MINNEAPOLIS — Everyone remembers the shot, an iconic, buzzer-beating 3-pointer off the hands of New York guard Sabrina Ionescu that quieted Target Center in Game 3 of the 2024 WNBA Finals. It was a play that, in retrospect, the Liberty might not be champions without, Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve said on Wednesday.
The T-shirts some fans donned courtside told another story: that the officiating Reeve called out following the Game 5 loss in New York cost the Lynx a record fifth championship. “Everyone watched Minnesota get robbed,” and “You had to cheat us to beat us,” spotted the crowd alongside signs of “pay the players.”
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In broader terms, Lynx assistant Eric Thibault, then head coach of the Washington Mystics, remembers the tightly contested nature of the instant classic series. How enormous every play felt in the moment.
“I think we’re going to get a taste of that tonight,” Thibault said on Wednesday morning.
Not quite.
The first Finals rematch of 2024 collapsed under its own weight and that of the extended season’s unrelenting grind, as the Lynx secured a 100-93 win over the Liberty on Wednesday night. Buried past the halfway mark of the season, the matchup barely felt the part, even if the crowd’s energy did.
“It’s been so long, it doesn’t feel like a Finals rematch,” Lynx forward Napheesa Collier said. “Maybe if, like, the schedule is different, and we would have played them in the beginning of the year, it would have, but now it just feels like two really good teams going against each other.”
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The action on the court was, for the most part at least, how Thibault envisioned. The sides went shot-for-shot in a tightly contested first half, trading crowd-charging blocks for silencing corner 3s. A player’s bellow for a forced timeout off the full-court press here, a matching one for an opposite-end baseline block there.
Yet, waiting this long left a riveting, Finals-level matchup at the mercy of the injury gods, and they haven’t been kind to the reigning champions. Health is shaping up to be their true hurdle in a rare repeat championship. The ailing Liberty trailed by as many as 15 points at the 3:04 mark before making it a game again late. It felt less than and, at times, forced.
Collier’s final-minute and-1, met by chants of “M-V-Phee,” sealed the win. The two teams will meet again in 11 days in Brooklyn, then twice more in the ensuing week.
“So stupid,” Lynx guard Kayla McBride said, nodding her head at the head-scratching scheduling in this regular-season series scheduled as if it were a playoff one plopped into regularly scheduled programming.
Napheesa Collier celebrates during the Lynx’s win over the Liberty. The two teams will meet three more times over the next few weeks. (Photo by Ellen Schmidt/Getty Images)
(Ellen Schmidt via Getty Images)
Still, the Lynx felt triumphant following the first home loss of their season earlier in the week. At 23-5, they hold front-runner status on home-court advantage throughout the playoffs.
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All things considered — and that includes a 40-minute team meeting in the aftermath of an “embarrassing” loss to Dallas on Monday — the second-place Liberty aren’t hanging their heads on their ninth loss of the year.
“If there’s ever a good loss, this is one of those losses that you can live with,” Ionescu said following her fourth 30-point game of the season.
Ionescu scored a game-high 31, carrying the offensive load again and spreading out the accolades for a short-handed squad whose depth still nearly upended their biggest competition.
“With a million reasons why we could have come in here and gone through the motions and made excuses for ourselves, we didn’t,” Ionescu said. “I’m proud of each and every player that was out there tonight playing as hard as they could, doing whatever they could to get back to playing Liberty basketball, and we did that tonight.”
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While other teams are tooling up for the playoffs, the Liberty are stacking injuries, crossing their fingers that their unlucky stretch will change before then. New York is one of the most injury-riddled teams this season, according to data by The Next contributor and physical therapist Lucas Seehafer. They have so many, Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello brought a piece of paper to her pregame press conference to cover it all.
“I’ve got to go down the list, oh my gosh, there’s too many,” Brondello said, interrupting her rundown of current ailments.
Only three players from the 2024 champions played in the rematch, and for the 16th time this season, they were without one of their big three in Ionescu, Breanna Stewart or Jonquel Jones. That 38 percent mark is fitting of one of their perimeter shooters, not a front office possessing a roster capable of more trophies. They almost were forced to go without offseason point guard acquisition Natasha Cloud, a game-time decision who battled through illness.
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Jones returned a week ago from an ankle injury, running the starters’ record up to 9-1. The loss is disingenuous; Stewart left in the opening minutes of last week’s loss to the Sparks. Brondello said the three-time WNBA champion is out indefinitely with a bone bruise in her right knee. There is no timetable for her return, and Brondello said they would bring her back when she’s ready. If that’s late in August, “great,” but “whether she gets back before the end of the season, I don’t know.”
Nyara Sabally (knee), the Finals Game 5 heroine, and Kennedy Burke (calf strain) are each expected to miss a couple of weeks. If Cloud couldn’t play, New York would have been left with eight players in uniform.
Reinforcements are on their way after center Emma Meesseman, a three-time EuroLeague MVP and the Mystics’ 2019 Finals MVP, landed in New York on Wednesday. Initially a coup in depth, the 6-foot-4 center is a vital replacement and game-changer in this regular-season series.
The Lynx know they saw a different version of the Liberty on Wednesday, will again in a couple weeks, and could see a third if a postseason clash does come to fruition. At the halfway point, there is nothing in terms of talent and performance to counter the belief these two will meet in another epic Finals, this time a best-of-seven.
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Health — not the Lynx — is the Liberty’s largest hurdle this season.
“All this adversity we go through now will help us as we move forward,” Brondello said. “Now it’s about just getting healthy. Can we get healthy and then we have the task of finding the chemistry with the full group? But that’s something obviously we all welcome.”
Marine Johannes scored 14 in her entrance to the starting lineup. Isabelle Harrison, who missed a couple of games with injuries, was one of those key pieces stepping up with 15 points in 17 minutes off the bench.
Harrison remembers watching the Finals and feeling New York’s hunger for redemption after losing the 2023 Finals, the “gut feeling of like, damn, we don’t want to lose it again,” she said.
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She sees it every night out of Minnesota, and knows the Lynx probably circled this first matchup. They won two of their record-tying four championships after losing the year prior, and two of those players (Lindsay Whelan and Rebekkah Bruson) are on the coaching staff with Reeve.
“But it’s the same for New York,” she said.
Health, ultimately, will be what makes or breaks them.
