Ballhalla Got The Playoff Christening It Deserved

The phrase "road playoff game" can have a variety of meanings depending on the circumstances, and the one that Paige Bueckers and her Dallas Wings teammates stepped into on Sunday night was about as daunting as they come. They had to enter Ballhalla, home to the WNBA's loudest fanbase, and take on the two-seeded Golden State Valkyries, owners of the league's most ferocious defense. No thanks. "Home playoff game" can have different meanings, too, as last year's Valkyries might tell you. Their surprisingly successful inaugural season ended with a playoff appearance, and the reward for so thoroughly exceeding expectations was an 0-2 sweep at the hands of the Lynx and one home playoff game, played in San Jose because a tennis tournament had dibs on their home arena. Any bitterness that arose from that experience did not carry over into this season, in which the Valks transformed from a plucky expansion squad playing over their heads into the team with the league's best net rating. Things are different, now, and even through the television screen one could sense how much the home crowd had been anticipating this chance to show what a playoff game in Ballhalla feels like. Bueckers did her best. In the first quarter, the roar of the crowd was briefly quieted by the Wings' star, who seemed to understand that the best way to short-circuit the self-sustaining process of a locked-in defense drawing energy from and returning it to a locked-in crowd is to go out there and get some tough buckets. Call it a superstar's instinct. And so tough buckets were exactly what Bueckers spent the first quarter collecting. Despite being hounded up and down the court by Gabby Williams, she scored 11 of her team's 20 points in the first quarter on 4-of-5 shooting, and the Wings only trailed by one when it was over. At this point one could detect just the slightest trace of trepidation in the noise of the crowd. Bueckers wasn't actually going to spoil this party, was she?

Read it at Defector ↗

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