Angel Reese put up a real double-double in the Indiana Fever’s overtime win over Atlanta on Saturday, and none of it is going to matter because the only clip anyone’s replaying is the point-blank putback she missed with the game on the line.
That’s the trade this rivalry runs on now.
Caitlin Clark goes 26 points, 9 assists, 3 rebounds in a win and gets the box score treatment, cited and passed around as more proof of whatever she’s building this season. Reese has a legitimately strong night and gets a GIF instead. Whatever actually happened over 40-plus minutes gets flattened down to one frozen frame, and that imbalance in what sticks is worth naming instead of just letting it happen again.
The early read on this one was wrong, though. Reese opened 3-of-10 from the field for 7 points while Atlanta built an eight-point halftime lead, and she owned it afterward, telling ESPN’s Holly Rowe: “I mean, I was playing like s—t in the beginning, but it’s a game of runs.” Fair self-assessment. She clawed all the way back to 15 points, 14 rebounds, and 6 assists on 5-of-16 shooting in a game that eventually needed overtime to settle.
That’s not a modest recovery. That’s a real double-double, in a game that needed overtime to decide it.
Then Atlanta had the ball tied at 81 with the clock running out, the final possession fell apart around a Reese look at the rim that would’ve ended it right there, and it didn’t fall. Other shots in that same stretch missed too — Rhyne Howard’s didn’t go in, Naz Hillmon’s didn’t go in — and somehow it’s Reese’s miss that’s been clipped and captioned across every timeline since Saturday night.
That selective memory is the actual story, not the shot.
I play a Tuesday-night rec league in Hoboken where I’ve clanked easier looks than that with nobody in the gym but the guy running the clock, so I get how a shot like that just doesn’t go in sometimes. Doesn’t make it less painful to watch on repeat. Just makes it less fair that it’s the only thing anyone remembers.
Indiana took overtime 14-10 to close it out 95-91, Clark got to the line late and grabbed the rebound that sealed it, and the Fever have won four straight to sit 23-12. Yahoo Sports has the full breakdown of how it ended, and CBS Sports walked through the extra period play by play. There’s also this, which is its own separate mess:
https://twitter.com/BrickCenter_/status/2089137064319275295
That’s Clark on the broadcast visibly cracking up as Atlanta’s misses piled up down the stretch, already past 1.9 million views. People found time to get mad about a smile that happened two feet from a missed shot nobody’s mad about in the same way.
https://twitter.com/LakeShowYo/status/2089128837254926829
Reese spent a half playing herself into a hole and then spent the rest of the night dragging Atlanta back into a game they had no business still being in. Bleacher Report’s box score rundown backs all of it up if you want the shot chart. She earned that double-double. She just didn’t earn the right to have it be the headline.
One miss, four straight Fever wins, and Reese goes back to Atlanta carrying the clip instead of the box score.
