When we chat on Zoom after their final regular-season victory, Lexie Hull’s black eyes have mostly healed. “We’re almost there,” she says with a sunny smile that masks the fighter lurking behind it. “I keep telling people I looked worse than I felt.”
It looked pretty darn bad when Hull crashed headfirst into Seattle Storm’s Gabby Williams just one game after having taken an elbow to the face in a matchup against the Minnesota Lynx, but there was no option to take a beat and recover if she wanted to help the Fever clinch their spot in the playoffs—even if that meant adding a bloody lip to her collection a week later against the Chicago Sky (with no foul called for the accidental shot to the face).
“I have played through a lot worse than that, so I don’t think I would’ve taken the game off even if we had a fully healthy team,” Hull says. “I think I’d still want to be like, ‘Put me out there.’”
For a moment Hull’s face felt like a symbol of the Fever’s story this season: taking hit after hit with no reprieve, starting with legendary veteran DeWanna Bonner’s abrupt exit near the start of the season. In quick succession, the loss of Bonner was followed by a slew of season-ending injuries—first Clark, then Sydney Colson, Aari McDonald, Sophie Cunningham, and so on, until their roster was up to 16 players with all their emergency hardship contracts. Through all that adversity, the Fever managed to claw their way through the semifinals, pushing the Las Vegas Aces into overtime in game five, to the shock of the entire WNBA fandom.
Speaking to Hull about Bonner’s decision to leave the Fever, it seemed to me that there was still lingering hurt and confusion. “I was super, super, super excited because finally there’s a [player in my position] that I can look up to that has won in the league and has all these accomplishments and knows what it takes, and I can learn something from her,” Hull says of the two-time championship-winning vet. “And then she randomly leaves, and we’re all just kind of like, ‘What happened?’ We were never given an explanation.”
