If you're not paying attention to Chelsea Gray, you should be.
Can she lead Las Vegas to their first title?
I’m going to step away from preseason football for a bit to address a medical issue that likely afflicts many of my readers. The technical term is Basketball Jones.
Cheech Marin and Thomas Chong identified the disease back in 1973, symptoms including not being able to sleep at night or finding someone to set a clean pick.
It doesn’t just torment players, it torments fans.
James Naismith invented basketball as an indoor winter sport designed to keep his Springfield Massachusetts International YMCA Training School students from going crazy in the brutal northeastern winters.
His invention has long since moved outdoors and become a year-round obsession. But the NBA hasn’t started preseason games yet, college teams are six weeks away from formal practices and watching the Jamal Crawford Pro-Am is a cry for help.
I have a cure and its name is the Women’s National Basketball League playoffs.
I know, I know. Women can’t dunk. Well, most of them anyway. I come not to convert but rather to inform. There’s a pretty compelling Duke-centric storyline going on right now and it’s not too late to jump on the Chelsea Gray bandwagon.
When Gray was healthy she may have been the best player of Joanne P. McCallie’s Duke tenure. She was a top-five recruit from Manteca, California who bet on herself and came across the continent to Duke for hoops and academics.
But she suffered season-ending knee injuries at the end of her junior (2013) and senior (2014) seasons. She missed Duke’s final 11 games in 2013 and the final 18 of her senior season. She still was named co-ACC Player of the Year—with Maryland’s Alyssa Thomas-— and second-team AP All-American in 2013. Despite all the missed games, Gray still scored 1,210 points at Duke and her 5.0 assists per game is a school best.
Gray also was a two-time Academic All-ACC selection.
Gray was drafted 11th in the 2014 WNBA draft by Connecticut but was traded to the Los Angeles Sparks in 2016. She helped them win the 2016 WNBA title, made three WNBA all-star games and was selected first-team All-WNBA 2019. Former Duke star Alana Beard was one of her mentors in L.A.
It’s a little over 300 miles from Manteca to Los Angeles. Not exactly next door but still close enough for friends and family to make the drive.
But Gray was a free agent after the 2020 season and she bet on herself again, signing with the Las Vegas Aces.
I had chance to talk to Gray about this decision last December.
“It was just a time and a place and a moment in my career when I needed a change. I didn’t want to go too far east and it just so happens that Vegas is right there. So, it ended up being a cool process for me to figure out what my next step was. It was hard leaving somewhere I had been so long, that I had gotten used to, relationships and friends and so forth.”
For the record, Las Vegas isn’t much further from her home than Los Angeles is.
Gray had an outstanding 2021 season for Vegas, making another all-star game. But that 2021 WNBA season was interrupted to allow its players to play in the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, moved back a year due to COVID.
Gray helped Team USA capture the gold medal, winning all six games. Gray was fourth on the team in points and assists.
“A great moment for me and the team,” she told me. “To be part of that legacy is amazing. It was a dream for me as a young kid.”
After her WNBA season ended she again went out of her comfort zone, taking a gig as an analyst covering women’s hoops for the ACC Network.
“It’s been good,” she said last December. “It’s a different experience for me. But I get a chance to talk about the game. I’ve always been interested in it. Wanting to expand and see if this is something I want to do.”
All of that is prelude to a remarkable 2022 season for Gray and the Aces. Las Vegas is led by former South Carolina star A’Ja Wilson, who finished second (to Seattle’s Breanna Stewart) in AP’s Player of the Year voting; the league’s award has not yet been announced. Kelsey Plum and Jackie Young provide the wing scoring.
But Gray is driving the car. Somehow she missed making the all-star game this season. But the Aces tied the Chicago Sky at 26-10 for the league’s best record and Gray was a major reason why. She averaged 13.7 points per game and finished fourth in the league in assists per game (6.1), third in steals per game (1.6) and sixth in foul shooting (91 percent).
And she did it all with a flair that has made her a social-media darling. Gray has always played with some moxie. But she’s taken it to a different level this season. Use your favorite search engine to look for “Chelsea Gray behind-the-back pass” and you’ll find some doozies, including one to Young on an in-bounds pass against Indiana that has been dubbed the assist of the year by pretty much anyone who has seen it.
There are entire highlight-reel sites devoted to Chelsea Gray’s passing.
“It’s like if [the passes] go through, they’re good,” she told Basketball News earlier this month. “If they didn’t, it would be so terrible. As my game has progressed and I got a little smarter about when to make certain passes, there was more of a balance.”
Pundits have started calling Gray “Point God,” or the more anodyne “Point Gawd.”
Vegas opened the playoffs against the Phoenix Mercury, the same team that knocked them out of the 2021 playoffs.
The Aces won both games, 79-63 and 117-80. Gray had 44 points and 12 assists in the two games. Vegas set a WNBA record with 23 made three-pointers in the second game and Gray had seven of them, missing only once. She did this after limping off the court after a game-one collision that had everyone holding their breath.
ESPNW ranks Gray has the third best player in the playoffs, behind Stewart and Wilson.
All three will be on action when Vegas and Seattle square off in one semifinal. Chicago and Connecticut is the other.
The semifinals are best of five.
Vegas won three of four against Seattle in the regular season, with Gray scoring a career-best 33 points in the regular-season finale, a 109-100 Las Vegas win.
Gray is likely to be matched up much of the time against Seattle’s legendary Sue Bird, who is retiring after 19 seasons in the WNBA. So the spotlight is going to be on Bird, which means the spotlight also is going to be on Gray.
The semifinals start Sunday on ESPN. All the cool people will be watching to see if Chelsea Gray can continue her rise to stardom and add some more hardware to an already impressive trophy case.
And maybe cure your case of Basketball Jones.