Angel Reese proves why she’s the Dream’s ultimate giver in confidence, energy and buckets

SAN FRANCISCO — What Angel Reese wants, she usually gets. She wills the world she wants into existence because she seems genuinely unaware that any other outcome is possible. It's either a tremendous superpower or a kind of nefarious spell conjured by the villain in the story, depending on your view of her — which, by the way, she could not care less about.

How strange that the Atlanta Dream forgot about this to start the WNBA Finals. How predictable that Reese would have enough of that at some point. Because here she was Monday, backpedaling in the third quarter of Game 2, waving her arms, begging her coaches to get her the ball if her teammates couldn't or wouldn't. The best player on the floor for the Dream somehow slipped everyone's minds — again.

"I'm not going to tell you exactly what I said," Reese noted after a 79-65 win over the Golden State Valkyries that rewrote records and reset this championship round at one game apiece. But then again, she didn't have to. Everyone on her side got the idea. Everyone in the building got the idea. Everyone got an earful, then got an eyeful of maybe the strongest force of personality in the league.

When attempting to run through a wall, why not follow the person who refuses to believe it's there in the first place?

"Going in the locker room (before the game), the first person I made eye contact with was Angel," Dream coach Karl Smesko said. "And I'm like, 'Oh, I like this look.'"

The look is the point. The 30 points and the 16 rebounds are not beside the point, of course, not when Reese became the youngest of the six players ever to post those numbers in a WNBA playoff game. Nor is the franchise's first finals win, arriving a few months after she did . These are milestones.

But they stand upon an almost comically large mountain of belief.

When Angel Reese is on your side, she is the ultimate confidence-giver. She runs on belief and defiance and aggression, and she assumes her teammates take the same octane as she does. She pours it into their tanks, too. She brings everybody along on the ride.

So starting this series on the road, in the Ballhalla cauldron, was most people's idea of a problem for Atlanta. It might be Reese's idea of fresh air.

And the reason everyone wondered where she went in the second half of Game 1, taking just two shots from the floor, was due to the fact that she was everywhere in the first half. Nobody on the Dream approached the challenge of the Valkyries defense more insistently. Just a little more commitment to the bit, for a little longer, and the results might have been different.

Reese flogged herself in the hours after Saturday's series-opening loss — "I think I let the team down, and that was on me," she said. "I wasn't aggressive enough" — but the reality of her game at age 24 is that she can't create offense entirely by herself, at least not all the time. The right plan and regular passing of the ball are required. In Game 2, Smesko schemed Reese into the best possible spots to get her downhill, and her teammates played through her. When they didn't, they were notified that they should start doing so again, immediately.

"At one point, she was like, 'I need the ball! I need the ball!'" Dream point guard Jordin Canada said. "We gave her the ball. And she went to work."

Basically by herself, Reese upset the equilibrium of the series. She made 10 of her 16 shot attempts. The rest of the athletes who competed Monday went 32-of-107 from the field.

But you can also draw a line between her attitude and the discombobulation of the Valkyries. Reese talked about playing "hungry" and "pissed." Golden State talked about taking too many punches without punching back. It all meant the same thing, and it was effectively all about the same person.

"You can just see she wants it really bad," Canada said. "We feed off her energy. She set the tone, for sure. And it just trickled down through the whole team."

She would know. She would know how this works. Canada spent a portion of the postgame news conference discussing how bummed she was about herself, and in particular her shooting. A few minutes later, as the Dream contingent walked back to the locker room, Reese addressed Canada with a smile.

"You were good!" she told her point guard. "You did a lot of great things for us!"

Until a star delivers like this in a moment like this, the audience is free to question whether they can. Reese's answer in Game 2 is less a rejoinder than a threat. She can fill a box score, and while doing so, she can make her group believe like her. Whatever unease the Dream might've felt about their championship chops after Game 1 is gone. It's replaced by a sense that anything goes from here.

After Monday's win, every Atlanta player had long since disappeared into the visitors locker room when Reese headed up the ramp after postgame television interview duties. When she made that same walk after the series opener, she didn't feel like herself. She wanted to be sure she left the floor after Game 2 reassured of who she was.

And this was more like it. This looked like what she wants.