Five things to watch for in Valkyries-Storm part 2

Rotational, tactical, and analytical changes incoming.

It’s going to be a big week here at RoV. The Valkyries may be off until Saturday, but we’ll have daily content, including coverage of Friday’s win over the Sky in tomorrow’s post. Additionally, a warm welcome to all the new subscribers from Reddit. For those unfamiliar, I don’t use sound in most clips—clips are meant to be talked over—so keep listening to whatever you’re listening to.

One of the Golden State Valkyries’ (8-7) most impressive wins this season came two weeks against the Seattle Storm (10-6). The Valkyries roared—some might say Stormed—out to a double-digit lead in the first half and rode a career day from Carla Leite to a 76-70 win.

Both teams will want to go into the Commissioner’s Cup Final break strong. If I’m Seattle, I’m still smarting from the loss, one of the team’s worst performances of the season. If I’m Golden State, this is an opportunity to cement my unprecedented status as a team capable of beating even the league’s most experienced and vaunted teams.

You can read a more comprehensive preview here.

Let’s take a look at a few adjustments we could see from the first matchup.

1. The Rotation

Here was the rotation in the first matchup:

This time around, Golden State will be without Leite, still with an injured back, as Marisa Ingemi of the San Francisco Chronicle reports, but Temi Fágbénlé will likely return from her Eurobasket recuperation. That’s crucial to the game for the Valkyries, as we’ll see in a moment. Tiffany Hayes is also back in the rotation after missing the first matchup with a nose injury (a nice replacement for Leite).

For Seattle, it’s the same starting lineup. The Storm have barely changed up their first five all year, whereas the Valkyries have seen—and been forced to see—a lot of different looks. The only change for Seattle is no Lexie Brown (illness), and potentially yes Mackenzie Holmes.

Both teams played Friday night, although Seattle beat Connecticut comfortably enough to rest their starters for most of the fourth quarter. Golden State also has a different bench from June 14: Aerial Powers is no longer with the team, and Kaitlyn Chen and Chloe Bibby are in (Laeticia Amihere also has more Valkyries experience under her belt).

I’d expect the starters to be nothing new: Veronica Burton, Tiffany Hayes, Kayla Thornton, Steph Talbot, and Temi Fágbénlé. Monique Billings will be a bench lynchpin, while the stars are aligning for a lot of Chen and Kate Martin off the bench, and Bibby and Amihere vying for ninth depending on how the staff wants to attack the game.

2. What do the Valkyries want to do defensively?

It was very clear how Golden State wanted to attack the game last time out. The Valkyries have prided themselves on being a defense-first team, and the goal was to stop the Storm—the league leader in points inside the arc—from getting to the paint. They succeeded.

Seattle’s 26 points in the point were their fewest in a game all season.

In the first matchup, Golden State packed the paint by playing a ton of zone (really, a matchup zone) defense. They did it in the halfcourt, they did it on sideline out-of-bounds (SLOBs), they did it vs. the starters, they did it vs. the bench.

Naturally, Seattle will prepare counters to the zone, and Golden State will expect that. It’s unlikely that Golden State can get away with playing so much zone the second time around, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the bench lineups utilized it a lot, betting on the relative lack of creation in Seattle’s second unit.

What counters can Seattle utilize?

An obvious option is to shoot more threes. Hot shooting will get teams out of a 2-3 zone really quickly, as well as provide more offensive rebounding opportunities, to which a zone is naturally susceptible (limiting Seattle to just three offensive rebounds was a big reason the Valkyries won the first matchup).

The Storm looked to shoot more threes after halftime of game one, and Skylar Diggins and Alysha Clark hit them at a high enough clip to help bring Seattle back. Against Golden State, Seattle took corner threes at their third-highest rate of season, per pbpstats, and Diggins in particular looked to find the left corner consistently. Gabby Williams, taking nearly 40% of her shots from deep, had just nine points, her second-lowest total of the season, and Seattle must look to get her involved early.

But Seattle isn’t really a three-point heavy team: it’s a paint-heavy team. They have not taken more threes in a game than they did against Golden State since playing Golden State. Their ability to get the ball into the paint will make or break their gameplan in this one.

3. How will Seattle look to get into the paint?

The easiest thing for Seattle to do against the zone is just enter the ball into the post and let someone—usually Nneka Ogwumike or Ezi Magbegor—go to work.

