Before a mid-May practice at the Mercury’s facility in Scottsdale, Ariz., Tina Charles worked through her offensive repertoire. Or, rather, she worked through what portion of it she could, in the space of a half hour. Charles possesses her sport’s thickest catalog of low-post maneuvers: pivots and reverse-pivots, shoulder-shimmy misdirects, up-and-unders and step-throughs and one-footed fadeaways, lately buttressed by a quickening handle and smooth three-point stroke. While Diana Taurasi and Skylar Diggins-Smith, two tentpoles of the Mercury team that made last year’s WNBA Finals, played a shooting game on the far court, Charles sweated on the near one, sidestepping into threes and spinning jump hooks from her fingertips. Snaps of wrist and snaps of net, again and again.
The idea, when Charles signed in February, was that her bucket-getting acumen would give last season’s runner-up a champion’s finish, and that the Mercury roster would give the 12th-year center, who led the league in scoring last season, the only line item her Hall of Fame résumé lacks. Vanessa Nygaard, Phoenix’s first-year coach, speaks of Charles as the rare frontcourt player—maybe the only one leaguewide—who could slot in comfortably alongside all the Mercury’s incumbent All-Stars, doing dirty work on the block on some possessions, dragging double teams away from Brittney Griner on others. With Griner’s wrongful detainment in Russia, though, the newcomer went from complement to stopgap. “She’s the most versatile back-to-the-basket post player we have in the game,” Nygaard says. “Seeing her play opposite BG obviously hasn’t happened so far,” she adds grimly, “but what a tremendous asset, to have Tina Charles to plug in when your center is in a Russian jail.”
Taurasi is terse on the subject, as on most things related to Griner’s detention. “That was the plan,” Taurasi says of the Charles-Griner combo. “The plan changed.”
