Tamika Catchings powers Indiana Fever into third WNBA Finals in seven years

The New York Liberty and Indiana Fever completed their three-game Eastern Conference final Tuesday night, with each side winning, convincingly, six of the 12 quarters played.

But it was the Fever who captured the final six, following up Sunday’s shocking comeback from 18 down with a 66-51 victory that catapulted Tamika Catchings into yet another WNBA Finals.

“Honestly, there comes a time in the game where the best player on the team has to step up,” Catchings said, drenched in sweat, wearing her gray “Indiana Fever Eastern Conference Champions” t-shirt over her uniform. “Throughout the game, when other players are doing their thing, you let them do their thing. Because you believe your teammates are capable of making plays. ... We were running, we were clicking. And then you get to a point, maybe three or four possessions, where we didn’t get anything. Balls in my hand. My choice is pass the ball, or make a play happen. My choice was to make a play happen.”

It is Catchings’ acute sense of timing that has elevated her to the very highest heights in virtually every statistical category you can imagine. Catchings, at 6ft tall, is among the best rebounders in league history, to complement her ability to score, pass, block shots and most of all, deflect opposing passes.

And Tuesday night, in what might be her final playoff game at Madison Square Garden – with 10,120 fans filling the lower bowl completely and hoping the Liberty who rolled to the best record in the regular season would return in time to win the decisive game – the 36-year-old decided at each inflection point in the game to grab hold of it herself.

With 6:17 to go in the second quarter, Catchings picked up her second foul. Many players, particularly the leading scorer on a team, would go to the bench for protection at that point. Catchings, instead, anticipated the Candace Wiggins drive, taking a charge that fired up an Indiana team ahead, 19-18. What followed was an extended Fever run, keyed by forced turnovers, a second Catchings charge take, and five points from Catchings herself to extend the Fever lead to 33-22 by halftime.

“On defense, I know I can make a difference,” Catchings said of her decision to take a charge. She didn’t commit her third foul until well into the fouth quarter, and was never whistled for a fourth. “Sometimes my shots are falling, sometimes they aren’t, but I always know I can make a difference on defense, whether it’s taking charges, or putting my hands up against Tina Charles.”

As for her coach, the question came down less to whether Catchings would be a difference-maker, and more about exactly how she’d do so.

“We’re going to have Tamika involved, one reason or another,” Fever coach Stephanie White said following the game. “Whether it’s initiating offense, whether it’s for spacing reasons, whether we’re using her as a facilitator, we were just trying to get mismatches.”

What makes Tamika Catchings so tough is that virtually every situation she encounters turns into a mismatch. Her ability to read offensive sets of her opponents allowed her to place herself squarely in the path of the play—so many of her steals at this point come not from quickness, but from larger-scale anticipation.

And so it was that when the Liberty made their inevitable run, cutting a lead that had ballooned to 18 down to jusy 49-45 with 8:21 to go, Catchings decided to take control of the game.

Without hesitation, Catchings drove to the basket and drew a foul on Tina Charles, then calmly sank a pair of free throws. Defensively at the other end, an unexpected leap at Charles as she passed led to a turnover. Another possession, Catchings managed to insinuate herself between 6ft 6in Carolyn Swords and the basket to start a Fever fast break with a defensive rebound, then got behind the Liberty defense on a pass from center Erlana Larkins for a backdoor layup. Finally, a screen from Catchings freed up point guard Briann January for a layup.

59-45. Timeout Liberty. Ballgame over, all thanks to the full array of Catchings skills.

Catchings was asked if that sequence was simply a set of executions, or if she’d made a decision that it was time to end the game.

“That was definitely conscious,” Catchings told the Guardian. “I knew I needed to make something happen. Whether it was for myself or my teammates. When I drove, they’d been having one, two, sometimes three people coming over, and I’d find my teammates on the perimeter. But tonight they didn’t come, so it was up to me to get to the basket, create that open shot. And same thing defensively, just in that moment, doing what I could.”

It is telling that Catchings is so matter-of-fact about deciding it is time to impose her will on both ends of the floor, an ability shared by a vanishingly small number of people in the history of the game. She is the emotional and playmaking engine that drives this Fever team, returning to the WNBA Finals for the third time since 2009, not once a favorite to get there. They’ll be the decided underdogs against Maya Moore and her team filled with US Olympians, six in all.

Then again, the Fever are back in the finals after defeating the league’s MVP, Elena Delle Donne, in a deciding game on the road, then beating the best defensive team in the league since 2007 a Tamika Catchings team was the last one with better defensive efficiency than the 2015 Liberty—in a deciding game on the road.

“The script wasn’t written for the Indiana Fever to get to the first round,” Catchings said. “The script wasn’t written for the Indiana Fever to get past the second round. The script definitely wasn’t written for the Indiana Fever to get past the finals,” and Catchings giggled, a superlative athlete who’s already accomplished everything enjoying the found money of her 2015 season. “That’s been the script, I feel like, honestly, my whole career.”

Catchings is now 8-2 in elimination games. It might make sense, when Tamika Catchings plays them, to refer to them as something else. And the only strange thing about the script is that people still expect it to turn out different. This is Tamika Catchings. It never does.