Liberty’s stunning meltdown in Game 1 reopens fresh WNBA Finals wounds

NEW YORK — Barclays Center fell eerily quiet while the sold-out crowds’ wristbands continued to flash. The white “New York ain’t for everyone” towels hung limp.

Breanna Stewart, standing under the basket, raised her hands above her head. It was in disbelief rather than jubilation.

“We should have won this game,” Liberty All-Rookie selection Leonie Fiebich said outside the locker room. “We had many chances. We gave it away multiple times in the game and that’s just really disappointing and not how we wanted to start the series.”

The New York Liberty coughed up their 18-point lead, squirreled away chance after pristine chance at putting it away and ultimately allowed the Minnesota Lynx to steal Game 1 of the WNBA Finals, 95-93, in overtime Thursday. It ties the largest comeback in WNBA Finals history, joining the Liberty’s comeback in Game 2 of the 1999 Finals when Teresa Weatherspoon hit “The Shot.”

“We had our opportunities to win and we didn’t finish it,” Liberty head coach Sandy Brondello said. “We’re disappointed. We have to go back to work. We have to freshen up. We have to look at how we can be better, and it’s really just principles of play. Things that we have been great at all season long, we have to just refocus on them.”

The Liberty led by 15 points with 5:20 left in a game they had led the entire way. They did everything they needed and wanted: established Jonquel Jones early in the paint, set up Sabrina Ionescu for 3-pointers and stood strong defensively in a dominating 32-19 first quarter.

“Nothing is won in the first quarter,” Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve said.

Barclays Center reacted to every major play, waving towels during Lynx free throws behind the basket and rising for every pull-up beyond the arc. Even as the Lynx focused on finding their footing and chipped away, first with a 10-0 run in the second quarter, the Liberty kept enough distance and answered. Brondello said pregame the team was poised and still building off the pain of losing last year’s Finals, which they’ve referred to as a scar that heals. They were a stacked superteam with more rest heading into the series and home-court advantage in front of a sold-out crowd of 17,732 fans.

Suddenly, none of that mattered in the final minutes of a game they thought they had locked up.

“We were up a lot and I think we kind of took our foot off the gas a little bit,” Ionescu said. “And it ended up kind of biting us in the butt there late.”

Ionescu, who struggled from the floor on a bloated 8-of-26 shooting line, said the team was “playing not to lose” and became too comfortable against a team it knew could claw back.

“When you’re up in that situation, you’re trying to take the best shot, trying to also play the clock, and they’re trying to score as fast as you can,” Liberty guard Courtney Vandersloot said. “It looked like the hoop was just getting bigger and bigger for them.”

The Lynx scored eight straight on buckets from Napheesa Collier, Courtney Williams and Natisha Hiedeman to tie the game while Liberty leaders Stewart and Ionescu couldn’t stop the bleeding. After a Liberty shot-clock violation, Williams bounced to the Lynx end of the floor for the reset timeout inbound and drained a 3-pointer with contact from Ionescu. The ensuing free throw gave the Lynx their first lead of the game at the 5.5-second mark.

“We were up a lot and then we had a wild kind of sequence to end the fourth,” Stewart said.

Ionescu attempted to inbound it to Stewart, covered closely by Collier, for a game-winning shot. The ball appeared to be deflected out by one of them, but the referees called a jump ball.

Crew chief Isaac Barnett said the calling official did not have definitive information, nor did the nearest official, nor the third official. It is allowed to be challenged, but a coach must have a timeout. Neither did, and it was not a reviewable matter by officials.

Stewart then missed on a drive to the rim and the Liberty retained possession. She was smothered again on the ensuing inbound and drew a foul on Collier.

Stewart tied it with the first free throw, but missed the second for the win.

“Because they were reviewing the time, you’re just focusing on making the shot,” Stewart said. “Making the first one. Making the first one. Making the first one. And then the second one, the same. It’s when you want to be thinking about nothing else. It definitely sucks to miss.”

Stewart turned it over to start overtime and neither team scored until Collier’s layup at 3:32. Two more Liberty turnovers followed leading to another Lynx bucket.

“We went into overtime and we didn’t really execute anything,” Fiebich said. “We had turnovers that led to easy points for them. That’s just not how you play in overtime.”

Jones hit a 3 to cut the deficit to one only for Williams to answer again with another 3. The point guard scored a team-high 23 points, including 15 in the fourth quarter and overtime.

Back-to-back steals and scores from Ionescu and Jones tied the game with 28.5 seconds to go, and Stewart emphatically blocked Williams to set up a rousing Liberty comeback in a roaring Barclays.

Collier quieted the crowd for the first time, hitting a tough turnaround fadeaway over Jones. They were stunned into silence later when Stewart missed an open driving layup that would have tied it again.

“I had probably one of my cleanest looks,” Stewart said. “Didn’t make it.”

Hitting buckets was a struggle for the Liberty all night. They shot 37.8% overall on 90 shots.

“You look up at the end and we held them below 40 percent, which is monumental,” Reeve said. “A lot of that was obviously late. We got big stops when we needed them.”

Jones was the sole bright spot, shooting 9-of-14 for a team-high 24 points and 10 rebounds. She didn’t draw a foul until minutes into the first quarter. By all accounts, it should have led to a win. Ionescu scored 19, Stewart had 18 and Fiebich scored 17.

“Unfortunately, our two stars, they had to rely on too many difficult shots,” Vandersloot said of Ionescu and Stewart.

The Liberty won on the boards, but lost in paint points. They didn’t win the little moments that lead to victory when the margin is as close as everyone knew it would be between the league’s two best teams. They squandered the home-court advantage they worked so hard to procure after their 2023 Finals heartbreak to the Las Vegas Aces.

“To be honest, I’ve never been a part of a game like that,” Vandersloot said. “It was a very high, low [experience] especially the end.”

The veteran point guard said within an hour of the final buzzer she had already moved on and refocused. She said she spoke to the team in the locker room afterward and wants to be someone it can lean on and work with to move forward.

“We can have tonight, we can feel bad about this, but when you leave this building, you have to think about moving on and being able to put this behind us,” Vandersloot said. “Because we can’t just dwell in this loss. We still have games ahead of us and we still have a great opportunity. We have to remember that.”

If they don’t, and miss out on as many chances as they did Thursday, another Finals scar is forming.