Arike Ogunbowale is the most fun rookie in the WNBA right now

Photo by Cooper Neill/NBAE via Getty Images

The Notre Dame phenom has become the WNBA’s hottest rookie — and potential Rookie of the Year.

The thing is, it never looks like she’s open.

The moments when Dallas Wings star rookie Arike Ogunbowale chooses to pull up don’t make much sense — especially to those of us without ice water running through our veins — like when a veteran with six inches on her is reaching for a block, or when she’s a comfortable foot behind the three-point line, or when she’s dashing through three defenders to the basket.

They’re the kind of shots you’re not supposed to take — especially not in the WNBA. Fans and detractors alike will tell you the league is about “good team basketball,” a damned-with-faint-praise alternative to the NBA’s flash and theatrics.

But the thing is, those shots — those gutsy, ill-advised, insanely-fun-to-watch shots — won’t stop going in.

An hour before she became the only rookie in WNBA history to post multiple 35-point games, Ogunbowale was getting an IV to help recover from food poisoning caused by a bad Subway turkey sandwich. She started that game 0-for-5 — obviously, things turned around. “There’s not a shot I don’t like, honestly,” Ogunbowale said the next day.

“So,” she concluded matter-of-factly, “I’m gonna shoot it.”

Her resume for Rookie of the Year is a double-edged sword. Since the All-Star Break, Ogunbowale leads all players in scoring with 24.6 points a game on 44 percent shooting. The point guard, who is playing that position for the first time in her career as a WNBA starter, is averaging four assists a game in the second half of the season — mostly via quietly absurd one-handed passes. She became the first rookie with seven consecutive 20-point games, and then she became the first rookie with three consecutive 30-point games. Both streaks are active.

The catch, according to her detractors, is the boring stuff: efficiency and consistency. They point to games like one versus the New York Liberty in late June, where Ogunbowale shot 2 for 23.

“I played decent before the All-Star break, but it was up and down some days,” she says. Her remarkable confidence — the swagger that fueled two of the most memorable buzzer beaters in NCAA tournament history, that keep-shooting-no-matter-what attitude — was tested. Wings coach Brian Agler even had her come off the bench despite the team’s dearth of options at PG. (Skylar Diggins-Smith is out this season on maternity leave.)

“Having to be a starting point guard in the WNBA and still having to score as well — it was definitely a lot, and it took some time for me to get used to,” she says. “I was really learning on the fly.”

In spite of all the changes, Ogunbowale insists she stuck to the script. “I came in with the mindset that they drafted me knowing what I’ve done in college,” she says. “Whether I went 12th or first I was going to go out there, play my game and try not to do anything that I’m not used to.”

She adds the understatement of the season: “I guess it worked out in my favor.”

There were still flashes of the college Arike in the early part of the season. She never stopped loving the end of the shot clock or an implausible game-winner. When I note just how deep Ogunbowale was when she hit the go-ahead three to get her scrappy Wings a win over the then-no. 1 Connecticut Sun, she’s characteristically casual and confident:

“Yeah, I know right?”

But even as fans saw hints of just how high her ceiling might be, Ogunbowale still wasn’t performing to her own standard. So over the All-Star break she sat and watched film, trying to untangle some of the subtle maneuvers and schemes veteran players were using to shut her down. “Obviously it’s not like college, where the age gap [between players] is like five years at most,” Ogunbowale says. “Here, people can be 10-plus years older than you — they’ve been around for a while; they know the tricks. For me it was more mental, just learning how to play against these players that really know the ins and outs of this game.”

Ogunbowale credits that film study with helping her read opposing defenses better and see the increasingly inevitable double-teams coming throughout the second half of the season. So even when it looks like she’s out of options, she’ll always have another move up her shooter sleeve.

She also knows that it might not be enough, that her main competition for Rookie of the Year, the Lynx’s Napheesa Collier, has all the assets critics say she lacks. Collier has been a starter all season long on a playoff team and was a replacement All-Star. Her stat sheets are balanced; advanced metrics paint her as a more efficient player.

“I see that argument,” Ogunbowale says of her rival (the pair have been facing off since college), “but honestly like, we’re two different positions. She’s a floor player, so the majority of her shots are literally in the paint. Especially as a point guard, when there’s one second left on the shot clock, I’m the one who has to put the ball up — while still getting double-teamed. I don’t have a Sylvia Fowles or Odyssey Sims, who have been in the game for a while and are just scorers in general. It’s definitely different.”

And most important, she says, is not what analysts say but what her coach and teammates say. “[Agler] has helped me a lot, because he has all the confidence in the world in me,” she says. “I’ve been able to play how I’ve always played, and not a lot of rookies can say that they’ve been able to do that and still have success.

“Basically, I have the green light, because that’s what they need me to do. Whether it works out in my favor or not, my job is to shoot and to score.”