The ‘Point Gawd’ rises: How Chelsea Gray restores the Aces
Credit to Author: Katie Barnes| Date: Mon, 23 Sep 2024 07:44:30 EST
CHELSEA GRAY DRIBBLES across half court at Indiana’s Gainbridge Fieldhouse and angles toward Fever rookie Caitlin Clark. The Las Vegas Aces point guard prepares to spring her trap.
Gray fakes to her right and dribbles behind her back to her left, creating separation from Clark on the wing. Clark scrambles to recover, but Jackie Young sets a screen and then curls around A’ja Wilson toward the hoop.
Gray waits a beat, then another. Clark gets tangled with Wilson. Young streaks open. Gray pivots to her right and, with her back to the basket, delivers a behind-the-back, no-look bounce pass from logo to lane. Young finishes through contact and heads to the free throw line. Gray punches the air in celebration.
It’s midway through the third quarter of a September showdown between two of the WNBA’s hottest teams. It’s also quintessential Chelsea Gray — the kind of pass that years ago prompted Candace Parker to dub her “Point Gawd.”
But plays like this one from the six-time All-Star have been sparse this season.
Gray missed the first 12 games of the 2024 WNBA season with a foot injury suffered in the 2023 WNBA Finals. In her first 12 games back, her assists dwindled and her turnovers mounted. She averaged 7.3 points and shot 39% from the field.
Gray’s early-season struggles were so severe that some WNBA fans questioned her inclusion on the U.S. Olympic roster. Others, they argued, (namely Caitlin Clark) should have gone to Paris in Gray’s place.
“With all due respect, f— them,” Gray says. “My résumé and what I’ve done at this point speaks volumes, and what I bring to a team is why I was on the team.”
Since the arrival of September, Gray has more closely resembled that person on her résumé. She averaged 10.6 points and 5.6 assists in eight regular-season games in September. She scored 16 points and had seven assists Sunday night as fourth-seeded Las Vegas took a 1-0 lead in its best-of-three first-round series against fifth-seeded Seattle. And make no mistake. Gray’s reemergence is a necessity, not a luxury, for the two-time defending champion Aces, who lost more games in the first quarter of this season than they did in the entire 2023 season.
Gray knows it. Wilson knows it. Coach Becky Hammon knows it, too.
Gray is still trying to figure out how to consistently deliver it. But the answers may lie in the places that made her the Point Gawd to begin with: how she became a pass-first guard in Northern California, the painful lessons from the sideline at Duke, the know-how from legends in Los Angeles, and the love and support she’s found at home in Las Vegas. To return to form, Gray needs to find herself.
The Aces’ three-peat hopes depend on it.
“She’s a main ingredient to our recipe, to our cookbook,” Wilson says of Gray. “She’s probably the salt, something that you just need a little kick to it to change the whole meal.”
KELSEY PLUM IS doing all the talking as Gray leans against the elevator wall in a Cleveland Marriott during the women’s Final Four weekend in March 2024. A fan waits for an opening.
“You guys W players?” he interjects at last.
“Well I’m not,” Plum says. She points to Gray. “But she is.”
The fan nods. “Oh cool.”
“You ever hear of the Aces?” Plum asks with a smirk. “That’s their best player.”
Gray playfully glares at Plum, because, well A’ja Wilson exists. But it’s not as hard for Plum to build her case as you might think.
Start with Gray’s passing.
“I think she’s the greatest passer in the game right now, male or female,” says Joanne P. McCallie, who coached Gray at Duke from 2010-14. “She’ll find a way to get you the ball. And she’ll use spaces that people don’t see. Even at the highest level, where you have great defenders. Gosh, it’s really fun to watch.”
Vintage Gray sees things other players don’t — a cutting player, a gap, a teammate who looks covered but could be open with the right ball placement. She uses her body to manipulate defenses, emphasizing changes in speed and direction, shifting her eyes, and making subtle feints.
“She sees plays two, three steps ahead of everybody else,” says Hammon, who is sixth on the WNBA’s all-time assist list, two spots ahead of Gray. “It’s like a master chess player. You’re playing one move, she’s playing four or five moves ahead of you. The whole time, she’s setting you up to ultimately get to where she wants to get.”
And whether she lets fly behind her back or lobs a no-look pass to the block, Gray gets her teammates the ball.
“Great passers can find the open man,” Parker says of Gray. “Fantastic and above-average and generational passers can get somebody open.”
But she’s also a clutch scorer. When the game is on the line, Gray isn’t just an option, she can be the option. At 5-foot-11, Gray can post-up smaller guards and wreak havoc in help-side defense.
