{"id":886786,"date":"2026-10-18T16:28:20","date_gmt":"2026-10-18T16:28:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/886786\/"},"modified":"2026-10-18T16:28:20","modified_gmt":"2026-10-18T16:28:20","slug":"angel-reese-isnt-who-you-thought-she-was","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/886786\/","title":{"rendered":"Angel Reese Isn\u2019t Who You Thought She Was"},"content":{"rendered":"

WNBA<\/a>WNBA<\/a>Forget the narratives and the nonsense. The WNBA\u2019s most polarizing player has become one of its most valuable.\"\"Getty Images\/Ringer illustration\"\"<\/a>By Seerat Sohi<\/a>Oct. 16, 12:06 pm UTC \u2022 8 min<\/p>\n

It is a common, effective rhetorical trick to start a story about an athlete by highlighting a singular play that affirms their on-court value: one moment in which their singular ability changes the outcome. But it\u2019s impossible\u2014and counterintuitive\u2014to try to distill Angel Reese\u2019s impact into one play.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Her dominance is best understood through the lens of accumulation: Dozens of mundane moments of hustle\u2014a tipped ball here, a rebound there, a steal and a look-ahead pass\u2014add up and render the sublime moments, the clutch, do-or-die buckets we treat with great reverence, less relevant.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Some stars make plays; others save them. Being her teammate means you can miss a momentum 3, a driving layup, or even a free throw and not have to fret. \u201c\u2018If you miss,\u2019\u201d Atlanta Dream guard Rhyne Howard recalls Reese telling her, \u201c\u2018I\u2019m gonna be there to get it.\u2019 That gives me confidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Having Reese on your side simply increases your margin for error. If you\u2019re her opponent, you can nail shot after shot and still find yourself behind. The New York Liberty, for instance, averaged a true shooting percentage of 60.6 in their semifinal series\u2014a figure that would tie Indiana\u2019s historically potent regular-season offense\u2014and still got swept. The Dream took, on average, 11 more shots per game than New York. In a series that was decided by just 15 points, Reese\u2019s 14 offensive rebounds created \u2026 15 extra points.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Few people have been as scrupulously observed and willfully misunderstood as Reese. The pinnacle of her athletic career, the national title she won at LSU in 2023, was her simultaneous entry into fame and infamy, via the taunt\u2014a hand wave in the face of Caitlin Clark\u2014morally legislated around the country.<\/p>\n

Her very existence as a Black woman\u2014one who is bold, passionate, and, as she puts it, unapologetic\u2014triggered deep racial animus in the American psyche, revealed in the disproportionate hate she received for regular athletic follies. Entire creator economies<\/a> were fueled by finding glib, perverse joy in her setbacks.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The importance of her greatest strength\u2014rebounding\u2014was endlessly debated. Her flaws, like finishing at the rim, were relentlessly clip-farmed.<\/a> Put all of this together, alongside an array of on-court skills that made her a bit of a WNBA curio, and it\u2019s not hard to understand how she came to occupy this strange nexus of celebrity unique to women\u2019s basketball in the 2020s: overexposed but underestimated, reviled by haters while overprotected by supporters.<\/p>\n

In her final days with the Chicago Sky, she publicly critiqued the direction of the franchise, triggering a public spat with teammate Courtney Vandersloot and a mystifying half-game suspension. Her own team, after trading her away for two late-first-round picks after just two seasons, insinuated<\/a> she was a culture killer.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She is coming off an All-WNBA season and a Defensive Player of the Year award and capping off her first playoff appearance with a trip to the WNBA Finals. If Atlanta wins, she will become the first star since Breanna Stewart to win a title within her first three years in the league. We are reaching, in other words, heretofore unseen levels of Proving the Haters Wrong.\u00a0<\/p>\n

All the while, one coach saw Reese\u2019s value through all the noise and had the system to unlock it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The Atlanta Dream celebrate after defeating the New York Liberty in Game 3 of the semifinals<\/p>\n

Getty Images<\/p>\n

Karl Smesko came to Atlanta by way of Florida Gulf Coast University, a Division I mid-major that overperformed year after year by consistently shooting more 3s<\/a> than just about any team in the nation for a decade, preaching the gospel of analytics long before it was popular. \u201cSmeskoball,\u201d as it has come to be known, prizes taking efficient shots beyond the arc and in the paint, playing with pace, and winning the possession battle by crashing the offensive glass and forcing live-ball turnovers.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In 2025, Smesko\u2019s first year at the helm of the Dream, Atlanta led the WNBA in offensive rebounds and shot more 3s than all but three teams<\/a> in WNBA history. But Atlanta flamed out in the first round against Indiana, as plodding veteran bigs Brionna Jones and Brittney Griner proved unplayable.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Enter Reese, a fast-moving answer to the gap between Smesko\u2019s mathematical vision and its execution.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen we found out Angel was available, it\u2019s like, well, this is really going to make some of these goals a lot easier to attain,\u201d Smesko said after the Dream closed out the Liberty in Game 3. \u201cWe added the perfect piece to really bring that plan to life, and Angel\u2019s been, you know, everything that we could have hoped for.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Dream, entering the WNBA Finals after going undefeated in the postseason, are a team built in Reese\u2019s image: Their regular-season offensive rebounding margin, 4.3 per game, was the best in WNBA history. Their defense, fueled by steals and deflections, has generated more points off turnovers than any other team in the WNBA this season.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rebounding has always taken up a contradictory place in the imaginations of basketball fans. Ending a defensive possession with a board has been treated as both highly important and somewhat perfunctory\u2014more of a chore than a skill. The argument against treating Reese\u2019s rebounding ability, which is the best in WNBA history, with more reverence is built on two ideas:<\/p>\n

