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On 16 August, the Atlanta Dream faced the Indiana Fever in the WNBA’s showcase matchup, and Angel Reese had a chance to don the cape. Tied at 81, the Dream had possession with five seconds left in regulation when Rhyne Howard launched a deep three-pointer. Reese was perfectly positioned under the basket, snagging Howard’s air ball with an outstretched hand. But in the rush to win the game, Reese forced a shot off the backboard that caromed off the front rim – and Naz Hillmon’s putback fizzled as the buzzer sounded. After Indiana escaped with a 95-91 overtime victory, Reese beat herself up over the loss.

“I didn’t sleep,” she told reporters days later. “The competitor in me wanted to win that game so bad. I replayed that play so many times.” Reese vowed to shrug the game off and do better. Damned if she hasn’t proved herself to be a woman of her word.

The past week has been one for the books for the three-time All-Star forward affectionately known as Bayou Barbie. In the Dream’s next game at Las Vegas last Tuesday, she held her own against reigning MVP A’ja Wilson, knocking the defending champions down a peg in the playoff race. Two days later against Los Angeles, she scored 20 points on all nine of her shot attempts in her most efficient game as a pro. Last Saturday against Phoenix, she added a career-high 31 points and 14 rebounds for her 25th double-double of the season, extending the franchise record she set earlier in the month. Reese followed that up by grabbing 26 rebounds – in 40 minutes – when the Dream faced the Sparks again on Monday night, breaking the WNBA’s single-game and single-season records.

In a span of four games – all wins, all on the road, all strengthening Atlanta’s chances of locking up the second overall playoff seed behind white-hot Minnesota – Reese has shown herself to be every bit the franchise player the Dream hoped for when they traded for the third-year vet this spring. And yet somehow, when it comes to Reese’s reputation on and off the court, there remains this overwhelming reflex to assume the worst.

Today’s athletes are quick to call out their “haters” as a source of motivation, distilling the critical noise around them into a broad composite. Reese, however, can actually name screen names. They reliably surface under Dream and WNBA posts touting her on-court accomplishments and in her own social media posts celebrating Vogue covers, her custom Barbie doll and her interview with Michelle Obama. Piling on Reese has become a sport unto itself, underscored by the stockpile of user-generated clips dedicated to holding her lowlights up for ridicule and scorn. That’s in addition to the vitriol directed at Reese simply for daring to be a Black female professional athlete in the digital age.

These online trolls roast every flubbed layup, every airball, every mental lapse. Most damningly, the internet mob accuses Reese of missing on purpose to pad her own rebounding stats, dismissing her hard-won putbacks as “mebounds”. Even allies like Shaquille O’Neal, a self-appointed father figure, did Reese no favors by suggesting, to her face, that she and her peers would draw more male fans if they lowered the rims and wore hot pants. The trolls were enough to deal with already without Reese’s supposed biggest protector setting screens for them.

The vitriol is a relatively recent development in a basketball story that once hewed exclusively to the painted lines. Before Reese was a hater’s delight, she was the Baltimore area’s teen phenom, the beanpole crashing the boards in her mother’s adult rec league, the high school sophomore pushing her team to a state championship. She was the Maryland transfer who led LSU to an NCAA title in 2023 after a procession of decorated recruits failed to get the job done. But of course the problem wasn’t that she won; it was whom she beat and how.

It was merely Reese’s bad luck that Iowa stood between LSU and the title, and that her testy exchanges with Caitlin Clark would become the spark for a race-based culture war that has only intensified since the two turned pro. The camera crew for this month’s Fever-Dream game couldn’t let the moment pass without searching for an updated version of Reese’s ring-finger staredown of Clark in the NCAA title game – if only to keep chasing the record-breaking viewership and attendance numbers their matchups routinely command.

The WNBA wasn’t the least bit inclined to turn down the temperature when Clark and Reese entered the league as the first and seventh picks in the 2024 draft, respectively. Instead, league promoters pushed their own racial binary, positioning the college rivals as the Bird and Magic for a new era of women’s pro ball. And while Reese has thrived as a basketball influencer for millions of Black women and girls, as likely to turn up at the Met Gala as on a cereal box (the Allure story on ring-gate leads with Reese’s “black micro-French” manicure), her traditional brand of athlete celebrity pales in comparison to the politically charged horde of casuals that has made Clark the most popular figure in the women’s game.

The stakes in this clash were made clear yet again this season when Toronto Tempo coach Sandy Brondello drew a one-game suspension for referring to Reese as a “protected species” – Aussie talk freighted with extra meaning in a country where Reese’s ancestors were regarded as subhuman. (Brondello apologized profusely for the gaffe.) The stark contrast in styles between Clark (the three-point chucker who dazzles the crowd) and Reese (the grinder whose dirty-work contributions are critical but far less conspicuous) only gives the keyboard mob more material to distort.

When Reese has pointed out, quite rightly, that she played as much a role in building Caitlin Clark lore as anyone, she has risked an avalanche of racist and sexist abuse from online commentators who can barely be bothered to learn the names of Clark’s teammates. “I’ve been attacked so many times, death threats, I’ve been sexualized,” Reese said after the Tigers fell to Clark’s Hawkeyes in the 2024 Elite Eight, bringing a fresh round of social media bile her way. “I’ve been so many things, and I’ve stood strong every single time.” That resilience is hard to miss when she’s diving for loose balls and scrapping for boards.

The longer Reese’s detractors dwell on her lowlights, the more they miss what’s happening in plain view: her continued transformation into an all-around force. Her summer move to Atlanta brought about more than a change in scenery. It’s yielded obvious strides in her game. In addition to the rebounding records, Reese is setting personal highs in scoring (16.1 points per game) and total minutes played as her confidence handling the ball, shooting from outside and contesting shots grows. And while Reese still has a way to go before rounding into a rangy frontcourt threat who draws defenders farther from the basket, she has shown herself more than capable of carrying the Dream’s championship hopes on her back.

And if the haters are going to keep hating, Reese may as well start beating them to the punch. Last fall, in response to online trolls, she filed a trademark for “mebounds” to make it a slogan for a one-off line of shirts and hats (with the proceeds going toward cyberbullying prevention). If her online trolls insist on spinning everything she does into a spectacle, Reese figures: why try to win hearts and minds when you just can sell tickets? “Whoever came up with the mebounds thing, y’all ate because mebounds, rebounds, crebounds – anything that comes off that board, it’s mine,” she said in a viral post. “And a brand? That’s six figures right there. The trolling? I love when y’all do it because the ideas be good.”