Chelsea Gray hit a buzzer beater to force overtime and then hit another one to end it, and that is how Las Vegas walked out of Gainbridge Fieldhouse with an 86-84 win over Indiana on Thursday night. Two shots. Two buzzers. Same shooter.
The setup for both was Indiana giving the ball away at the worst possible moments. Caitlin Clark, who almost never does this, made the kind of late mistakes that hand a veteran team a window, and the veteran team on the floor was the one that has spent four years teaching itself exactly what to do with a window.
I don't have the full box in front of me yet, so I'm not going to pretend I know who scored what. What I know is the shape of it, and the shape of it is depressingly familiar if you root for the Fever.
how did Chelsea Gray's buzzer beater beat the Fever?
Because she has done it before, and because Las Vegas builds its entire late-game identity around the assumption that she will.
There is no play in this league less surprising and more impossible to stop than Gray with the clock under four seconds and a switch she likes. She does not rush. She does not hunt space she doesn't need. She gets to the spot on the floor she decided on two dribbles earlier and lets it go while everybody else is still doing math.
checked the almanac: gray won finals mvp in 2022, the year las vegas got its first title, and the shot menu has not really changed since. she just kept ordering off it.
Do it once and it's a highlight. Do it twice in the same game, at two different buzzers, in a building that wanted no part of either one, and you're describing a temperament, not a hot night.
what happened with Caitlin Clark against the Aces?
Uncharacteristic is the right word and it's the only one I'm going to use. Clark is 24, she's been the sun the entire league orbits since the day Indiana drafted her first overall in 2024, and she plays a style that lives on the edge of the pass nobody else sees. That style comes with nights where the edge wins.
She also spent Thursday, before the game, being asked about political issues and answering that people should speak when they feel like speaking and that she's trying to navigate life as a 24-year-old. That's a fair answer from a young player carrying a spotlight nobody has carried in this league before.
The game itself had another wrinkle: two men were escorted from courtside seats during the third quarter. The league and the building handled it. Worth noting, not worth dwelling on.
Thursday night around the WNBA
| Game | Final |
|---|---|
| Las Vegas at Indiana (OT) | Aces 86, Fever 84 |
| Los Angeles at Minnesota | Sparks 89, Lynx 82 |
| Toronto at Portland | Fire 97, Tempo 83 |
The Sparks ending Minnesota's 10-game winning streak was the other real story of the night, with Erica Wheeler getting four in a game-ending 8-0 run. Portland snapped a five-game skid behind Carla Leite's 27 points and 11 assists, and Toronto has now lost eight in a row, which is the kind of stretch that changes how a first-year roster talks to itself.
what comes next for the Aces and Fever
Both of these teams turn right back around on Saturday. Las Vegas is at Minnesota at 1:00 PM ET, walking into a Lynx team that just had a 10-game run ended in its own building and will not be in a generous mood. Indiana is at Chicago at 3:30 PM ET, with about 36 hours to file this one away.
That's the part I'm actually watching. Not the shot, the response. A young team that loses like that on its home floor tells you something about itself in the next 48 hours, and Indiana gets to answer fast. Good. Long layoffs after a loss like Thursday's are how a game becomes a story instead of a game.
And I want to see how the Lynx come out of an ended streak with the Aces in town. That's the matchup on this weekend's board that has my full attention.
