Doyel: What more could Marissa Coleman have done?

More than 16,000 people at Bankers Life Fieldhouse, and Marissa Coleman had a better view than anyone. She didn’t just see it happen – she saw it happen to her. She was the Indiana Fever player trying to defend Minnesota’s Maya Moore with 1.7 seconds left and a tie score Friday night in Game 3 of the WNBA Finals.

She was the player who failed.

And Coleman, she wanted to see it again. Where she went wrong. Why? How? That’s what she was doing when I entered the Indiana locker room after its 80-77 loss in Game 3 that left the Fever on the brink of elimination. Ahead 2-1, the Lynx will try to finish off the best-of-five WNBA Finals on Sunday in Game 4.

The Fever locker room was empty except for a few team employees and seven players, all sitting quietly in front of their lockers. Six of them were facing the middle of the room, staring at each other, staring at nothing. Coleman was the seventh player. She was sitting in front of her locker, her back to the rest of the room. She was hunched over. I thought maybe she was sick.

Turns out, she was hunched over her cell.

What she saw, what the crowd of 16,332 saw, was the Lynx inbounding the ball with 1.7 seconds left. Moore was the intended recipient, and Coleman was all over her. Moore ran toward the ball, and Coleman followed. Moore ran away. Coleman followed. Moore was almost 40 feet away, across the court, when Lynx guard Lindsay Whalen floated a pass over Coleman and into Moore’s hands.

Now Moore had the ball and the clock was running and 1.7 seconds isn’t a lot of time.

“You’re not thinking about a pump fake with 1.7 seconds left,” Fever coach Stephanie White was saying in the media interview room.

In the Fever locker room, empty but for seven players, a few team employees and me, Coleman was watching as Moore caught the inbounds pass. Coleman closed out on Moore, closed hard, and rose to contest the shot.

Only, there was no shot. Moore never left her feet. Coleman did. Moore took one dribble to her right, and now she was alone. And now she was rising to shoot an uncontested jumper near the top of the key, well  beyond the 3-point arc,  about 25 feet from the basket.

The clock was running. Less than one second. Less than half a second. Ball still in Moore’s hands, Moore at the apex of her jump. Here comes the release. There goes the clock.

Red light flashes. Game over.

Ball descending. Ball in the basket. Game over.

Bankers Life Fieldhouse, so loud for most of the fourth quarter, was almost completely silent. In the front row under the opposite basket, Paul George and George Hill and C.J. Miles and a handful of other Pacers waited for the referees to huddle at the scorer’s table and discuss the shot. Colts linebacker Robert Mathis, sitting in the fourth row opposite the Fever bench, stood and watched as the referees studied the replay.

Behind the Minnesota bench, the 100 or so Lynx fans who made the trip to Indianapolis were cheering loudly, the only noise in the otherwise quiet building. They had just seen the slow-motion replay on the arena’s giant video board, the same replay being watched courtside by the referees, and it was clear: The ball left Moore’s right hand an instant before the clock hit all zeroes and the red light came on.

The original call was confirmed. Shot, good. Game, over.

Coleman watched it again on the tiny screen of her phone. And then she turned around and told me what had happened.

“She’s a great player,” Coleman said of Moore. “She made a great play.”

In the interview room, White was saying almost the same thing. What else is there to say? Moore was MVP of the WNBA last season, MVP of the All-Star Game this season and bidding to be MVP of the Finals. She averaged 20.6 points per game this season, second in the league, but has hit a new level in the playoffs at 26.4 ppg. Of course she took the shot. Of course she made it.

“Well,” White said, the first words out of her mouth in the interview room, “that was just a great player making a great play at the end of the game. … That was just a hell of a shot by Maya Moore.”

Moore finished with 24 points in 22 foul-plagued minutes. She scored 10 in the final quarter, briefly engaging Fever star Tamika Catchings in a scoring duel of future Hall of Famers – Catchings scored four consecutive points late in the quarter, with Moore matching her at the other end – and then kept going after Catchings cooled off.

And so when Fever guard Shenise Johnson missed a 3-pointer with 4.9 seconds left and the Lynx rebounded and called timeout, there was no doubt on the Fever bench who would take the final shot.

“Not at all,” White said. “Not at all.”

In the quiet Fever locker room, I was asking Coleman what else she could have done. As White had said in the interview room, you don’t assume a player will risk a pump fake with 1.7 seconds left. Moore did and was rewarded, but by the slimmest of margins. What more can you do, I was asking Coleman, but contest the first appearance of a shot?

“I should have stayed down,” she said quietly. “That’s what I should have done differently. I should have stayed down – but like I said, she’s a great player and she made a great play.”

On my way out of the room, I looked back at Coleman. She had spun back toward her locker. She was hunched over her phone, watching it one more time.

Find Star columnist Gregg Doyel on Twitter: @GreggDoyelStar and atwww.facebook.com/gregg.doyel.