MINNEAPOLIS (AP) — The bitter and crushing end to last season for the Minnesota Lynx clearly hasn’t sidetracked their progress, with a 22-5 record and a four-game lead atop the WNBA standings nearly two-thirds of the way through the schedule.
Finally, the opponent that delivered that distress in the decisive Game 5 of the WNBA Finals arrives. The New York Liberty visit Target Center on Wednesday night, and the Lynx have been wondering what took so long.
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“It should’ve been the first game of the season. That would’ve made the most sense,” Lynx star Napheesa Collier said. “But here we are. We can’t control that. We’re just getting ready to play.”
With the league’s new 44-game schedule this year, there’s less time to rest. This will be the Liberty’s fourth game in six days. But it’s time to gear up, because the two teams will meet four times in an 18-day span: in New York on Aug. 10 and 19, and in Minnesota again on Aug. 16.
“I think common sense would say that these two teams probably should’ve played earlier in the season, but the Rubik’s Cube that is our WNBA schedule I guess is not solvable,” Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve said. “I’m not the person who does it — there are certainly other challenges — but I think it’s a big miss for sure.”
Better later than never. The first WNBA Finals that went the distance in five years was a contest for the ages that resulted in record attendance figures and TV ratings, the first championship for the Liberty, and hard feelings for the Lynx — particularly around a disputed foul call on Collier late in regulation that allowed Breanna Stewart to tie the game with two free throws and set the stage for the overtime win. Reeve bluntly said the title was stolen from her team by the officials.
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“I definitely won’t forget it. But I don’t feel any resentment toward the Liberty team. It’s not their fault. I feel like we really left that in the past. It’s been so long at this point. It’s a new season. We’re a new team. They’re a new team. So just trying to focus more on this year,” Collier said.
So maybe put the revenge theme on the backburner.
“It doesn’t really feel like retribution for last year,” Collier said. “It just feels like we’re about to play a really good team.”
It’s a team that’s not quite right, though, in second place but just two games up on fifth-place Seattle.
The Liberty have endured a plethora of injuries during this defense of their first WNBA championship, with center Jonquel Jones returning last week from a month-long absence to a sprained ankle. Stewart was ruled out for the second straight game, after hurting her lower leg early in a loss to Los Angeles on Saturday. Stewart is on the current four-game road trip that started in defeat at Dallas on Monday, when the team held a nearly 40-minute meeting in the locker room afterward.
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The Liberty have also been missing Nyara Sabally, who was instrumental in the Game 5 win last year in the WNBA Finals, for the past two weeks for what the team has deemed rest.
The Lynx are coming off their first regular-season home defeat this year — not counting the Commissioner’s Cup loss to Indiana — after dropping a 90-86 decision to Atlanta on Sunday that’s sure to have them roaring back under the demanding Reeve.
The Liberty might not yet be a true rival, but the latest move toward reaching that status came earlier this month when Emma Meesseman, the 2019 WNBA Finals MVP who last played in the league in 2022 and has been named EuroBasket MVP twice in the past three years, agreed to come to New York once her visa from Belgium is secured. She also considered Minnesota and Phoenix.
Asked after practice on Tuesday about Meesseman’s decision, Reeve offered a slight shrug and a smirk: “She made the wrong choice.”
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AP WNBA: https://apnews.com/hub/WNBA
