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Down a member of the core-four, Las Vegas got enough helping hands to come-from-behind to beat Dallas in the team’s most recent outing.
The Aces beat the Wings, 89-82, Wednesday, July 5 from the Michelob Ultra Arena in front of a sellout crowd of more than 10.1K screaming fans. It was a +16 second half turnaround for the home team that netted it the win.
Obviously, a tale of two halves,” head coach Becky Hammon said. “It’s not always a bad thing to walk into a fight and get punched. That’s how the game goes, you’ve got to be able to take it.”
The team got the dub without all-star guard Kelsey Plum who missed the game due to a non-COVID illness. In addition, the team was already without reserve guard Riquna Williams, who has missed the entire year with a lower back injury.
“She’s different,” Hammon said of Plum. “She’s different from any other athlete I’ve ever seen, male or female. She’s just cut from a different cloth. We miss her presence. “We kind of had to win differently. You didn’t see the fluidity as much and a lot of the reason we have that fluidity is because she gets downhill.”
Its most recent win ran the Las Vegas win streak to nine games including a 5-0 mark on homestand that just ended. Overall, the team is a WNBA’s best 16-1 and currently sit atop the league’s standings.
While the Aces took care of business at home, the Wings will get a chance for immediate revenge with a matchup in Dallas set for Friday, July 7 from the College Park Center. That will mark the start of a brief two-game road trip.
“We looked like we hadn’t played offense in like two months tonight,” Hammon said. “Hopefully, we have better attention to detail going into Dallas because it’s going to be another fight.”
As she often does, guard Chelsea Gray closed the show for Las Vegas with back-to-back buckets with just under two minutes left to keep the home team’s lead at seven points. She scored the team’s final six points of regulation on her way to a 20-point, six-assist and five-rebound night.
Fellow guard Jackie Young led the team in scoring with 28 points on 10-of-15 from the field including three made three-pointers.
“Chelsea and Jackie, they were phenomenal tonight on both ends of the ball,” Hammon said. “Jackie and Chelsea I thought really imposed their wills on the game.”
As a team, the Aces had to overcome a once 14-point deficit in order to storm back for the victory. The biggest turn in the comeback effort came in the third quarter as Las Vegas went on a 13-0 run in order to tie the game 55, accounting for the first stalemate of the game.
That run was met with a 10-0 run by Dallas to regain control of the game.
“We have a lot of pride in [the locker room],” Hammon said. “It’s hard when you’re behind because you battle back and you have to have some things go your way. Then it's even harder to get through that because you have these multiple possessions of good stops, good stops then we kind of had multiple possessions of mistakes.”
It was a 7-0 response by the home team that injected life back into its sellout crowd as well as the team’s bench. At halftime, the Aces trailed by nine points but the team’s 10 turnovers were a bigger point of contention.
“For us to have 10 turnovers at halftime is uncharacteristic for us,” forward Alysha Clark said. “I think we were just rushing a little bit. [The Wings] are obviously long on the defensive side of the ball.”
In the second half, the team responded by committing just three in the 20-minute session.
Forward A’ja Wilson also had a tale of two halves after being held to just seven points in the first half, she bounced back with 15 in the second to secure the 65th double-double of her career. She finished with 22 points and 13 rebounds, which were tied for the game-high.
Wilson scored eight points during a 10-0 stretch for Las Vegas in the fourth quarter which she punctuated with her third block of the night.
Clark made her first start with the Aces in the absence of Plum. She tallied 10 points to become the fourth and final Las Vegas player in double-figures. However, her heaviest lifting came on the defensive end, splitting time guarding Dallas guard Arike Ogunbowale and forward Natasha Howard.
“Every game, I know the players that I’ll probably guard,” Clark said. “Knowing that I’m probably going to be on these players, I make sure that I’m studying what they like to do.”
Ogunbowale was held to just 12 points after racing out to nine points in the first quarter. Moreover, she missed the final nine field goal attempts she took in the game.
“We were just trying to be disruptive with her,” Hammon said. “[We wanted to] make every touch difficult, every shot difficult. Obviously, when you do that you spread your offense a little bit thin.”
Howard, on the other hand, put up a game-high and season-high 32 points on 13 made field goals to go along with 13 rebounds. Her effort helped the Wings win the points in the paint battle by 10 points.
Dallas forward Satou Sabally was held out in the second half after recording nine points, two assists and a steal in just under 18 minutes on-the-court in the first half.