Sometimes a basketball game comes down to one brutal reality: The other team has A’ja Wilson, and yours does not.
That appeared to be the Sky’s fate Saturday afternoon against the Aces. They erased a 10-point deficit to tie the game in the fourth quarter, only for Wilson to score the go-ahead basket with 3.2 seconds remaining.
But the Sky are developing a late-game superpower of their own.
Her name is Sydney Taylor.
Taylor’s late-game heroics have repeatedly put the Sky on the doorstep of wins they could not quite finish.
Before the All-Star break, Taylor scored a career-high 31 points in New York only for the Sky to crumble in the final minutes. Taylor was not going to let it happen again.
“That New York game has been on repeat for me since it happened,” Taylor said. “I was really due for one. I needed one really bad for me.”
Saturday’s game was sloppy on both sides. Taylor missed open looks early, and the disappointment showed. But the great thing about Taylor is she doesn’t stop shooting — and she can heat up quickly.
She did in the fourth quarter. After a flurry of scoring from Taylor, a corner three-pointer finally sent Aces coach Becky Hammon cursing into a timeout. All of a sudden, the Sky were knocking on the door.
Taylor scored 13 points in the frame, but it took everyone for them to finally close out a game like this.
The return of guard DiJonai Carrington has made their defense much stingier down the stretch. Center Kamilla Cardoso trusted herself enough to hit one of her first jump shots of the season. Natasha Cloud converted a key three-point play.
“We constantly say, ‘Don’t let your bootyhole get tight at the end of the game,’” Cloud said. “We’ve been in so many of these late-game situations where we understand that at some point it’s going to tip in our favor.”
Taylor opened up at practice this week about wanting even more opportunities with the ball in her hands in clutch moments.
Marsh gave her two in the final 27 seconds.
With the score tied, he called for a clear out for Taylor to go one-on-one. She burst past Aces guard Jackie Young, but her floater bounced off the side of the backboard.
Taylor then watched Wilson respond from the bench after Marsh made an offense-defense substitution. She told herself that if she got back into the game, another opportunity would come.
It did.
With 3.2 seconds remaining, Taylor received a perfect screen from Elizabeth Williams, caught Cloud’s inbound pass and let a deep three-pointer fly.
“I don’t even know how close I was or how far I was,” Taylor said. “I just shot it. I’m glad my teammates had the confidence in me to take a shot like that against that team. That’s a big win for us.”
The moment was even sweeter given that Marsh had stolen the winning play from Hammon, his old friend and mentor.
“Our first year in 2022 we ran it in practice,” Marsh said. “Anybody that knows me knows I save everything from everywhere that I’ve been. I just pulled that one out, and luckily it worked.”
Lucky indeed. This five-game homestand is essentially do or die for a team still chasing a miracle playoff push.
Cloud, the Sky’s hype woman and heartbeat, still sees everything coming together.
“I know that the first half of our season was relatively ugly and painful,” Cloud said. “We kept staying the course, understanding that we’re losing these ones, but when it matters most, we’re going to have the experience.
“We have 11 games left [before the FIBA break]. We have two already checked off, and we’re taking it one game at a time. I’m just really proud of the resilience of this team to take all the adversity of the first half of the season so that when we do have games like this, it feels so much better because we’ve been through the [expletive] mud.”