Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon reflected in the moments after her team’s reign as the two-time defending WNBA champions came to an end Sunday when the Aces were bounced by the New York Liberty in of the fourth game of their semi-final series.
It was a somewhat frustrating year for the Aces, who still had all the talent in the world but couldn’t find the same equipment they had in the previous two seasons.
“We had great talent,” Hammon told reporters, “and we had a good team.”
Just a good team. Not great, even less excellent. The Aces simply weren’t equal to the sum of their parts.
In comparison, Hammon – spontaneously – found the Lynx to be quite the opposite.
“You take a team like Minnesota and you have good talent,” she said, “but you have a great team.”
This is a super team era in the WNBA. Last year’s finals featured Las Vegas and New York – two teams loaded with stars and top picks. These are the teams with the big names, and they are the ones who have received most of the media coverage and recognition. And rightly so. They were the ones who competed for the titles.
This was not the case in Minnesota. And we expected at the start of the season that this would continue. Going into the season, oddsmakers had the Lynx at about 50 to 1 to win the WNBA title.
Minnesota didn’t seem to have the talent to compete at the highest level. Yes, Napheesa Collier was awesome. But Las Vegas and New York were full of high-end actors. Minnesota apparently had one.
But early results suggest Minnesota might be different. The Lynx started 4-1. Then they were 13-3. They then won the Commissioner’s Cup, beating Liberty 94-89 in the final.
“You need to talk about us now. You have no choice,” Lynx coach and general manager Cheryl Reeve told the media after the win. “We just beat a great team. You know how hard that is to do. Because you love your awesome teams, man. You love your great teams. That’s all you want to talk about is your great teams. And we just beat a great team, so let’s talk about it.
And yet, the narrative didn’t seem to change to any extent. Even though Minnesota continued to win games, even though the Lynx played the best basketball of any team in the league after the Olympic break. Yet all the conversation around the WNBA Semifinals was centered on Liberty-Aces.
Minnesota-Connecticut was on the undercard.
This was brought to Collier’s attention during the semifinals and, frankly, she appreciates the lack of notoriety at this point in the season.
“If you continue to underestimate us and we continue to do what we do. We go in and punch teams in the face, because they have the same mindset,” Collier said. “I think we’ve proven who we are all season, and we have so much confidence in ourselves and we know what we’re capable of, and that’s what we try to show every night. What the guys say and believe other teams so it doesn’t really matter what this core team feels, and we know we have something special here.
They’ve known this since training camp, when they experienced first-hand their willingness to move the ball on offense and exploit possessions on defense. The power to do both came from the desire to succeed for each other.
The collective was stronger than the individual pieces.
“We like each other, early in training camp we meshed so well, the chemistry was there and we continued to build it,” Lynx guard Courtney Williams said. “You could just feel the difference and the way we play for each other, our selflessness, everyone just wants to win. Ultimately, that’s what this team is all about.
Reeve said Minnesota could have taken two different approaches when it became clear that Las Vegas and New York had “gobbled up top talent.”
“You can either say, ‘OK, well, it won’t be our time for a while, we’ll just wait,'” she told reporters. “Or you can say, ‘We’re going to find a different path.’ »
Minnesota chose the latter option, and its journey has been filled with team basketball that capitalizes on each player’s individual abilities to make the combination of five players on the court as successful as possible. Now, only Liberty – the final boss – stands between Minnesota and the mountaintop.
A similar scenario has already occurred on the men’s side. Reeve recalled the 2004 NBA champion Detroit Pistons, who used a similar recipe to defeat a Lakers team featuring Kobe Bryant, Shaquille O’Neal, Karl Malone and Gary Payton in the Finals.
“So there’s more than one way (to win),” Reeve said. “There’s more than one way to do this, and so we’re not a great team, but we’re a really good basketball team.”
Yes, the “not a great team” chip is still on Reeve’s shoulder, as well as those of his players.
“I think the chip was there,” Williams said. “(Experts) had us ninth at the start of the season, so that chip never went away. We block out the noise. We know what we can do, we know what we can do, so we’re just going to continue to show everyone what we can do.
