My favorite play of the night was definitely when Yo Griffith pulled down that one-handed and the ball went from Griffith-to-Lawson-to-Powell-to-layup in five seconds; the ball never touched the court.
Adrian Williams' play exacerbates something that has troubled me about the bench all year, and it relates in large part to why I'm so critical of Atkinson as well. With Walker out again, Brunson has stepped up admirably, as we all were hoping she would have done last year. But the problem isn't that we didn't have a player who could fill Walker's shoes, the problem is that we don't have a player that could fill Brunson's shoes: sure, Brunson has come in and given us what we were getting from Walker, but Williams has largely failed to replace what Brunson (and Walker, essentially) were giving us off the bench, namely reliability in our 4/5 rotation.
Having said that, I'm still personally willing to give Williams a little more of a pass than Atkinson. I mean, after all, Williams wasn't meant to be the first big off the bench; it's not her fault that Walker got injured again, and we weren't prepared. Williams was probably going to be a 10-12 minute a game player before Walker got injured. But, as near as I can tell, Atkinson was expected to be more than she has been. I can't imagine that Whisneant let Buescher and Maïga-Ba walk unless he thought that his swing position rotation of Powell, Newton, Robinson and Atkinson was going to be good enough; that tells me that he expected Atkinson to contribute... and, in my opinion, she hasn't done the job. Now, to be fair, I put that on Whisneant more than I do Atkinson, and I certainly haven't been quiet about my criticism of him in the last two years, but I find it astonishing that he let Buescher and Maïga-Ba go, and then looked at Robinson and Atkinson and thought, "Eh, that's good enough." I'm mostly bothered because the way the bench has been playing puts too much pressure on Lawson, in my opinion; there have been times when I've seen the reserves, led by Lawson, on the court and thought, "Lawson's the only player on the floor that's even remotely an offensive threat!" We've needed for the bench to be able to give Griffith and Penicheiro all the rest they need to be ready for the playoffs, and I'm not confident that they've done a good enough job at that.
