Coaches shorten rotations when the playoffs begin. The stars come alive. This is their proving ground. And yet, no postseason is without its surprise heroes trotting over to the scorer’s table, eager to leave their mark. Last year, the Las Vegas Aces asked almost nothing of their bench ... until they did. In a tough Game 4 in New York, with two starters injured, Cayla George and Sydney Colson delivered. A bench player once even won Finals MVP: Emma Meesseman took over for an ailing Elena Delle Donne in 2019's five-game Sun-Mystics series. This WNBA playoff preview is dedicated to those without a shoe deal—the X-factors, the microwave scorers, the glue gals. I’ve chosen eight who could rise to the occasion this fall, paired by first-round matchups. May they make these playoffs theirs.
(1) New York Liberty: Is it a stretch to call Leonie Fiebich an unsung bench hero? The 24-year-old rookie spent large portions of the season in Betnijah Laney-Hamilton’s place in the starting lineup due to injury, and Fiebich is sung enough that she’s a decent bet to win Sixth Player of the Year. (The Chicago Sky may be kicking themselves for throwing her rights into the already-bad 2023 Marina Mabrey trade.) The Liberty win games, essentially, because their bigs are without typical big deficiencies: Jonquel Jones can shoot; Breanna Stewart can switch onto guards. Head coach Sandy Brondello is thereby free to craft whatever lineups she wants to, which means the 6-foot-4 Fiebich fits the scheme. She’ll do it all, against any size. And with Sabrina Ionescu in a pretty bad shooting slump these days, they’ll take Fiebich’s strength from three.
(8) Atlanta Dream: The Dream struggle to move the ball, and they're without the injured Aerial Powers, one of the few players on this team who can create her own shot. So maybe keep an eye on energetic Ezinne Kalu, a standout for Nigeria at the Summer Olympics. Kalu, who hustled even when Team USA was thoroughly handling her team, scored her first WNBA points on Thursday at the age of 32. She joined the Dream on a seven-day hardship contract; I don't imagine their playoff run will last any longer than that.
(2) Minnesota Lynx: Let me take you behind the blogging curtain: When the WNBA season resumed after the Olympics, I wrote a quick “second-half preview” with my lingering questions for each team. On account of my prodigious curiosity, these were mostly easy to come up with, but the team for whom I had very few questions was the Lynx. Eventually, the deadline for this dumb second-half preview was bearing down on me—whose idea was it to write that, anyway?—so I decided they needed to be better at “rebounding,” which they sort of did, even though they were winning a lot already. And you know what? The Lynx actually answered my half-assed question by trading for Myisha Hines-Allen, who’s been a useful rebounding bench big for them ever since. She brings some hard-nosed play to their switchy, five-out roster. Hines-Allen and the Lynx proved they could hang with bigger lineups and dominant post players in a statement win over the Liberty toward the end of the regular season. (Well, Breanna Stewart got hers in a 38-point performance, but Minnesota kept the rest of the team quiet.) Because they heeded my warning, the Lynx are my pick to win it all.
(7) Phoenix Mercury: This poor team is swooning its way into the playoffs. The Mercury might have had a shot at the fifth or sixth seed when the second half started, but a much younger Indiana Fever roster has passed them by, and it looks like it’ll be a quick exit for Phoenix against a Lynx team that’s just too hard to guard. Natasha Mack might not have a path to heavy playoff minutes—her role has been understandably smaller since Brittney Griner returned from injury—but I’ve enjoyed watching her this year, and this blog is already functioning as a repository for random notes that never found their way into an actual regular-season blog. She makes all kinds of chaos with what Natasha Cloud called her “go-go gadget arms.” Mack had a career-high four blocks earlier this week against the Sparks, but she’s also great at blowing up transition plays and generally mucking things up.
(3) Connecticut Sun: The scrap-ready guard Marina Mabrey is doing everything the Sun hoped she would when they traded for her in a rare blockbuster midseason deal. Mabrey sometimes struggled with an extreme offensive workload in Chicago—and even in Dallas, where she played three seasons before that. But given the playmaking of Alyssa Thomas and a bench role with Connecticut, she’s thrived. Before the trade, Mabrey was on pace for one of the worst shooting years of her career. In her games since, she’s shot better than 40 percent from three in Connecticut and even improved her efficiency from two. Mabrey has a reputation for streakiness, and this spacing-challenged team would be wise not to rely on her too much for scoring, because she can just as easily shoot them out of games. Still, at her best, Mabrey is instant firepower off the bench and a perfectly irritating fit on this team of pests.
(6) Indiana Fever: In the same way certain movies are “joke delivery vehicles,” I’ll confess that this entire preview concept is a Temi Fagbenle compliment delivery vehicle. Her rim-running kept the Fever watchable while the team scuffled to start the season, and when she rejoined them in mid-August after missing two months with a thumb injury, they had conveniently become the kind of fast-playing team she’d suggested they could be in flashes. Now that Aliyah Boston and Caitlin Clark have clicked, the 32-year-old Fagbenle is probably most valuable to Indiana for her defense. It stands out, admittedly, among a mediocre cast of defenders. Like her teammate Lexie Hull, Fagbenle comes by that defensive prowess through plain hustle rather than pinpoint technique. But however she gets it done, she gets it done. On their first trip to the playoffs, the Fever’s young core have a perfect bench veteran behind them.
(4) Las Vegas Aces: The obvious choice here is Tiffany Hayes, another strong Sixth Player of the Year candidate who came out of retirement to join the Aces in June, when things were starting to look iffy for the defending champions. But I don’t make obvious choices, only subversive and stylish ones. Every time Sydney Colson gets minutes, my eyes are drawn to her. She’s a handy option when the offense is stalling; she won’t score a ton, or really at all, but she makes a nice change-of-pace playmaker. Expect A'ja Wilson to run the offense and defense this postseason, but she seemed to enjoy watching Colson cook earlier this month:
If Colson's second-half minutes are any indication, there may be some playoff minutes in her future. I won’t soon forget the 15 minutes she played in last year’s championship clincher, where she scored two points and finished with a +17 plus-minus—in a one-point game!
(5) Seattle Storm: It would be funny if the Storm's offense actually did experience their long-awaited regression to the mean, and they started shooting 80 percent from three and won it all. But Seattle needs a more realistic gameplan than faith in the statistics gods. For now, a poor-shooting team is just who they are. I’m reminded of a Bill Laimbeer quote: Back when the Aces refused to even take threes, he offered that his team instead got threes “the old-fashioned way, a bucket and a foul.” Maybe the Storm can try that. Wing Jordan Horston is a terrific athlete who can get to the rim, and she’s had some electric games off the bench. Beyond that, if Seattle can’t pose any real shooting threat, expect the Aces to hang back in a zone to force the issue.
