The Liberty have two days between games to somehow regroup and recover from the calamity of Thursday’s meltdown loss to the Minnesota Lynx in the opener of the WNBA Finals at Barclays Center.
As All-Star guard Sabrina Ionescu put it after the Liberty squandered a 15-point lead with five minutes to play before eventually losing in overtime to cough up home-court advantage in the best-of-five series: “If [the Lynx] didn’t have our attention before, they have it now.” Game 2 is slated for Sunday in Brooklyn.
“We’ll respond, that’s for sure,” said Ionescu, who missed 18 of 28 field goal attempts. “I think we all knew we weren’t going to go clean sweep and win.
“Obviously, we wanted to protect home court, and it sucks to kind of lose in the way that we did, but I know we’re going to respond.”
Veteran guard Courtney Vandersloot, a five-time All-Star who won a WNBA title with the Chicago Sky in 2021, called the game “the craziest thing I’ve ever been a part of” in her career.
And not in a good way.
“I’m not gonna lie to you guys. This is hard. … There’s no way around it. We came into the locker room and we feel like it was a missed opportunity for us, and that hurts,” Vandersloot said. “The first thing I said in there is we have to find a way to move on from this. These type of things, if you don’t address them, if you don’t nip it in the bud right away, it can be tough to come back from. But we know we have a mature group, and we understand that this is a series for a reason.
“We’re fully aware of the situation and know and believe in those in that locker room and think that we still have enough. I mean, this series isn’t over. It’s not. [Game 1] was hard, and we’ll take it because this isn’t our first time.”
Indeed, the Liberty are in the Finals for the second straight year, but their focus all season was to secure home-court advantage after dropping the first two games on the road last year in Las Vegas.
The Lynx now have won four of five from the Libs this season, including the Commissioner’s Cup championship, and coach Sandy Brondello admitted even before Game 1 that “they’ve had our number.”
But Game 1 was far worse than that, as the Liberty built two big leads — 18 in the second quarter and then 15 in the fourth after the Lynx had whittled the first cushion down to two.
Ionescu fouled Courtney Williams for a go-ahead four-point play with 5.1 seconds left in regulation, and Breanna Stewart missed one of two free throws with a chance to take the lead with 0.8 ticks left.
The Liberty then missed their first six shots and committed three of their 11 turnovers in overtime.
“It’s a Finals game. Everyone is gonna be hard,” Ionescu said. “We knew they were going to come back, and I think we got a little comfortable. We started off really well and got up … but we can’t play to not lose. … It seemed that we kind of took our foot off the gas a little bit, and it ended up kind of biting us in the butt there late. But I think it’s a great learning experience for us.
“There were so many times in the game that I feel like we could have won the game. But the great thing is the series is not won in one game. Obviously, this one hurts, but we just got to continue to grind and improve on the things that we know we have to improve.”
