Alyssa Thomas only knows one way to hit a dagger

Daggers don't really belong on a spectrum. Their outcome—finality, punctuation, extinguished hope—is so much more important to them than their means that it's kind of silly to compare them. Still, there was something particularly vicious about the final shot Alyssa Thomas fired in Game 1 of the Sun-Lynx semifinals on Sunday. It was the daggeriest dagger you will ever see.

Sure, the Aces-Liberty series can give fans more star power on the court and even off the court (in the first game of this series, Spike Lee yapped at Kelsey Plum on the sidelines). But for those who are fixated on the action and only interested in pure fun, there is this series. The requisite drama in Sun-Lynx occurs between the lines.

In their regular season series Minnesota and Connecticut's styles tended to produce the best fights. (The Sun won two of three close games.) Both teams play active, transition-oriented defenses. Anyone trying to plan the series in advance has probably, and rightly, imagined that it would be tiring to watch. The Lynx spent parts of the game enduring a rare offensive slump. Kayla McBride, the league's most consistent three-point shooter this year, finished the game with just one of five points from outside. Let's call it a bad night, which the Lynx won't worry too much about for the rest of the series, or give credit to the Suns defense, which remained disciplined enough to deny Minnesota the open play their offense has had all season created effortlessly.

The combination culminated in a nerve-wracking fourth quarter in which both teams tepidly traded goals until no one really scored at all in the final minutes. After Bridget Carleton hit a layup to bring Minnesota within one point of Connecticut, 69-68, with 3:50 to play, it would take another three minutes for the score to change. Thomas fought through Alanna Smith for a layup; An exceptionally pleasant Lynx ATO ended with Napheesa Collier galloping through a wide-open lane, making it a one-point game once again. But Thomas knew this shouldn't be a series defined by elegance. On the next possession, when the Lynx were all down, she did the crazy and amazing thing she can reliably do when you have a little bit of space up at the free throw line.

It's hard to put into words what I find so devastating about Thomas's dagger – perhaps, in retrospect, it's the sheer obviousness of it. When people say a game “could only end this way,” they often do so in a figurative or poetic sense. I think the saying applies figuratively, but in the case of Thomas, who (say it with me) plays with torn labrums in both shoulders, the phrase is also a literal one. The world's ugliest one-handed mid-range shot is basically the only kind she can physically endure. For all its aesthetic flaws, there's no shot that will make any Sun fan feel better in clutch time.

Her performance wasn't quite as impressive as Marina Mabrey's 20-point night, but Thomas has always been one of those players whose boxscore brilliance is only recognized in hindsight. She finished the game just short of a triple-double with 17 points, 10 rebounds and nine assists. The hype surrounding the end-of-season awards may incorrectly suggest that the 32-year-old had a disappointing season last year when she finished second in MVP voting. (This year, with her fellow power forwards having career seasons and a shiny new phenom in Indianapolis, she could be left out of some first-team All-WNBA ballots.) But the story of Alyssa Thomas never changes. She doesn't care about the how, just the number.