dpSAN FRANCISCO – With every stop, strip and steal, Gabby Williams has become the rarest of basketball archetypes. In a sport obsessed with scoring from the perimeter, her highlight reel, Williams’ claim to notoriety, lies almost entirely on her prowess as an elite defender, an impassable obstacle.
And make no mistake, Williams’ resume as a stopper remains peerless for the red-hot Valkyries.
The Valkyries’ huge offseason addition has been arguably the league’s top defender and is a lock to make her third All-Defense team as the leader of the WNBA’s No. 1 unit in points allowed and defensive rating.
The 5-foot-11 forward’s 1.7 steals per game severely understate her impact in the passing lanes, but barrels of ink have been spilled about her role as the fulcrum of coach Natalie Nakase’s offense-stifling machine.
Less has been made of her remarkable improvement as a shooter. After years of being a defensive specialist who dabbled in being a playmaker, rebounder and opportunistic scorer, the 29-year-old has emerged as a bonafide bucket-getter for a team with title aspirations in just its second season of existence.
She is averaging career highs in points (14.9) and 3-point percentage (34.7%). When queried about the reasons for her breakout, Williams kept it simple.
“Just confidence getting the ball out, and having the ball in my hands more, and our spacing has also helped a lot,” Williams said on Wednesday morning.
Her usage is 29.3% in the 25 minutes per game she plays – that somewhat limited playing time suppresses her raw stats – the kind of responsibility reserved for only the superstars. In most cases, if a jack-of-all-trades standout was asked to take on a heavier scoring load, efficiency would drop as defenses begin to tilt her way.
Williams has done the opposite.
She has taken a career-high 31% of her shots between 3-10 feet, and yet has also connected on 50.4% of those attempts, compared to 37.7% in her previous four seasons in Seattle. Ditto for the short midrange of 10-16 feet: 39.2% accuracy rate this season compared to 35.4% in the Pacific Northwest.
After spending last season deferring to stars such as Nneka Ogwumike, Skylar Diggins and Jewell Loyd, it is now Williams who has the ball in her hands facing a set defense with the clock running down.
It is a role Nakase is confident Williams is built for.
“She’s developing into our closer and she wants to close,” Nakase said after Williams scored 13 fourth quarter points against Atlanta in June. “I’m very proud. I’m proud of Gabby because she’s building a different level of confidence that I’ve never seen before.”
Williams made sure to credit the Valkyries’ obsessive commitment to spacing on Wednesday. The team fires up a WNBA-most 30.7 3-point field goal attempts per game, giving her business class-level spacing on her drives.
With all of that room, Williams has morphed into the exact player the Valkyries offense needs: an engine.
Golden State does not need a ball-dominant star to run a heliocentric attack. But it does need someone who can give the defensively-minded Valkyries enough of a spark to keep the offense humming.
Gabby Williams has done more than enough to prove that while she is known as a stopper, she can score with the best of them too.
