Why Seattle's playoff hopes could rest on Dominique Malonga - ESPN

DOMINIQUE MALONGA SETTLES her 6-foot-6 frame into a chair in a Brooklyn hotel on a hot July 4 evening. The Seattle Storm rookie is fresh off a practice at Barclays Center after arriving in New York from Atlanta that afternoon.

It's a moment of calm. The 19-year-old, who played four seasons of professional basketball in Europe, became the youngest player ever drafted by the Storm when they chose her with the No. 2 pick in April. Her height and agility drew comparisons to French countryman Victor Wembanyama. She moved 5,000 miles from Nanterre to Seattle in May. She dunked in her first practice. Praise poured in.

«She's a unicorn. One of one,» Storm coach Noelle Quinn said. «She's going to be a star,» teammate Gabby Williams said. There was consensus among the Storm: Just you wait.

But Dominique Malonga was sent to the bench. And mostly stayed there. Through her first 18 games, she averaged 4.4 points and 2.3 rebounds in 9.1 minutes. The night before, she went scoreless against the Dream as Nneka Ogwumike and Ezi Magbegor hoarded the minutes in the paint.

«It's frustrating, for sure,» Malonga tells me.

Emotion acknowledged, she moves on. She refuses to linger in the gloom. «Never have this negative faith or negative mood that can affect the team or the bench,» she says. «That's not what I want to bring.»

She tells me how she claps from the sideline and zeroes in on Ogwumike and Magbegor. How can she do what they're doing better?

«I want to breathe that energy,» she says.

She yearns to turn the expectations into something concrete. She's watching film. She's learning the intricacies of American basketball. She's training harder than ever.

«I'm not a dreamer,» she says. «I'm a realist.»

As the WNBA season turned to its