The Storm Are The WNBA’s Tank Champions

The WNBA doesn’t have an award for “clutch-ness” the way the NBA does, so it figures that they also do not have an award for “unclutch-ness.” Allow us to fill the vacuum: Defector’s inaugural Unclutchy Award for Outstanding Achievement in Choking and Tanking goes to the Seattle Storm. The voting wasn’t close, which is good; if it were, the Storm probably wouldn’t have won. 

WNBA Stats defines “clutch time” as the final five minutes of a game within a five-point margin. It happens to be the time when the 7-28 Storm do their best work. They’ve played 16 clutch games and lost a remarkable 14 of them. Consider it a simple tradeoff. If you want to build around a pair of awesome, athletic teens, you must also accept that teens are fickle and mercurial and sometimes straight up forget how to play basketball. It’s all part of the fun.

The 6-foot-4 Awa Fam, 19 years old on draft night, had a reasonable claim to be the first-overall pick in the draft this past spring, but she ended up going to Seattle at No. 3, after Azzi Fudd and Olivia Miles. The term “stretch big” gets thrown around a little casually these days, so it might be more meaningful to say that Fam is a great shooter who only happens to be a big. The percentages won’t wow anyone—she’s making 35 percent of her three-point attempts this season—but the volume (four attempts per game) should. These are contested threes and quick catch-and-shoot looks she’s hitting, not the “somebody left her open” threes most centers take.