When the Las Vegas Aces took a 2-0 lead in the 2022 WNBA Finals, it was the eighth time in league history that a team had won the first two Finals games in a best-of-five series. In the previous seven instances, the team had gone on to sweep.
The Aces entered Thursday night on a five-game win streak, punctuated by a rout in Game 2 when they were able to get anything they wanted in the second half against Connecticut. They had yet to lose a road game in these playoffs, going 3-0 in Phoenix and Seattle. All signs pointed to a Las Vegas win in Game 3, and a 9-2 start for the Aces only confirmed that impression.
Instead, Las Vegas fell apart soon after that hot start. After setting the nets ablaze for the first eight games of the postseason — and scoring 42 in the Finals thus far — Chelsea Gray finally had a relative off night, scoring just 11 points along with seven assists and four turnovers. The Aces had plenty of other miscues throughout the game, but the Sun keyed in on slowing Gray; that put the entire Las Vegas offense out of rhythm and allowed Connecticut to stay alive in the series with a 105-76 win.
The most significant adjustment that the Sun made to attempt to contain the human fireball that is Chelsea Gray was switching DeWanna Bonner onto the Vegas guard. In previous seasons, Connecticut has used five-time all-defense selection Jasmine Thomas as its primary defender on Gray to great effect, but with Thomas out for the season, that job had initially fallen to Natisha Hiedeman. The 5’8 Hiedeman is more of an offensive specialist and far too slight to disturb the 6’0 Gray, so the Sun were forced to give the assignment to 6’4 Bonner, who had done well to limit Jackie Young in her first two games.
“Length. Length,” Connecticut coach Curt Miller said of the decision to give Bonner the Gray matchup. “Chelsea Gray’s numbers are historic right now on contested shots. So we were pleased going into tonight, two games, 27 of her 33 shots in this series had been contested. 27 contested shots. So we were staying in place with her, trying to make them difficult, but she has an incredible release point and incredible knack of scoring while contested. So we decided a little bit more length on her, and we knew everyone’s going to guard her, everyone’s going to guard her tonight. But let’s put some length on her.”
The numbers speak for themselves, but it was noteworthy seeing Bonner actually affect Gray’s jumper. Even when it…
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