It’s once again the unmissable meeting of the superteams. Except that the playoff clash awaited all year will take place in the semi-finals.
The No. 1 New York Liberty and No. 4 Las Vegas Aces begin their WNBA semifinal series on Sunday at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn (3 p.m. ET, ABC). Each franchise returns the top five from the 2023 WNBA Finals that Vegas won in four games at Barclays. And team front offices have filled out stronger, deeper benches to make history.
The Aces are aiming for a three-peat that has only been achieved once in WNBA history, when the Houston Comets won the league’s first four titles. The Liberty are still chasing their first championship after leaving five finals empty-handed. They lost three to the Comets.
Liberty general manager Jonathan Kolb, the 2023 Executive of the Year, added All-Stars Breanna Stewart, Jonquel Jones and Courtney Vandersloot ahead of the 2023 season to build the league’s first superteam via free agency. It reached the franchise’s first final since 2002, but fell short in a heartbreaking Game 4 that Liberty could have taken final possession.
“It’s hard to win the first year when you’re a team,” Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello said before the Liberty-hosted Commissioner’s Cup on Long Island in June. “We’ve done pretty well, but I think you see the benefit of spending more time together (and) seeing how we continue to grow. We’ve faced adversity, we’ve knocked out players and we continue to build that chemistry.
The Aces come from the country with three consecutive No. 1 draft picks: Kelsey Plum, A’ja Wilson and Jackie Young. Plum, who called the Liberty’s lack of chemistry as one of the main reasons the Aces locked up the 2023 title, said this week that the Liberty has improved.
“New York is much better than last year. Quite simply, plain and simple,” Plum said. “They’re bigger, they shoot the ball at a better clip. If you go down the line, pound for pound individually, they’re all better basketball players.
They are also playing with the hurt of a final loss on their minds. Brondello and the team called it a scar that will heal them and make them stronger. They will need it to defeat the powerful Aces.
“They’ve been the better team all year,” Aces head coach Becky Hammon said. “They played like an angry team, with an edge. And we worked our way here. I feel like we probably got our edge back in the last three or four weeks, I don’t think that we are the same team as New York (this season).
Here are 3 things you need to know for the series:
These regular season results are misleading
Yes, the Liberty won the regular season series, 3-0. But none of these matches are really indicative of this revenge.
Two veteran point guards missed the Liberty’s 90-82 victory in Las Vegas on June 15. Chelsea Gray of the Aces was still recovering from a foot injury she suffered in Game 3 of the WNBA Finals, and Vandersloot of the Liberty was out for personal reasons. .
Liberty wing and all-defense contender Betnijah Laney-Hamilton (right knee) missed Game 2, a 79-67 Liberty victory on Aug. 17 in Las Vegas. This was the Aces’ first game after the All-Star/Olympic break, even though they had the longest rest period of any team. Gray still wasn’t looking at himself at that point, and the Aces were without six players during the break.
New MVP A’ja Wilson missed the last game two weeks ago, which was the only one hosted at Barclays. The Liberty won 75-71 by fending off a furious comeback from the Aces. Las Vegas won the fourth 20-11 to scare New York into a possible postseason meeting.
Both teams are fully healthy heading into this one, and Gray appears to have made the playoffs just in time for the Aces.
The battle of the MVPs
The series is full of No. 1 draft picks and MVP candidates. The headliners, of course, are Wilson and Stewart after the duo led Team USA to a gold medal in Paris last month. These are two of the greatest players in the world and will face off against each other throughout the series.
Wilson broke the record books en route to one of the best seasons in league history. Her 26.9 points per game is a league record and she averaged a double-double with 11.9 rebounds. earned him a third MVP last week. In a dominant scoring year, his 21 and 24 points in games against New York were nothing special. She was highly motivated in the final finale after an MVP voter ranked her fourth, putting her behind Stewart and Sun forward Alyssa Thomas in the vote count.
Stewart lifted the trophy last season for the second time, but didn’t have a good playoff run and that hurt the Liberty. It was the first time she made the playoffs without wearing a Seattle Storm jersey and the first time she lost in the finals of an NCAA or WNBA playoff series. Her scoring dropped 20% in the playoffs, from 23 to 18.4 points per game, and she averaged 16.3 points against the Aces in the Finals. This is largely a drop from the 3-point range (17.6%). She’s shooting 40% from 3 since the All-Star/Olympic break, up from the 22.9% decline that continued early in the season.
Sabrina Ionescu finished sixth in MVP voting this year, behind teammate Stewart in third. Her Improved play puts the Liberty in a better position than last season, and she reignited from the 3-point line against Atlanta after her own post-break slump. Liberty center Jonquel Jones, the 2021 MVP with the Sun, will be sought after for big double-double games. Aces Gray, Young and Plum all earned MVP votes, and Hammon said the team followed its guards.
The defense will prove the difference
The defense distinguished the Aces last season and led them to a decisive game despite Gray and center Kiah Stokes both benching due to injury. Hammon said after the celebrations, she “invented a defense” and her group “executed the stupidity.”
That side of the ball has been more problematic for Las Vegas this year, giving New York an edge even though Hammon said she’s been confident in their defense as of late. The Liberty finished third in defensive rating and twice held the Aces at least 15 points below their season average of 86.4 points per game. In the 2023 Finals, the Aces beat their average of 92.8 in the first two games of the WNBA Finals (99 and 104 points).
Liberty 6-foot-4 forward Leonie Fiebich, a Spanish League MVP and 2024 first-team All-EuroLeague selection, joined the starting lineup in the first-round series against Atlanta as Vandersloot came off the bench. That puts more size (Fiebich is 6-foot-4 to Vandersloot’s 5-8) on the perimeter alongside all-defensive contender Betnijah Laney-Hamilton (6-foot) to slow down the Aces’ trio of high-scoring guards.
