Portland made 5 more threes and led most of the night — then lost by 3 at the free-throw line

Two teams that played their first WNBA game this season met Friday night at Rogers Arena in Vancouver, and the one that shot better from three lost. We read the full box score — every field goal, every free throw, every lead change. The Portland Fire made 11 three-pointers to the Toronto Tempo's 6, took more shots (70 to 59), and led for 61% of the game, by as many as 13 points. Toronto won 82-79. The game divides into three clean columns. Portland won the three-point column by 15 points — 11 makes to 6. Toronto won the two-point column by 6 (19 makes to 16) and the free-throw column by 12 (26 to 14). Six plus twelve minus fifteen is three — the final margin. The free-throw column is the story. Toronto attempted 33 free throws to Portland's 17 — nearly twice as many — and made 26 to Portland's 14. Isabelle Harrison, Toronto's leading scorer with 25 points, did not make a three-pointer: she went 0 for 3 from the arc and 9 for 10 at the line. Toronto's top two scorers, Harrison and Kiki Rice (19 points), combined for 44 points and one three-pointer between them. Portland's offense pointed the other way — Bridget Carleton alone made five threes and scored 18. After Portland took a 76-75 lead on a 13-0 run with 3:28 to play, Toronto retook the lead on the last two field goals of the game — a Harrison layup for 77-76, then a Rice layup for 79-76 — and closed it out at the line, where Harrison sealed it with two free throws. The win snapped a 12-game Toronto losing streak that ran from July 14 through August 19.

The following is analysis, not fact. A highlight package sorts a basketball game by the threes, and Portland's 11 makes would headline any recap ^mmodeled. The whole-record read sorts it by where the points came from, and Portland's advantage was entirely from distance — it won the three-point column by 15 and lost everywhere else. Both teams shot between 39% and 42% from the field and pulled 34 and 27 rebounds; Toronto took the two-point column by six and the free-throw column by twelve, and those 18 points inside the arc and at the line covered Portland's 15 from beyond it. The free-throw line, worth 12 of those points, was the largest column Toronto won. Getting to the stripe 33 times in a game is a style, not an accident — attacking the rim and drawing contact rather than settling for the perimeter shot ^mmodeled. Portland took 31 three-pointers and 17 free throws; Toronto took 22 threes and 33 free throws. On a night the ball wouldn't fall for either team from distance, Portland's offense went cold down the stretch — no field goal after it took the lead — while Toronto, the team that had spent the evening getting to the line, kept scoring, first on two layups and then from the stripe ^mmodeled. That Toronto did it short-handed — the Associated Press reported it lost two more players to injury during the game, on top of three already out — only sharpens the point about where its offense lived ^mmodeled.

One game is one game, and a 16-attempt free-throw gap can turn on a handful of whistles as easily as on a settled style — the same two teams could reverse it a night later ^mmodeled. Free-throw rate is also partly downstream of the score: a team protecting a late lead gets fouled on purpose, which inflates attempts without describing how the game was played ^mmodeled. Here that cuts the other way — Portland, not Toronto, led for most of the night and made its own late run — but the caution stands, and the sample is a single 40-minute game between two teams weeks old as franchises ^mmodeled. What survives is arithmetic: Portland won the three-point column by 15, Toronto won the free-throw column by 12 and the two-point column by 6, and the game by 3.

On a highlight reel, this is a game Portland's shooters won — 11 threes, a 13-point first-quarter lead, the ball in front for three quarters. Read to the free-throw line, it's a game Toronto won at the one spot the highlights never show: 33 trips to the stripe, 26 makes, and a 12-game losing streak finally over.