When we chat on Zoom after their final regular-season victory, Lexie Hull\u2019s black eyes have mostly healed. \u201cWe\u2019re almost there,\u201d she says with a sunny smile that masks the fighter lurking behind it. \u201cI keep telling people I looked worse than I felt.\u201d<\/p>\n
It looked pretty darn bad when Hull crashed headfirst into Seattle Storm\u2019s 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\u2014even 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).<\/p>\n
\u201cI have played through a lot worse than that, so I don\u2019t think I would\u2019ve taken the game off even if we had a fully healthy team,\u201d Hull says. \u201cI think I\u2019d still want to be like, \u2018Put me out there.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
For a moment Hull\u2019s face felt like a symbol of the Fever\u2019s story this season: taking hit after hit with no reprieve, starting with legendary veteran DeWanna Bonner\u2019s abrupt exit near the start of the season. In quick succession, the loss of Bonner was followed by a slew of season-ending injuries\u2014first 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.<\/p>\n
Speaking to Hull about Bonner\u2019s decision to leave the Fever, it seemed to me that there was still lingering hurt and confusion. \u201cI was super, super, super excited because finally there\u2019s 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,\u201d Hull says of the two-time championship-winning vet. \u201cAnd then she randomly leaves, and we\u2019re all just kind of like, \u2018What happened?\u2019 We were never given an explanation.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When we chat on Zoom after their final regular-season victory, Lexie Hull\u2019s black eyes have mostly healed. \u201cWe\u2019re…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":341899,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[62,67,132,68,232,166307,166308,166309],"class_list":{"0":"post-341898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-united-states","10":"tag-unitedstates","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-wnba","13":"tag-women-of-the-year","14":"tag-woty","15":"tag-woty-2025"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115460210919792800","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=341898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/341898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/341899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=341898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=341898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=341898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}