The moids may have convinced you that the only WNBA story worth paying attention to this week involved the Indiana Fever’s Sophie Cunningham, AKA MAGA Barbie, and the Phoenix Mercury’s DeWanna Bonner. Happily, there’s been a lot more going on: Last night the Portland Fire treated the rest of the league to a historic match that sent two teams into four overtimes, breaking the WNBA’s record for the longest game ever played.
Sure, the Fire ended up losing 124-123 to the Washington Mystics, the youngest team in the league. But they did so in style. Three players—Bridget Carleton, Pancake’s mom Megan Gustafson, and Emily Engstler—fouled out of the game. Carla “the ultimate competitor” Leite and Sarah Ashlee Barker each achieved career high points scoring 32 and 25 respectively.
Leite, who grabbed a rebound and hit a buzzer-beating three-point shot that tied the game at the end of the fourth, was also on the receiving end of high praise from Coach Alex Sarama.
“She played an incredible game. She’s the ultimate competitor… but her execution, the clutch, was incredible,” he told reporters after the game. “It just didn’t go our way with the last shot, but I was really happy with the shot we got coming out of that.”
The Fire are on a losing streak, but all’s not lost
It would be easy (and fair) to look at Sunday night’s matchup as just another disappointing loss for the Fire, who haven’t won a game since they hosted the Seattle Storm on June 17. It’s also okay to note that the Fire appears to have a hard time winning on the road, period. So far, they’ve only managed that feat twice (on May 23 against the Toronto Tempo, and May 25 against the New York Liberty). Their back-to-back losses against the Chicago Sky on June 24 and June 26 directly preceded the Mystics game.
But dwelling on these losses would ignore the fact that Sunday’s defeat was perhaps some of the most Fire-coded basketball the team has played to date—and in a complimentary way.
Only one other game in league history has seen so many overtimes, a July 2001 match between the Storm and, funnily enough, the Mystics. And Sunday’s game is now the longest in WNBA history, at three hours and thirty-five minutes, and was the first to go into at least triple overtimes since 2016, when the Mercury and Dallas Wings slogged it out.
For starters, the loss showed off some of the Fire’s strongest gifts: the team has a lot of resiliency and grit, and they refuse to consider any part of the game garbage time. They also know how to stick together, something occasionally uncommon in the league. “We just kept using the word be relentless, connectivity… stay within ourselves, because we are tired in that moment,” said Sarah Ashlee Barker, who earned a career-high 25 points.
“I mean, I’ve never played 45 minutes my entire life, and so in those moments, you’ve got to dig deep,” she continued. “But digging deep is [about] staying connected and telling each other, ‘Hey, we got each other’s backs.’”
The Mystics seemed like they had the game in the bag at the beginning, when they went on a ferocious 10-0 run out of the gate. But Carleton, as she is so often wont to do, summoned the kind of energy that’s required of a team’s leader and began dropping threes to get the Fire into the game.
Carleton’s energy was contagious, especially after she drew three free point attempts at the first quarter’s end and sank them, back to back. Suddenly, the Fire were up 31-28, and we had a ballgame. Portland ran the second quarter, which Carleton closed out with another three-pointer. That pattern persisted throughout the third and the fourth, with the teams eventually matching one another shot-for-shot.
It would have been easy for the Fire to give up after the Mystics’ Sonia Citron tied the game 77-77 with just over two minutes left. She had two free throws and made them both (Citron rarely, if ever, misses), and a lot of teams would have dropped their heads, kicked the ground, and written the game off. Instead, Gustafson dropped a three-pointer and took the lead back.
Citron got fouled again, made her free throws again, and the two teams were locked in a one-possession game. Then Leite, host of the Leite Night Show and overall belle of the ball night after night, grabbed a rebound and tossed it right back up into the sky, sinking a buzzer beater three-pointer that shocked even her—and pushed the teams into The Longest Night Of Their Lives.
One overtime turned into two, two overtimes turned into three, and three overtimes ended up being four. Each time, it seemed the Mystics would take the win, and each time the Fire found a way to fight back. Engstler, who leads the WNBA in blocks and added on three tonight, fouled out fairly early into the overtime process. She was joined by Gustafson, who had 20 points, and then Carleton, who exited during the fourth overtime with 16 points of her own.
The Fire were briefly granted a moment of respite after the Mystics’ Kiki Iriafen, who had a 27 point, 11 rebound double-double of her own, fouled out of the game during the fourth overtime. If there was a moment to capitalize, it was then—and they got painfully close to doing so.
In the end, the Fire’s fouling may have brought about their demise (they committed 39 fouls, which gave the Mystics 41 chances to score). But they learned something from the game, and, maybe most importantly, they gave fans something to watch—and that’s something that will keep the Fire in people’s mouths for weeks to come.