Rewind to 2017, Game 1 of the WNBA Finals. Gray was playing for Los Angeles, and the Sparks trailed Minnesota 84-83 with under 10 seconds left.
Gray caught the inbounds pass and dribbled left toward the elbow. She stepped to the side, creating just enough separation to allow her to shoot a high-arching shot over Maya Moore and Seimone Augustus. The ball swished through the net with two seconds left, ultimately delivering a win for the Sparks.
With a minute to go in the WNBA semifinals in 2022 and the game against Seattle tied at 87, Gray dribbled toward the top of the key with her back to the basket. After waiting for a ball screen, she squared up and swished a 3-pointer. The next time down the floor, she hit a midrange pull-up to send the Aces to the finals. She finished with 31 points, 10 assists and 6 rebounds.
Gray’s run of greatness continued in the finals, where she averaged 18.3 points and 6.0 assists in a 3-1 series win over Connecticut. She was the 2022 WNBA Finals MVP, an accomplishment that no other pure point guard has achieved. Courtney Vandersloot hasn’t done it. Sue Bird never did it. (Diana Taurasi did in 2009 and 2014, but she plays more of a hybrid guard position.)
“The impact she’s having on the position itself is what will be looked back on,” Bird says of Gray. “If you rewind 30 years, the way point guards were talked about was, ‘You run the team, you pass the ball, and you get people open.’ No one was really looking to the point guard spot to score. Now, it’s really the mark of a generation that you have scoring point guards. You’re always looking for mismatches, and sometimes the mismatch is at the point guard. With Chelsea, [the Aces] would pick on that mismatch. That brought another layer to this position.”
Gray was voted best point guard, best passer, best leader, as having the best basketball IQ, and the active player who would make the best coach in a survey of WNBA general managers before the 2024 season.
“She has got ‘it’ factor,” Hammon says of Gray. “She is just built that way. And you’re either built that way or you’re not, there’s no in-between.”
GRAY STILL HAS a photo from one of the first times she ever held a basketball. The picture is faded and worn from the passage of time, but in it, she’s holding a small orange ball while standing on a basketball court in California.
After school most days, Gray’s parents, who both worked nights, took her from Manteca to her aunt’s home in Oakland. Gray’s mom worked as a corrections officer and her dad worked for a graphic design company. Gray chased after her older brother, Javon, and two cousins, Steven Crawford and Sean Watkins, to parks for pickup games. “People always think I have three brothers ’cause that’s the way I grew up,” Gray says.
Gray’s first organized basketball experience was on an otherwise all-boys team at the local Boys & Girls Club.
Because of her size, Gray couldn’t help her team much with scoring. The same was true when she played against older kids in the neighborhood with her brother and cousins. But there were other ways she could contribute. She learned how to see through a sea of limbs longer than her own and look through the boys towering over her to find the smallest of gaps to squeeze through a pass. “I couldn’t really score because I was small and I was with guys,” Gray says. “I would try to find ways to pass the ball and to be creative.”
Word spread from parks to gyms to schools about her flashy passes and swagger. Tom Gonsalves, Gray’s high school coach at Saint Mary’s in Stockton, remembers walking into an AAU game where she was playing. She was in sixth grade. The first pass she threw when he got there was behind her back. “She was dynamic from the get-go,” Gonsalves says.
She was just 5-foot-6 as a freshman in high school and certainly not the fastest or most athletic. “I run different,” she says. There’s a lot of “different” about her.
Every Saturday at 6 a.m., Saint Mary’s had a team 3-point competition called “The Ladder.” Players shot 100 3-pointers from whatever spot they wanted. To climb the ladder, a player had to make more than the person ahead of them. If they lost, they went to the bottom.
Gray sat atop the ladder when she hurt her shoulder, and Gonsalves told her that if she sat out the day’s shooting, she’d go to the bottom rung. “She made 55 out of 100 with her left hand because she didn’t want to lose her spot on the ladder,” Gonsalves says.
The summer between her junior and senior years, Gray was playing in a tournament with club coach George Quintero. Gray was the last one out of the van, and Quintero turned to her before she left and asked, “Are you ranked nationally?”
“I am, Coach,” she replied. Gray was No. 18 in the country, and plenty of people ranked ahead of her were going to be in the gym that weekend. Quintero and Gray didn’t normally talk about rankings or accolades. But that weekend, he wanted her to own it.
“She became so focused on being the best she could be, but she didn’t talk about it,” Quintero says. “She never did. I’ve never heard Chelsea Gray brag about anything. I’ve never heard her boast.”
