NEW YORK — Breanna Stewart plans to play in Wednesday night’s Game 2 against the Phoenix Mercury at Barclays Center, “barring anything crazy.”
Stewart told reporters Wednesday that she sustained an MCL sprain in the Liberty’s Game 1 overtime win in this WNBA first-round playoff series. She said she wanted to give the knee a go at shootaround before making a decision on her Game 2 status.
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On Monday, she learned that her MRI results showed “no crazy injuries in there.”
“I just want to make sure that I don’t wake up from my nap and feel like s—,” Stewart said hours before Wednesday’s Game 2.
The two-time WNBA MVP said she was “scared” when she first injured her knee, but, “I’m very happy to have gotten my MRI results back and know that it’s something that I can play through depending on how much pain I want to be in.”
When asked to describe her level of pain, Stewart said “I’m OK,” and scaled the pain to “a three.”
She doesn’t plan on being on a minutes restriction.
“No, I don’t know. No minutes restriction. I don’t like that,” the star said.
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“That’s a tough motherf—–,” teammate Natasha Cloud said of Stewart at shootaround.
After initially sustaining the injury in Game 1, Stewart attempted to stay in the game with three minutes left in overtime.
“When I when I first got up, I was like, ‘OK, I’m not feeling as bad as I thought I would be feeling,’ ” she said. She missed an and-1 free throw and exited the game a minute later with the Liberty leading by seven points.
“Anything laterally was not as enjoyable. And I felt like we were in a good spot where I told [head coach] Sandy [Brondello] like ‘I need to come out,’ ” she said.
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With Stewart playing through the sprain, the 6-4 forward is willing to deal with the risk of making the injury worse.
“I think the thing is with injuries, there’s probably always a chance, you know, so I’m like I’m willing to take that because I want to be out with my team. And they told me that, like structurally, everything looks OK. So my plan is to go.”
