BROOKLYN, N.Y. — What a relief when it all ended: An ugly overtime. A straight-up bad Game 5. A gripping Finals series. The greatest, noisiest WNBA season in memory. And for the New York Liberty, winners of their first-ever championship on Sunday night, a decades-long tradition of heartbreak.
The best regular-season shooting teams went 5-of-42 from three. Stars on both sides played terribly. Sabrina Ionescu, an unthinkable 1-of-19 from the field, tied her own record for missed shots in a Finals game. “I have so much respect for that Minnesota Lynx team, because man, that was ugly,” Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello said of the 67-62 victory. Suddenly, commissioner Cathy Engelbert’s pre-series announcement of a best-of-seven Finals beginning next year sounded like a threat.
As hokey as the “women play a purer style” nonsense gets, a distinct strength of the WNBA’s product is the amount of energy its players can afford to expend on any given game. To preserve both the intensity of the regular season and the quality of the playoffs, the league should probably consider some adjustments as the schedule keeps growing. The Lynx, who had only one day between the end of their semifinal series against Connecticut and the start of the Finals, took a fast lead in Game 5, beating New York with Napheesa Collier’s pretty cuts to the basket. The Liberty struggled to meet Minnesota’s energy, or find any easy source of offense. Breanna Stewart appeared to have as much remaining knee tissue as some members of the Timeless Torches, the Liberty’s senior dance troupe. Minnesota’s only concern at halftime, up by seven, was whether they would run out of gas.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. Her season on the line, Brondello rolled out a ginormous lineup with zero minutes’ experience together. To begin the fourth quarter, she played Stewart, Jonquel Jones, Kayla Thornton, Nyara Sabally, and Leonie Fiebich, where the 6-foot-1 forward Thornton was the shortest player by three inches and Stewart effectively played point guard. It turned the Liberty’s size advantage from theoretical—Minnesota erased much of it this series with pure hustle on the boards—to something the Lynx couldn’t match.
Worn down by New York’s size and aggression, typified by the Finals MVP Jones, Minnesota began to unravel at the end of the third quarter. Ionescu’s only make of the night gave her team a four-point lead with 2:19 left in the fourth, but Collier and Kayla McBride wouldn’t let up, and the two of them scored the Lynx’s last 10 points of regulation. That last run might have taken everything they had: The Liberty pushed the game to overtime, where the Lynx shot 0-for-6 and turned the ball over five times.
In one of the league’s more memorable postgame press conferences, Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve insisted this game should never have gone to overtime. On the Liberty's last possession of regulation, down two, Stewart bobbled an inbounds pass, took an extra step on her drive to the basket, and then drew a shooting foul from an Alanna Smith contest that looked pretty clean on replay. The Lynx challenged the call, but it stood, and Stewart made a pair of game-tying free throws. (That itself was a small miracle, because she had just missed two on her last trip to the line.) Reeve criticized the league’s challenge system, which asks on-court officials to review their own calls instead of sending clips to an outside replay center like the NBA does. The game ended with a 25-to-8 free-throw disparity in favor of New York, and the third officiating-related postgame monologue of the series. “I know all the headlines will be ‘Reeve cries foul.’ Bring it on. Bring it on. Because this shit was stolen from us,” she said.
I understand Reeve's disappointment, and don’t mean to ignore the specificity of her complaints, but also can’t help feeling like a loss in this series would have been unsatisfying no matter who endured it. These bonkers Finals felt less won than survived.
The games themselves precluded much prewriting, but the lasting lessons of this series seemed obvious well before the buzzer. Versatile frontcourts still separate the contenders from the jokers in the WNBA. The four players at the top of MVP ballots in recent years speak to the now-obvious value of an elite two-way power forward. But the spacing, mobility, and playmaking chops of Smith and Jones at the five gave the Lynx and Liberty especially high ceilings. “We gave hope to those teams that aren't willing to circumvent the cap or fly illegally or all the stuff that's happened over the last five years,” Reeve said, referencing league investigations into the last two title-winners. (The Aces are under investigation for cap circumvention, and the Liberty were fined a league-record $500,000 for chartering flights to road games for players three years ago, when it was a violation of CBA rules.) “So to do it the right way gives hope for the other teams that you can build a team just like ours. You don't have to have a superteam. You don't have to have that.”
Reeve is partly right: The chance to acquire players of Stewart's and Jones's caliber in one offseason comes around too rarely to be called a model strategy. She deserves credit for signing Smith—hardly a household name, but an absolute warrior all series. Still, Reeve misses the ways the Lynx and Liberty have been built with similar tools. Both of them owe their Finals runs to years of smart decision-making. Talent matters; so does having a front office that doesn’t suck.
The Connecticut Sun cut Bridget Carleton four games into her 2019 rookie season. Weeks later, she got a call from Reeve. Carleton has gradually become one of Minnesota's most important players. A 44 percent three-point shooter this season, she made the go-ahead free throws that won the Lynx Game 4. After role player extraordinaire Leonie Fiebich hit the first bucket of overtime in Game 5, only the Liberty’s second three of the game, her coach could breathe easier. “I'm going to tell you this as a fact,” Brondello said wryly. “Whoever scores first in overtime usually wins. I was confident after that.” Fiebich, the 24-year-old German rookie, came to New York as a not-so-random trade throw-in. Though she was drafted by Los Angeles and then had her rights sent to Chicago, Fiebich said neither team kept in touch with her. “I don’t think that they had any use for me at that moment, so they acted like I was not part of their organization,” she told Winsdr recently. The Liberty had been eyeing her international games and jumped at the chance to acquire her. “It was the first time that an organization was really interested,” she said.
The Lynx drafted Collier, a franchise player, with the sixth overall pick—no tank necessary. As a champagne-drunk Stewart pointed out in the postgame press conference, Sabally played few minutes in the semifinals series against the Aces, but the Liberty were surely glad for drafting her in 2022 and keeping her around when she scored nine points in the third quarter of Game 5 and gave her team new life.
Build rosters that make sense, win games with those rosters, and fans will respond. This applies in any sport, but especially so in this league, which will always face some hostility to the idea that a WNBA team can be a meaningful part of a person’s life. On game days and on the days between them, these teams both felt like part of the air. Pardon the Thomas Friedman bit: As fun as the arenas in Minneapolis and Brooklyn were, some moments outside them could be just as invigorating. I dodged bootleg Liberty T-shirt sellers on walks to the arena. I’m ashamed, but also a little chuffed, to admit I had the time for Game 5 wrong until I overheard two valet drivers in Minneapolis talking about it. (National Sunday WNBA games usually get played in the afternoon, not in primetime.) Last night, as I slipped out of the Liberty's arena at an awful hour, a nearby deliveryman with a hand truck full of boxes hollered “Sweetie!” at me, beginning what I was sure would be garden-variety street harassment before he congratulated me on making franchise history. He thought I was employed by the team. A city loves a winner.