Not about her McDonald’s All American Game selection or her California Gatorade player of the year honor as a senior. Not about her state championship or her MVP award.
“I don’t think she’s ever gonna be satisfied that she wins a championship,” Quintero says. “Because I think in her heart she can win them all, but quietly, in her way.”
Only if she can stay on the court.
BEFORE KELSEY MITCHELL became teammates with Caitlin Clark in Indiana, before she was the No. 2 pick in the 2018 WNBA draft (behind A’ja Wilson), before she became the second-highest scorer in NCAA women’s basketball history at Ohio State, Mitchell was a hotshot prospect at Princeton High School in Cincinnati.
She revered a Duke player named Chelsea Gray.
Mitchell remembers going to a Xavier-Duke game during her junior year of high school. Gray had 22 points and 10 assists that day, but Mitchell demanded more of the Blue Devils’ junior star: her autograph.
“I felt like I’d never seen anybody better,” says Mitchell, who managed to get Gray’s signature. “She passes so well, but her anticipation and chemistry with her teammates allows her to make those passes.”
Indeed, Gray was well on her way to rewriting the women’s basketball record book at Duke. As a freshman, she went 5-for-5 from the field and 6-for-6 from the foul line in a Sweet 16 win over DePaul. As a sophomore, she was a USBWA All-American and one of four finalists for the Nancy Lieberman Award while averaging 12.5 points and 6.1 assists per game. She set the Blue Devils’ single-season assists record as a sophomore with 201.
“I get so much pleasure and fulfillment of making other people better and other people’s success,” Gray says.
As a junior, she set a school record with 15 assists against Clemson. She had a triple-double against Boston College. In the 25th game of the season, she dislocated her right kneecap and missed the rest of the season. As a senior, she fractured her right kneecap in the 17th game and missed the rest of the season. She feared her playing career was over.
Gray’s basketball IQ always impressed McCallie, and she felt Gray could be helpful another way.
“I moved a coach out and slid the bench down and put Chelsea on the front,” McCallie says.
Gray peppered McCallie with suggestions. They exchanged ideas. McCallie marveled at how good of a coach Gray already was.
“I just feel like it was incredibly enjoyable for me as a coach,” McCallie says. “And special. I never had that again.”
After the season, Gray was drafted 11th by the Connecticut Sun in 2014, but she missed the season rehabbing her right knee. She moved to Long Beach and ran camps alongside Quintero to make money. She hoped she could return to the court.
“I didn’t have a job,” Gray says. “I couldn’t go overseas yet. I didn’t have an office job waiting for me. That was one of the hardest periods of, ‘OK, you got to find a way to make money here. Are you going to continue? Are you going to figure out another job?’ I knew I had the potential to do really good in this game. But I just need to stay on the court.”
Gray debuted in the WNBA in 2015 and averaged 6.9 points and 2.7 assists in 16 minutes per game for the Sun. She was traded to the Sparks ahead of the 2016 season. And her dreams of making basketball her career moved back to her home state.
PARKER WALKED INTO the gym for one of her first Sparks workouts in 2016, and Gray came over to introduce herself. “I know who you are,” Parker told her.
“She was super quiet,” Parker says. “She kind of likes observing and figuring out the situation. I think she was a lot more reserved than she is now. When she was able to get comfortable, she was funny.”
Alana Beard had followed Gray’s career since she was in college. Beard graduated from Duke in 2004 and met Gray during the year she was in Los Angeles rehabbing.
“Obviously you knew that she was young and had a lot of growing to do,” says Beard, a four-time WNBA All-Star and two-time defensive player of the year. “But I never, ever questioned or doubted her ability to lead a team of vets, which she stepped right into. Because she was always open and willing to receive coaching and criticism.”
When they became teammates on the Sparks, Beard took Gray under her wing. Not that Gray gave her much choice.
“At some point Chelsea just started following me,” Beard says. “Everything I would eat, she would eat. Anytime we would be on the road or go out to dinner I would order salmon salad, fruit. She would order salmon salad, fruit. That just blossomed into becoming more of like a big sister/little sister relationship.”
The big sister/little sister relationship was something Gray also found with Parker. “I feel like I’m most proud, yes, at basketball and all that stuff,” Parker says. “But when she came in, she was drinking really bad wine. Now I’ve kind of got her to a place where she understands what’s a good bottle of wine.”
Gray listened to the lessons they shared — about adjusting to the flow of a game, to making the right reads, to getting into the rhythm of a playoff series — but didn’t really understand.
