Erlana Larkins stood six feet and one inch tall, which is what the programs at Madison Square Garden and Bankers Life Fieldhouse said she stood, and she spent ten professional seasons playing the post against women who were three and four and sometimes six inches taller than that. She out-rebounded most of them. She got there first. She knew where the ball was coming off the rim before the shot left the shooter's hand.
She came to Indiana in the spring of 2012 as a free-agent signing out of a season overseas, after the New York Liberty had drafted her fourteenth overall in 2008 and then waived her two years later. She was twenty-five years old. The Fever needed a banger up front next to Tamika Catchings. Lin Dunn signed her on March 14. Seven months later the franchise won its first and only championship.
In Game 1 of the Finals against the Minnesota Lynx she grabbed fifteen rebounds, which at the time tied for the second-most ever in a WNBA Finals game. She did it the way she did everything else — without fanfare, without a step-back jumper, with her shoulders low and her hands ready. The Fever beat the Lynx three games to one. Catchings won Finals MVP. Larkins kept rebounding.
She stayed in Indiana for six seasons. Her best year came in 2014, when she averaged 9.7 points and 9.2 rebounds and shot fifty-nine percent from the floor, and she was the glue between Catchings and Briann January and Katie Douglas and the rotating cast of guards Dunn and then Stephanie White ran through the rotation. She was never an All-Star. She was never the headline. Championship rosters cannot be built without players like her.
She finished her WNBA career with the Minnesota Lynx in 2018, the franchise on the other side of the 2012 Finals, then went home to Florida. The numbers next to her name in the record books are modest. The ring is not. The Vault keeps her here, in the era she helped define, because the 2012 championship does not happen without her on the glass.