Liberty Win in Finals Rematch Loss
The New York Liberty's most vital win of its ongoing championship defense might never grace its win column.
The dog days of summer have taken a bite out of the Liberty, who are working without All-Star starter Breanna Stewart and depth stars Kennedy Burke and Nyara Sabally. That somewhat stifled the metropolitan hype around the first WNBA Finals rematch against the Minnesota Lynx staged on Wednesday, one many supporters likely slapped a premature loss upon.
Instead, New York came out with one of its more spirited efforts of the season, keeping pace with the Lynx for nearly all 40 minutes before Minnesota earned its quantum of revenge with a 100-93 decision in front of its home crowd at Target Center. Despite the defeat, lingering reminders of the Liberty of recent old emerged, such as a 48.6 percent output from the field, winning the points in the paint battle by eight, losing only nine turnovers, and limiting the Lynx to nine fast break points.
"If there's ever a good loss, this was one of those losses that you can live with," Sabrina Ionescu, whose 31 points helped keep New York afloat, said in the aftermath. "We came out, we competed for 40 minutes. Everyone played as hard as they could ... That's the standard we have to come out with every night, but with a million reasons why we could have come in here and gone through the motions and made excuses for ourselves, we didn't, and 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. We did that tonight."
Wednesday's game, the first of four Finals rematches packed into a 20-day span, was rightfully hyped as a sequel and the Liberty sought to be make it better than the last. They certainly succeeded in that regard if the preceding installment was the first game of an ongoing four-part road trip.
The visit to Minneapolis was the Liberty's full first without its contributing triumvirate. Part one was staged in Arlington, which hosted a 92-82 victory for the Dallas Wings, one where the Liberty refused to bask in the relative beauty of the final score after they narrowed a 30-point deficit to the rebuilding North Texans down to six.
New York recognized the gravity of such a showing even while depleted and held a half-hour postgame meeting while Dallas celebrated one of its most emphatic wins in quite some time. In an admittedly small sample size, the aims and points of that discussion manifested in Minneapolis.
"Our performance was unacceptable for a team that wants to win a championship, regardless of who's in and who's out. So that's what we spoke about," head coach Brondello said of the meeting after the Dallas game. "I handle conflict in the moment. You've got to air it out. Let's be better. This is it, the film, don't lie, let's watch that."
"We haven't won anything or lost anything quite yet. This is all about learning. Now we have a lot of things to continue to learn as a team. We're adding new players in, but we haven't had our full group. We've had our full group for one game, and that was the first game of the year. So we've just got to hang in there, and we got to control what we're supposed to control, and it really just starts with the effort."
Evidence of the early effort sought by Brondello emerged fairly quickly: New York led by as much as eight in the opening period before Minnesota mustered a tie, but it was the first first quarter that did not even with a Liberty deficit in four games (the deficit was minus-27 alone in the last two games). Natasha Cloud, who nearly joined Burke, Sabally, and Stewart in absentia due to an illness, was a headliner of the early surge, matching Ionescu's first half tally with 10 points.
New York (17-9) still had plenty to clean up on the road ahead: the length sans Stewart is particularly glaring and it led to a 20-3 disadvantage in second chance points on a night where seven of nine Minnesota participants pulled in at least one offensive board. Lapses at the end of the early periods allowed the Lynx to build and keep a lead and they burned the Liberty for 15 three-pointers on 31 attempts (five alone from Kayla McBride).
Even so, New York has used the medically induced absences, as well as the compacted yet expanded 44-game WNBA schedule to engage in research-and-development experiments, most of which have proven successful.
Isabelle Harrison (15 points on 7-of-10 on Wednesday) has raised her Sixth Woman of the Year case, Marine Johannes impressed as a spot starter, and Stephanie Talbot has ingrained herself into the metropolitan rotation. Such a process is only set to continue with Emma Meesseman's imminent arrival and Stewart's eventual reinsertion, which may not come until the end of August.
As a supposed "superteam" and the defending champions, the Liberty indirectly, if not unintentionally, stands as one of the commonly accepted antagonists in recent WNBA plots. Thus, no one's sympathizing with their current woes, especially since they're also dealing with the new schedule.
That's just the way they like it, as the Liberty have been more than happy to figure out the problem themselves rather than falling on the crutches of readily available excuses.
"We probably accomplished most of what our goals [from the meeting] were, because a lot of them were controllables," Ionescu said. It's the understanding we have to come out with urgency. The season just kind of flies by and you can't continue to wait for the next game and the next game to figure it out. So I'd say, the way we came in, we were locked in."
"Obviously it didn't go our way, but the things that we wanted to control, which is just like our ball pressure, continuing to focus on the defensive end, things that we know we're capable of doing [went well], and those things can't waiver game to game," Ionescu continued. "Tonight was a night where we got back to playing the way we wanted to play, but that's going to have to be from here on out. That's that's not a negotiable thing anymore for our group, especially with where we're at in the season right now. That's just the bare minimum that we need to continue to hold ourselves to that standard and we will."
Geoff Magliocchetti is a veteran sportswriter who contributes to a variety of sites on the "On SI" network. In addition to the Yankees/Mets, Geoff also covers the New York Knicks, New York Liberty, and New York Giants and has previously written about the New York Jets, Buffalo Bills, Staten Island Yankees, and NASCAR.