“And I would be like, ‘Yeah, yeah,'” Gray says. “Had no idea what the hell [Parker] was talkin’ about. But now I understand it.”
In 2016, Gray won her first WNBA championship alongside Parker, who was named MVP, and Beard. In five seasons with the Sparks, she averaged 12.8 points and 4.6 assists per game.
The relationships Gray formed with Parker and Beard served as the foundation for her own leadership moving forward, especially as she did so without them by her side.
In 2021, she signed with the Aces, a team that had three No. 1 draft picks on its roster. A team that had been swept in the WNBA Finals the year before. A team that had the pieces to develop a dynasty. A team that needed her championship experience.
ONLY THE PAIN overshadowed the dread Gray felt as she sat on the training table inside Barclays Center. Moments earlier, she was guarding New York’s Breanna Stewart in Game 3 of the 2023 WNBA Finals when their legs and feet got tangled.
“I heard a pop,” Gray says.
She tried to put weight on her left foot as she ran down the court. But it was no use. She hopped into the locker room and asked the staff to get her wife, Tipesa, down from the stands.
Tipesa arrived, and tears started pouring from Chelsea’s eyes. “Something isn’t right,” she said to her wife.
“It broke my heart to see her like that,” Tipesa says. “She knows her body really well, so when she says that something’s wrong, nine out of 10 times, something is really wrong.”
As her teammates filed into the locker room following the 87-73 loss, Chelsea continued to cry.
She wanted to play and be there for her teammates. Up 2-1 in the series, a championship was on the line.
“Even after the game I was just like, ‘I could do some type of tape job, shoot me up or something,’ and be like, ‘All right. I’m playing in [Game] 4,'” Gray says. “‘And if we have to, I’ll play in Game 5.'”
But doctors told her playing wasn’t an option, that she had fractured her foot. An emotional Gray went up to her room to process that she wouldn’t be on the floor.
At film the next day, Hammon reminded Gray that there were other ways she could help.
“When I came in, Becky was like ‘We lose your physical ability, but your mind is your strongest asset. So we’re gonna need you,'” Gray says.
That clicked. The 2022 WNBA Finals MVP could still make the sideline and baseline out-of-bounds playcalls. She could still call out reads. “I was just locked in on how I can help for Game 4,” Gray says.
With Gray out, Plum needed to facilitate more on the offensive end, while handling more defensive attention. She leaned on Gray’s support and counsel from the bench, and the Aces won 70-69 for their second straight title.
“She was being extra eyes out there for me,” Plum says. “She was super helpful.”
TIPESA WAS PREGNANT with their first child the night Chelsea injured her foot. She was in her third trimester when Chelsea had surgery in November. Chelsea came home with her foot in a boot and instructions to rest as much as possible.
Chelsea wanted to be able to hop right up and solve problems for Tipesa, to bring boxes of baby goodies up the stairs, to build nursery furniture, to stand on her feet and cook dinner.
“Mentally, at home was a little bit harder, feeling like I couldn’t help as much ’cause I had to be sitting down,” Chelsea says.
Sometimes Chelsea tried to push it, but Tipesa shut that down.
“I think it was more difficult for her than it was for me because she wanted to help so badly,” Tipesa says.
With Tipesa’ s pregnancy, the plan was always for Chelsea to stay near home and not play overseas. Instead, she got a job on the Sacramento Kings broadcast. Now, every time she went to Sacramento, Chelsea had to shlep the scooter. Trips to Target became a negotiation around Chelsea’s lack of mobility instead of an easy errand.
The last time Chelsea felt so stuck was 10 years ago. Tipesa was the director of operations for Long Beach State women’s basketball and Chelsea went to a practice because Chelsea had a friend on the team. Tipesa didn’t pay much attention to Chelsea right after practice, but when they all met up later that day, she noticed Chelsea. And was interested. “I slid into her DMs,” Tipesa says with a laugh.
Chelsea hadn’t shared with her family that she was attracted to women as well as men. Falling in love with Tipesa meant sharing that part of herself in a way she hadn’t before.
“I was keeping something in for so long,” Gray says. “I wasn’t upfront about it, and hid a lot of things, lied. It was all part of my journey. It’s just taking the process of understanding that I’m still me, I love who I love, and it shouldn’t matter who it is and what they look like. It’s just been a process of relearning Chelsea. I had to relearn Chelsea in a space of not being secretive.”
She wanted to be honest about who she was talking to on the phone; who she was thinking about; who she was leaning on as she rehabbed her knee.
