On Sunday, the Minnesota Lynx and New York Liberty will meet for only the second time this season in a rematch of the hotly contested 2024 WNBA Finals.
Minnesota’s following game won’t come for six more days (on Aug. 16), again against New York. The Lynx’s next contest after that? Three days later on Aug. 19, also against the Liberty. That’s three matchups in a row against the same team in what players consider the league’s best rivalry.
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“I think common sense would say that (the) 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,” Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeve said. “I’m not the person that does it — there are certainly other challenges — but I think it’s a big miss for sure.”
A big miss, and the latest scheduling oddity in the 2025 season. As the WNBA experiences a swell of interest and viewership, quirks in the schedule, such as non-staggered start times and random off days, have drawn scrutiny.
Although the WNBA has similar schedule constraints to other leagues, some league-specific issues come into play. The WNBA recently issued an explainer about the creation of the schedule, which is coordinated by the league office in conjunction with the 13 teams and their arenas.
But none of the conditions explains why the league couldn’t field its marquee matchup until July 30, more than two months into the regular season. (That matchup, an entertaining 100-93 Lynx victory, provided further evidence that this is an in-demand series.)
Even if a scheduling formula that spits out the optimal travel/rest schedule for every team left New York and Minnesota waiting more than 10 weeks to play each other, there should be some override. If the league can flex national television games to prioritize compelling matchups, this is a game that belonged earlier in the calendar.
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Instead, the league has three games of diminishing interest at a critical point in the regular season, with superstars from both teams (Napheesa Collier and Breanna Stewart) unavailable because of injuries. It’s a self-inflicted error. The WNBA wants attention; it needs to retain it with better logistics.
It should be noted that it is only true for the Lynx that they’re playing their rival in three straight games, as the Liberty squeeze in a back-to-back against Las Vegas and Los Angeles during Minnesota’s five days off.
The league has no restrictions on how many consecutive times teams can meet. The WNBA says it tries to avoid four games in succession.
It seems like three consecutive games should also be restricted. New York is currently playing three games against Dallas within 12 days, the only three times those teams play each other this season. Stewart’s knee injury means she won’t face the Wings this year even if she only misses a few weeks.
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Though the Liberty and Wings have three contests in 2025, other teams meet five times. Before the 2025 season, in what was then a 12-team league, teams played each other at least three times and four times within the same conference. Now that there are imbalanced conferences (six teams in the East compared to seven in the West), there are two pairs of East teams that play each other five times (Indiana/Chicago and Atlanta/Connecticut).
The process for scheduling is complicated and begins after the conclusion of the prior regular season; the 2025 schedule was released on Dec. 2, 2024. The gist of the process is that games dates are decided based on “arena availability, an effort to reduce back-to-back games for a team(s), scheduling for reasonable travel by teams, fan demand in attending games on weekends versus weeknights, particularly during the school year, (and) filling predetermined broadcast windows.”
This can lead to gaps in the calendar. More often than not, Mondays are off days. The WNBA tries to maximize weekend games for attendance, and that necessitates Monday as a travel day (particularly in the pre-charter flight era) or a rest day. The league’s research indicates that fans also don’t like Monday games.
As far as why a random other weekday doesn’t have games — like June 12, a Thursday, which also happened to be an off day during the NBA Finals, or next Thursday, Aug. 14 — that is an unplanned occurrence.
The WNBA also has multiple games that start at the same time on weeknights, but that isn’t governed by the league. Individual organizations decide what time they want their games to tip off; since five teams are on Eastern time and five on Pacific, they often overlap at 7 p.m. local time. If teams want their games to be staggered, the franchises themselves will have to concede on their optimal start time.
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The number of games in the regular season is collectively bargained, so the length of the schedule in 2026 could introduce new challenges. Whatever those new obstacles are, they shouldn’t get in the way of an early rematch of the 2025 WNBA Finals.
This article originally appeared in The Athletic.
Minnesota Lynx, New York Liberty, WNBA
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