Indiana closed the WNBA's pre-freeze account the way it has closed most accounts lately, at speed. The Fever beat the Sky 113-90 at Wintrust Arena on Sunday night, headlining a four-game final slate before the league suspends play August 31 for the FIBA Women's World Cup and does not return until September 17. [1][3] Dallas thumped Seattle 92-70 earlier in the evening. Washington outlasted expansion Portland 105-100 in a thriller, and Las Vegas handled Toronto 88-78. [1] Then the league switched off the lights for seventeen days.

Twenty-four hours earlier, New York had held this same Indiana team off 109-102 at Barclays Center, as this paper filed Saturday night. The Fever's answer was to score thirteen more points against Chicago than they managed against the Liberty's entire defense. Short memory is usually an insult in professional sport; in August it is a job requirement. A roster that loses a white-knuckle game one night and wins a blowout the next carries something rosters cannot coach, which is the ability to file yesterday without grief.

The standings will now sit untouched through the group stage in Berlin, and everyone in the gym understands what that means. Seeding is frozen where it stands; the difference between fifth and seventh is the difference between a winnable first round and a date with Minnesota, and no amount of practice-court excellence will move it until mid-September. Players will scatter to national federations, spend their legs for country, and return as strangers in familiar jerseys. Saturday's loss and Sunday's rout both travel into the freeze exactly as they ended.

Then there was the circus, because there is always a circus when Enes Kanter Freedom buys a ticket. The former NBA center, courtside at Wintrust Arena, was ejected from Sunday's game after a confrontation with Sky guard Natasha Cloud, per the Associated Press account of an altercation that emptied the moment's meaning faster than any box score could fill it. [2] The basketball played on around him. The internet did not.

Here is the divergence worth marking before the freeze swallows everything. The league's preferred send-off narrative ran through competition: four finals, a statement win, a pause for the World Cup with the playoff race genuinely alive in half the buildings. Social feeds ran the other story, in which a celebrity stunt became the night's most-watched play and the Fever's statement win scrolled past underneath it. A reader who followed only the clips would believe Sunday belonged to a man who was not eligible to play in it. A reader who followed only the standings would miss how much of the league's cultural bandwidth now gets spent managing men who are not in the league.

Basketball resumes September 17 with seeding intact, bodies at the mercy of two weeks of international duty, and a playoff bracket nobody can touch until then. Indiana leaves for the break having split its weekend, looking every inch the contender nobody priced in April. Chicago leaves having been reminded, publicly and by thirteen points, that the gap between rebuilding and arriving remains wide. Everyone else leaves with ice packs and federation jerseys. The freeze decides nothing on paper and everything in October.

-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos