Angel Reese is always her own toughest critic.
The Dream star helped her team secure a pivotal late-season win over the defending champion Aces on Tuesday night, which took place days after she missed a game-winning layup in Atlanta’s overtime loss to Caitlin Clark and the Fever.
A smiling Clark, who finished with 26 points, led Indiana to the narrow 95-91 victory, leaving Reese in the wake of a bitter defeat to contemplate her costly miss. Following the Dream-Aces matchup, Reese opened up about her missed layup for the first time and shared her powerful mindset with reporters in light of her rather embarrassing snafu.
“I mean just for myself, it was very tough for me last game,” Reese said in Tuesday’s presser. “And it's about how you respond and it was important for me to respond back to help my team. I feel like I let my team down last game. So, just trying to pick up where I left off and knowing who they know who I am and how much I'm a competitor. So just coming out tonight and just doing whatever it takes to win was just my goal.
“... Like I said, last game was very tough for me. I didn't sleep. The competitor in me wanted to win that game so bad, I replayed that play so many times. But I'm like, ‘Why would I let that moment dictate everything else that I have going on that's positive?’”
"Last game was very tough for me. I didn't sleep...I replay that play so many times. And I'm like, why would I let that moment dictate everything else that I have going on that's positive?"
— Andrew Jerell Jones, Luke 1:37 (BlueSky too now) (@sluggahjells) August 19, 2026
Angel Reese on the win over the Aces from that tough Fever loss.https://t.co/JEkbhdEFif pic.twitter.com/aj9vixWnm3
Dream coach Karl Smesko, as well as the rest of the team, had Reese’s back immediately after her unfortunate miss, but that doesn’t mean Reese wasn’t hard on herself as any pro athlete would be.
In the final seconds of regulation with the game tied 81-81, Reese secured an offensive rebound under the basket and—while taking some marginal contact from Fever’s Aliyah Boston—attempted a putback that bounced off the backboard and off front iron. Reese also missed a wide-open layup early in the first quarter of the contest, and one can only imagine how heavy those mistakes weighed on her as the Fever ended up eking it out in overtime.
ANGEL REESE MISSES THE POTENTIAL GAME-WINNER
— Hoop Central (@TheHoopCentral) August 16, 2026
HEADED TO OVERTIME. 🍿🍿🍿 pic.twitter.com/2CqLMKPY5T
Reese, who finished with 15 points and 14 rebounds in that loss, received a firestorm of criticism on social media afterward. But Reese’s rhetorical question to herself perhaps put it best: Why should she let one moment define her?
Reese’s dominant WNBA season thus far has been a testament to her historic rebounding prowess. She’s not the tallest or the most athletic player on the court compared to her peers, and yet she’s well on her way to becoming one of the greatest rebounders the league has ever seen.
The former Sky star logged her 1,000th career rebound in 79 WNBA games, achieving the mark in 10 fewer games than Tina Charles. In her third campaign and first with the Dream, Reese is averaging a league-best 12.0 per game (she led the W in that stat in each of her first two years) and is on pace to break the WNBA’s single-season record, currently held by A’ja Wilson with 451 (Reese has 408 and nine games remaining in 2026).
She’s also been getting it done on defense for the title-contending Dream, whose defensive rating is 14.9 points better with her on the floor than off of it, according to SB Nation’s Noa Dalzell.
Rebounding records are easy work for Reese, clearly. Layups? Not so much, but she knows it and she has the rest of her career to improve her offensive game, no matter how loud the outside noise gets.
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