ARLINGTON, Texas – When the Valkyries are making their shots, they’re difficult to beat. It takes a historic type of effort to get past their league-leading defense.
With their season on the line at College Park Center on Wednesday, the Dallas Wings got just that. Arike Ogunbowale hit the game-tying shot with 4.1 left in the game and then the game-winner in overtime to force a decisive Game 3 on Friday.
“I guess I like when the time is going down,” Ogunbowale said with a laugh in the postgame press conference.
Ogunbowale scored a career-high 45 points in the Wings’ epic 108-100 overtime win. It was a single-player effort the Valkyries have not had to contend with this season. Golden State had not allowed a player to score more than 30 points in a game this season.
Ogunbowale had run out of space on the sideline after Gabby Williams was hunting her off Jessica Shepard’s screen. She faded backward and let it fly.
The Valkyries don’t allow shots like that to go in, but Ogunbowale was on a different plane of existence on Wednesday night.
Maybe she pushed off. It was hard to see in the moment. But it didn’t matter because the night belonged to Ogunbowale.
“I’ll keep that to myself,” Valkyries coach Natalie Nakase said, stopping herself when talking about that final shot.
“That’s kind of what was really frustrating: We knew she likes to step back left, and we didn’t get into it; we didn’t force her right.”
She broke the WNBA record for most points scored by a single player in a postseason game while shooting 12-for-23 with 18 free throws to match the Valkyries blow for blow.
In her overtime winner, Ogunbowale was matched up with Kiah Stokes, a 6’4 center who got caught on a switch at the perimeter. The Wings guard punished the mismatch with another deep 3-pointer to seal the game.
“I didn’t know what I would score,” she said after the game. “I just knew that I was going to shoot regardless because I just feel like seven shots isn’t enough to win in the playoffs, and I have to be aggressive whether it’s going in or not. It was a dogfight. Like, they’re a really, really, really tough team to play.”
Ogunbowale has faced criticism after the worst year of her career last season when she averaged 15.5 points per game on 36.4% shooting in 29 games, leading to speculation of if the Wings would keep her for this season. They brought her back on a two-year max contract and she struggled to shoot early in the season, but shot 46.6% after the All-Star break to be a true No. 2 option behind Paige Bueckers.
But she has never played well against the Valkyries. She was shooting 41.2% this season when facing Golden State before scoring just 10 points on seven shots in the Game 1 loss when Bueckers went 9-for-10 as essentially Dallas’ only scorer.
While the Valkyries locked Bueckers down on Wednesday (10 points, 3-for-13 shooting), Ogunbowale stepped up big time. Williams ended up guarding her at times in the second half after aggressively pinning Bueckers earlier on, but Ogunbowale also got several mismatches by switching.
Then she made a couple of just incredible shots that would have been difficult for anyone to stop, especially her game-tying and game-winning buckets.
“Arike likes that step-back (shot). We just have to make sure we take that away. And then once she’s rolling, we have to respond. We have to maybe throw more bodies at her. She did a hell of a job,” Nakase said. “Credit to Arike. She made a tough shot. We know she likes that step back left.”
Ogunbowale noted that the Valkyries played physically in Game 1 and it kind of rattled Dallas, a team that wants to run and thrives on space in transition.
“I felt like in the first game, I wasn’t aggressive enough,” Ogunbowale said. “I was really passive. I wanted to come out and be aggressive and find my teammates and make myself a scorer, and that’s what I did.”
Nakase seems to already know what she wants to do to prevent Ogunbowale from going off again in Game 3.
No one had ever scored more than 34 points on the Valkyries before Wednesday night. It’s safe to expect a non-historic performance on Friday when the Valkyries certainly lock in on Ogunbowale.
But they have rarely had to respond to a player like this before, and now is when their league-best defense is going to be tested the most.
