WNBA: Mercury seeking offensive improvement in semifinals against Lynx

The 2025 WNBA Semifinals series between the No. 4-seed Phoenix Mercury and No. 1-seed Minnesota Lynx continues this Tuesday, Sept. 23. Minnesota currently holds a 1-0 advantage in the best-of-five series and will host Tuesday’s game as well; the game will be broadcast nationally on ESPN, with tip-off scheduled for 7:30 p.m. ET.

The Lynx are coming off a series-opening win on Sunday, though it could hardly be described as a dominant performance by the home team. The Mercury were the ones who came out as the aggressors, scoring a whopping 42 points in the paint in the first half as power forward Alyssa Thomas got to the rim at will. It was a bit of a surprise for the Lynx, who led the WNBA in defensive rating (97.5 points per 100 possessions) during the regular season but seemed ill-equipped to handle Phoenix’s physicality.

The second half of the game was a different story. After a halftime meeting that Minnesota head coach Cheryl Reeve referred to as “collaborative”, the Lynx looked much more like themselves, outscoring Phoenix 42-22 in the second half and ultimately winning 82-69. The play of the Lynx’ backcourt proved to be the difference: Courtney Williams and Kayla McBride combined to score 45 points, while the Mercury struggled to shoot from the outside, making just 3-of-23 (13 percent) of their 3-point attempts.

“They problem-solved together,” Reeve explained after the game. “They don’t finger-point. Think about the worst moments of the game for us, which was most of the first half. You didn’t do back into the locker room with people blaming; they went right into listening, like ‘what can we do together? Who needs to do what?’”

Entering Game 2, the onus will now be on Phoenix to do the same. While the Mercury didn’t get severely out-hustled, they failed to adjust to the Lynx walling off the paint in the second half of Game 1, missing 3-pointer after 3-pointer and looking generally disjointed when Thomas’ drives to the hoop were taken away. Kahleah Copper led the Mercury in scoring with 22 points, but it took her 23 shots to get there, while Satou Sabally scored just 10 points on 3-for-11 shooting; Phoenix has enough to overcome a bad game from one of their three stars, but when two or all three of them shoot poorly, things become much more difficult.

“We were just 3-for-23 [on 3-pointers]. That’s a tough shooting night,” Mercury head coach Nate Tibbetts said before reaffirming his faith in his team’s overall approach. “[The Lynx] were flying around defensively, but we want to be aggressive downhill and if there’s no help, obviously we want to score in the paint. If there is help, then we’d like to kick it for threes.”

The Mercury certainly aren’t going to change who they are based on one poor shooting performance. Thomas is too good not to continue running their offense through, and it’s unlikely the team will shoot that badly from beyond the arc again.

Tibbetts and his staff may be wondering, though, how they can get their other players involved. Veteran forward DeWanna Bonner, who ranks second in WNBA history in points scored in the playoffs, was a complete non-factor in 25 minutes on Sunday, going scoreless and recording a plus/minus of -17. Rookie sharpshooter Monique Akoa Makani wasn’t much better, shooting 1-for-6 from the field.

Contrast these stats with those of Lynx center Maria Kliundikova, who was a +14 in just eight minutes off the bench and keyed a crucial Minnesota run in the fourth quarter with multiple offensive rebounds and plays made on defense. Reeve heaped praise upon Kliundikova, calling her eight minutes on the court “the best eight minutes of the game.”

The Mercury don’t need Bonner or any of their other reserves to supplant their stars in Game 2, but they do need them to be better complements. It’s a major part of what got the Mercury to this point: pairing Thomas’ playmaking with elite scorers in Copper and Sabally and surrounding them with low-volume, high-efficiency players who are aggressive on defense. Almost all of that was missing in Game 1, however, and if the Mercury are going to avoid an 0-2 hole, they’ll need to rediscover their collective identity.

No. 4-seed Phoenix Mercury (0-1) vs. No. 1-seed Minnesota Lynx (1-0)