Kevin Fahy told Breanna Stewart the New York Liberty had no reset timeout left in Game 2’s overtime finish — and the crew chief’s own pool report says Fahy confirmed to his partner, in front of Stewart, that they did.
Atlanta’s 101-98 overtime win put the Atlanta Dream up 2-0 in this WNBA semifinal, and the Dream’s ticket-demand spike after Game 2 says plenty about where fans think the series is headed. That’s not the problem the league needs to solve before Game 3. The problem is that nobody inside State Farm Arena agrees on the most basic fact of the final possession.
Stewart’s account of asking Kevin Fahy starts with a question and a trip to the scorer’s table, and ends with one word: no. She says Fahy checked with crew chief Fatou Cissoko-Stephens, who told him the Liberty had no reset timeout remaining, then relayed that answer back to her. “This is not blaming the refs, but when I ask both refs if we have a reset timeout and they tell us ‘no,’ and then we leave the game with a reset timeout, it’s pretty frustrating,” Stewart said afterward.
Two hours after the final buzzer, Cissoko-Stephens’ pool report landed, timestamped to a dead ball during Angel Reese’s free throws. It states that Fahy “confirmed with his partner between Reese’s penalty free throws that New York did indeed have a reset timeout remaining,” with Stewart standing behind him when he said it. What New York actually got back is a crew chief’s report that disagrees with itself.
The same document also claims there was no direct communication between the officials and the Liberty about the timeout, a line sitting a few sentences from the one describing exactly that communication. Both claims came from the same crew chief, in the same report, about the same dead ball. I read enough crime journalism on the side to know the move: when two sentences in one official document can’t both be true, somebody wrote the second one to cover for the first.
The Liberty had the reset timeout available and never used it. Stewart’s desperation three at the horn missed, and Atlanta walked out of State Farm Arena up 2-0 over a possession both sides describe differently. New York filed a formal complaint with the league office over the discrepancy. The same Liberty team that came in as an 8-seed and swept the top-seeded Lynx to get here is now down 2-0 to the Dream over a fact pattern their own crew chief can’t keep straight.
Here’s the pool report language Cissoko-Stephens released, now circulating in full:
https://twitter.com/AnnieCostabile/status/2108062871267786922
Read the two claims back to back. The one about no direct communication and the one about Fahy confirming the timeout in front of Stewart sit in the same short paragraph.
The WNBA can survive a blown call in a semifinal. It cannot survive its own report arguing with itself about whether the team that lost even had a timeout to use, and the league owes both sides an answer before Atlanta and New York tip off Game 3.
A league that can’t trust its own paperwork doesn’t get to trust its finish.