“I was walking through life feeling a little heavy,” Gray says. “It was a relief, of being more free. We were able to enjoy each other a lot more. And I was excited to be around and be authentic, and share in that. It made things better when it could’ve been a little bit worse.”
Chelsea proposed on a yacht in front of their friends, including Beard and Parker. Tipesa and Gray married in 2019. In February of 2024, Tipesa gave birth to their son, Lennox. Parker is his godmother.
Chelsea didn’t cry when she held Lennox for the first time, but she looked at him in wonder. She couldn’t believe he was here. “He’s my guy,” Chelsea says. “I just love him all the time.”
GRAY RISES FROM the bench to cheers from the Aces’ home crowd. She wipes away a tear from her cheek as she waits at the scorer’s table. She had told Tipesa that she wasn’t going to cry, but she can’t keep the tears at bay.
This is the first time she’s worn her Aces jersey in 248 days. The crowd gives her a standing ovation as she checks into the June 19 game against the Seattle Storm. Tipesa and Lennox look on from the baseline.
“It was very emotional for me just because I had a front-row seat to the hard times, the good times, just the roller coaster that she has been on for the last few months,” Tipesa says. “I realized in that moment how much I, on my end, missed watching her play.”
Gray scored one point, dished seven assists and grabbed four rebounds in 15 minutes of the Aces’ win. It was the start of an up-and-down slog through the remainder of June and July.
Gray lacked full mobility, and she didn’t feel the explosion or power in her foot. “I didn’t have any,” she says. “Going side to side or in a pull-up, so my timing was off. I had to adjust my shot to feel like I could make it, and I was just trying to figure it out through these games.”
In the 12 games Gray played before the Olympic break, she averaged 7.3 points, 4.8 assists and 2.7 rebounds with a 2.0 assist-to-turnover ratio — well below her previous averages with the Aces.
“It was really difficult when she first came back in June because, obviously, you want it all back right away,” Tipesa says. “And it was taking time. On my end, I was trying to remind her, from the moment she stepped on the court in June for her first game to before the Olympic break, she had been playing a total of four weeks after not playing for seven months.”
Talent and time began to converge after she returned from Paris with gold.
GRAY SQUEEZES THE orange-and-white stripes of the WNBA game ball between her fingers as she stands on the sideline and peers through the waving arms of Chicago Sky center Kamilla Cardoso. Behind Gray, the crowd at Wintrust Arena stands on its feet and chants, “Defense, defense.”
The Aces are in a jam. Again. They have lost four of five coming into this Aug. 25 game in Chicago, and this one is tied with 1.1 seconds to go. Hammon has drawn up a play and entrusted her stars to execute it.
Gray raises the ball above her head with both hands and waits for gravity to bring Cardoso back to the court. Before Cardoso can jump again, Gray lobs the inbound pass toward the block on a trajectory that is just high enough to clear the outstretched fingertips of the 6-foot-7 Cardoso.
Wilson isn’t open. Not yet. Her back is to Gray as she waits for Plum to set a screen on her defender, Angel Reese. Gray’s pass enters the airspace above the court, and Wilson breaks toward the hoop.
Wilson doesn’t see Gray release the ball, but she sees its shadow crossing the court. On her fourth step she looks up and catches the ball in stride on the left side of the lane. The lob pass is just low enough that Reese has no time to recover. Wilson jump stops and lays it in with her left hand. The Aces win.
There was never a doubt for Gray that she would throw that pass. Make that assist. “I said, ‘I’m throwin’ that motherf—er to you,'” Gray says she told Wilson.
Until this season, Gray had never come back from injury midseason in her professional career. She’d certainly never done it while trying to be a good partner and a new mom. But like she did as a kid playing against taller boys, like she did from the bench at Duke, like she did living among legends in L.A., and like she did last year in the Aces’ final game, Gray has learned along the way.
“I learned how to balance all that and how to find my best way to be effective in all of those areas,” Gray says. “Being able to handle a lot of things is something that I was able to see that I can be successful doing.”
Counting that game in Chicago, Las Vegas won 10 of 12 to close the regular season. Gray has flashed glimpses of the Point Gawd. And now, after Sunday’s 78-67 victory, the Aces are a win away from a potential clash with the top-seeded New York Liberty in the semifinals.
“You want to be playing your best basketball in September and October,” Gray says. “Some of those hard times in those games where I got frustrated, I just trust the process and I know I put the work in.”
A three-peat is on the line. Now is the time when the Aces need Gray the most.
“When she’s out there,” Plum says, “you just know you have a chance to win.”