You can see the Storm’s willingness to attack Talbot one on one, as well as their determination to enter the ball into the post—look for the deep seal early in a possession—after Golden State’s cross-matching in transition (finding someone to guarding in transition who is not necessarily the intended defensive matchup). That’s exemplified well here, as is an easy zone-beating concept: get the bigs a mismatch.

Here, the transition defense and matching lands the bigs on the weakside, where it’s Kate Martin’s corner. The Storm eventually find the mismatch and Magbegor scorers. Look for Seattle to purposefully move their bigs around offball to find the side of the zone they want to attack.

The Storm also found some nice zone-beaters with the double bigs, mostly by slipping off a guard screen into an already overloaded paint.

This might be where the return of Hayes can be extra useful, as she’ll fare better than Leite in switching to man-to-man defense and holding up against the bigs when mismatched.

The Valkyries aren’t without recourse against all of these things, of course. Golden State did a nice job in the first matchup—and has done a nice job all year—of getting hands into the passing lane on entry feeds.

There’s also a reason Burton was a such a game-wrecker in the first matchup. The Valkyries’ zone scheme enables her (and other guards) to dig down against post-ups with aplomb, and the matchup aspect of the zone enables her to rotate like few players in the league can:

She had four deflections that game.

The Valkyries essentially played Ogwumike off the floor in the first matchup (more on that anon). Seattle leaned into Clark’s spacing in the fourth quarter at the expense of the nine-time All-Star, which Seattle will never willingly accept. Ogwumike scored just six points, a season-low, on six field goal attempts, also a season-low. On top of getting more looks against the zone, Golden State will have to contend with her getting a few more looks as a screener, where she found some success with the quick slip:

Seattle is one of the most floater- and short midrange-happy teams in the WNBA. The Valkyries will want to continue to set the tone aggressively and will the race to the slip spot—most controllable about defending this is the team’s level of (beloved) hustle.

Finally, Golden State will have to contend, once again, with Diggins, who leads Seattle with 19 points and 6.1 assists per game.

Diggins had 21 and 3 against Golden State, and I’d expect her assist number to go up if Seattle gets more from Williams and Ogwumike as discussed. But look for Diggins to be a three-level scorer once again, especially attacking off screens whether against zone or man. If the Valkyries are out of zone, Burton will likely take the assignment again, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see a lot of pressure in both half and fullcourt to force the ball elsewhere. I wouldn’t hate trying to force her right, either.

4. What worked for the Valkyries offensively?

As mentioned above, the Valks forced Ogwumike off the court in the first matchup, and I think much of that had to do with winning against her offensively. Golden State consistently attacked her on offense, primarily making her defend ball screens, and got into the paint at a season-high rate.

Golden State’s 62.5% shooting on two-pointers was their best two-point shooting game of the season, and their 50% effective field goal percentage (eFG%) was their second best of the season (Aces).

That sort of defense won’t work against Hayes, an even better driver. What also worked in the drive game was a small hesitation, waiting for the backend defender to recover to the roll, and then acceleration to the rim:

Ogwumike started hedging more screens in the second half. Look to see if she plays drop or hedges aggressively this time around: the Golden State guards would love another field day.

Here, too, is where the return of Fágbénlé comes in handy: she dominated in the first matchup.

Her ability to get to the paint, as well as Seattle’s desire to stop points in the paint (if you want to know what a team wants to take away, look at what a team wants to get, and vice versa), turned them into a low-helper rotation team.

But Golden State’s ability to move the ball against those rotations, as well as find rollers early (and have Leite destroy the defense in empty PnR), disrupted things for Seattle and would have been even more destructive had Golden State shot better than 3/18 from three. So, one counter could be to change the rotation points…

Magbegor rotates from the weakside wing, making the corner defender play two. But there’s a counter to the counter…

Cutting behind that help-the-nail-helper is nice work from KT. The Valkyries have done well to cut from the weakside in empty all year, and should be able to get Seattle out of their comfort zone by preempting their rotations with continued off-ball movement.

5. Other offensive actions

Finally, look for plenty of work against Diggins, who showed a real tendency to not switch in the first matchup.

The guard-to-guard quick slips and ghost screens that the Valkyries have introduced more of will play nicely against this, as will some more standard Horns Flare/dribble hand-off (DHO) actions.

Golden State had a nice double drag look that created points in the paint:

And last but not least, the team went to their vertical BLOB (baseline out-of-bounds) package against Seattle with some success. We’ll see if Seattle shuts that down.

Valkyries-Storm part two tips off tonight at 8:30/5:30 p.m.