If she didn\u2019t clear the boards, someone else would.\u00a0She misses so many shots that it\u2019s only natural for her to be in position to rebound them.<\/p>\n

Both arguments bury her impact. Reese creates extra opportunities on a historic level: She is the biggest reason the Dream\u2019s offensive rebounding margin is the best in WNBA history. And even if she never cleared her own misses off the glass, she\u2019d still be the best rebounder in WNBA history.\u00a0<\/p>\n

To understand the value of her offensive rebounding prowess, I hand-tracked a small sample of Reese\u2019s offensive rebounds through the playoffs. The 18 offensive rebounds Reese has snagged have generated 22 extra points for her teammates. She also leads the postseason in combined steals and blocks. When Reese has been on the floor in the postseason, almost a quarter<\/a> of the Dream\u2019s opponents\u2019 possessions have ended in turnovers. In Smesko\u2019s system, Reese has become more than the best rebounder of all time. She might be the greatest possession generator the women\u2019s game has ever seen.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Smesko has also worked with Reese on improving her 3-point shot, becoming her personal shooting coach\u2014a rare occurrence among head coaches. \u201cWe shoot together every day, and that kind of puts confidence in me. When somebody shows up for you, it means everything to me,\u201d Reese says.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Smesko stopped one of Atlanta\u2019s first practices until Reese made two 3s with her teammates watching, forcing her to endure the necessary growing pains of public failure. After rebuilding the mechanics of her jumper, Smesko told her she would miss a lot before the makes started rolling in.<\/p>\n

The vision proved true. While Reese shot just 19 percent on 1.3 attempts per game during the regular season, she\u2019s now hitting 39 percent on 2.6 attempts during the postseason, a sudden leap that has unlocked the Dream\u2019s offense and been reflective of her progress this season.<\/p>\n

Her overall efficiency has also improved. After missing a potentially game-winning layup against the Indiana Fever in August, Reese has gone from shooting<\/a> 49.7 percent in the restricted area to 66.9 percent in the 14 games since, including the postseason.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Her early turnover struggles, the result of a since abandoned point forward experiment, also flipped; she was making 3.5 per game prior to the All-Star break but has made 2.6 per game since.<\/p>\n

Reese spent college and her first two years in the WNBA at the forward position, but in light of Brionna Jones\u2019s season-ending injury, Reese has now adjusted to playing center, where she has notched more steals than anyone since Alyssa Thomas\u2014another physical, unorthodox big who found a creative coach to maximize her skills\u2014in the 2020 Wubble season.<\/p>\n

Watching Reese, the outgoing ATL Barbie, do her pregame handshake with Smesko, the introverted wonk, is like watching the popular girl in high school with her nerdy best friend\u2014the one person she trusts because he couldn\u2019t care less about status and, more importantly, sees through it. Smesko saw something in her that others didn\u2019t and worked hard to cultivate it. While the world wondered whether Reese\u2019s rebounding mattered less because of her misses, Smesko knew her misses mattered less because of her rebounding.<\/p>\n

Reese is no stranger to the power of the reframe. She took \u201cmebounds,\u201d a derisive internet meme suggesting her misses inflate her rebound total, trademarked it, and put it on merchandise. She sees the first two years of her career, spent with the perennially dysfunctional Chicago Sky, who went 23-61 during that stretch, through a lens of gratitude. \u201cGoing through adversity builds character,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n

Nearly a third of the league once passed on Reese, who was taken with the no. 7 pick in the 2024 draft. Dallas took Jacy Sheldon over her. The Sparks passed on Reese twice. Even Chicago, the team that traded for her on draft night, chose Kamilla Cardoso over her with the no. 3 pick.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But if she hadn\u2019t ended up with the Sky, she likely never would have found her way to the Dream, who didn\u2019t have a pick until later in the draft. The only player whom she wouldn\u2019t go ahead of in that draft now is the one her name will be tied to forever: Caitlin Clark.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Caitlin Clark shoots against Reese<\/p>\n

Getty Images<\/p>\n

Clark and Reese have always been fascinating foils. Their on-court fit, evident in their chemistry on Team USA, is resplendent, representing two complementary polarities in the same movement toward pace and space. The regular season was headlined by Clark and a golden generation of young guards who are benefiting from the WNBA\u2019s emphasis on freedom of movement in officiating. The postseason, though, has remained the mucky domain of defense and size where bigs like Stewart, Kiah Stokes, and Reese, who can both create and weather physicality, have thrived.<\/p>\n

The Finals, which will feature the league\u2019s top two defenses, will inevitably produce a lot of missed shots for Reese to fight for. You don\u2019t exactly need complicated regression models to unearth the value of rebounding in the playoffs. It\u2019s so simple that it sounds stupid to even point out, but it\u2019s so intuitive that it often goes ignored: The team that has the ball has the best\u2014no, the only\u2014chance to score. Reese is not likely to hit the shot that everyone remembers but is likely to grab the one that ricochets off the rim, winning all the little moments that everyone forgets until they accumulate into something we remember forever.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Seerat Sohi<\/p>\n

<\/a>Seerat Sohi covers the NBA, WNBA, and women\u2019s college basketball for The Ringer. Her former stomping grounds include Yahoo Sports, SB Nation, and basements all over Edmonton.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"WNBAWNBAForget the narratives and the nonsense. The WNBA\u2019s most polarizing player has become one of its most valuable.Getty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":886787,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434],"class_list":["post-886786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=886786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/886786\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/886787"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=886786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=886786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=886786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}