The New York Liberty did everything they needed to do Sunday, and that list is three letters long: win. After losing Game 1 of the WNBA Finals by accidentally sticking their heads in a vacuum cleaner and pressing ON, the Liberty needed to beat the Minnesota Lynx in Game 2 to salvage their championship hopes, primarily, and to extinguish any existential dread if they had time.
Well, they did it: Liberty 80, Lynx 66, and the best-of-five Finals is tied 1–1 as it moves to Minnesota. Liberty star Breanna Stewart was the best player on the court, as she usually is; Stewart finished with 21 points, eight rebounds, five assists, a Finals-record seven steals, a block, and a beauty of a five-word quote, when she looked back at Game 1: “It’s not always like that.”
It’s very rarely like that. Game 2 served as a reminder to both the Liberty and the Lynx: The end of Game 1 was a weird and (likely) non-repeating event. The Liberty do not make a habit of blowing 15-point fourth-quarter leads. The Lynx cannot expect to come back like that again. This seems obvious, but the Lynx played most of this game like they thought another comeback was part of the game plan. They fell behind by 17 late in the second quarter.
“I’m disappointed that we let it get to 17,” Minnesota coach Cheryl Reeve said. “I’m more than disappointed. I’m pissed.”
She should be. The Lynx played such sloppy basketball, they should have come out for the second half wearing bibs. Stars Napheesa Collier and Courtney Williams committed 12 turnovers and shot two free throws. The Lynx as a team committed 20 turnovers and shot seven free throws—and three of those foul shots came when Liberty guard Courtney Vandersloot impeded Natisha Hiedeman’s ability to land after a three-point shot.
“We played really bad,” Collier said. “Yeah, obviously you want to steal one on the road. [But] we’re real disappointed in how we played today. You have to play with a level of desperation from the very beginning.”
If the Lynx do that, not only can they win, but it’s possible they should win. Two games into this series, we can junk any notion that the Liberty are heavy favorites. After 91 minutes of the Finals, the teams had scored the same number of points; the 80–66 final score Sunday was really misleading. The Lynx are 4–2 against the Liberty this year, and it’s not because of a statistical outlier or the vagaries of the schedule. The Lynx are a tough matchup for the Liberty.
Minnesota has a perimeter quickness advantage. It shows up when either team is running its half-court offense. The Lynx can get into the lane and score, and they can harass the Liberty guards into offensive lulls.
Reeve said before Game 2 that she thought her team had done a lot of things poorly in Game 1, yet it still won. It’s fair to say the Lynx did a lot more things poorly in Game 2. So many of their turnovers felt unforced: a bad pass, a dribble off a foot. Yet they still only trailed by two with less than four minutes left.
“Our offense was bad at a time when we really needed it,” Reeve said. “We were taking too long to get into things. I don’t think we were terribly hard to play against.”
Reeve is a Hall of Famer. She knows what she is watching. She said that “New York’s had a lot to do with” her team’s struggles offensively, but she does not sound like a coach who thinks her team has to play its very best to have a chance.
Just for example: Liberty star Sabrina Ionescu scored 14 points in the first 14 minutes and one after that, and she said afterward that “my goal was: Just take what the defense gives me. In the second half, they made some adjustments.” But Reeve didn’t seem to see it that way. She said that of Ionescu’s early points, “10 of them were fast break. So what changed was, she wasn’t able to get in the fast break. We had her in the halfcourt.”
Well, it’s the Finals. Both teams should expect to win. As Liberty coach Sandy Brondello said, “We can tidy up some things. They can tidy up some things as well.” The Lynx will almost certainly play a lot better in at least one of the games in Minnesota than they did in New York. Stewart said she welcomes the challenge: “We like it when it’s loud. We like it when it’s difficult.” The Liberty have the talent and skill to beat Minnesota when both teams play well. But they will also need grit, the kind they showed Sunday, when they balanced the series—and maybe themselves, too.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as The Liberty Can't Be Lulled By Lynx's Sloppy Game 2 Performance .
