.
The Storm’s two points in the fourth are tied for the fewest in a single quarter in playoff history (the Sacramento Monarchs also had two in the fourth quarter of Game 4 of the 2006 Finals) and they are the first team to miss every shot in a quarter since the league switched from halves to quarters in 2006.
For those who didn’t watch, and even for those who did, the obvious question is how? How did a team with Skylar Diggins-Smith, Nneka Ogwumike, Jewell Loyd and Gabby Williams not make a single basket in 10 minutes of action. Let’s take a look.
The first issue is that the Storm were playing too slow, particularly early in the frame when they were still clinging to a lead.
It’s one thing to try and turn a game into a low-possession affair, especially on the road against the defending champions, but you run the risk of smothering your own offense in the process. It felt like the Storm crossed that line. Often, they were barely beating the eight-second count, which left them little time to adjust if their first action didn’t work.
Another problem, which was influenced by the lack of pace, was that the Aces did a terrific job keeping them out of the paint and away from the rim. Overall, the Storm were not a great offensive team in the regular season, but they did excel at getting into the paint. They were second in the league in that category at 40.5 points per game, and nearly half (48.7%) of their points came in the paint.
In the fourth quarter, they only got a paint touch on seven out of 17 possessions (eight if you want to include Victoria Vivians‘ pull up jumper with a toe in the paint, but for the purposes of this exercise we will not). Even when they did get into the paint, they were unable to get good looks at the basket. Just one of their 12 shots in the frame came in the restricted area. There were a lot of mid-range jumpers and awkward attempts instead.
Notably, Nneka Ogwumike was largely uninvolved in the fourth. Arguably the Storm’s best player this season, Ogwumike went for 13 points on 50% shooting in the first half, but she didn’t score after the break. The Aces decided that she wasn’t going to beat them, and she only took one shot in the fourth quarter.
Finally, the Storm simply turned the ball over too much late in the game. Six of their 13 turnovers came in the fourth quarter. While the Aces generally weren’t successful in turning them into points, those were six possessions where the Storm didn’t even get a shot off. Wasted opportunities are just too costly against a team like the Aces.
“Yeah, I mean, we just buckled down” A’ja Wilson said. “We understood the assignment and knew what it was gonna take. I think we saw in the first half that this isn’t gonna be easy. This is the playoffs, this isn’t a regular season game. Things we would do in regular season, we have to literally times 10 it in the playoffs… second half we figured it out.”
