Was That The Greatest WNBA Finals Game Ever?

BROOKLYN, N.Y. — Two minutes before the end of the fourth quarter of Game 1, the WNBA emailed out its list of players due to speak at the postgame press conference. Postgame media has worked this way since the league closed off locker rooms to reporters a couple of years ago. You can make your requests for other players to chat with outside as needed, but the obvious stars usually end up in front of the mics. The Minnesota Lynx, then down nine points, would send out Napheesa Collier and Kayla McBride to talk. McBride had her best shooting night of the playoffs, quieting the New York crowd when it got carried away by the Liberty’s transition flurries in the first quarter. Collier played a defensive game out of a textbook. But about 60 real minutes and 400 lifetimes later, Minnesota’s leading scorer arrived in the interview room. “Whaddup, whaddup, whaddup!” she crowed on the walk to the table. Courtney Williams had changed the plan.

Williams was beaming on the other side of maybe the best WNBA Finals game ever, which the Lynx won 95-93 in overtime on Thursday after trailing the Liberty for all but the last five seconds of regulation. If “best ever” sounds hyperbolic, perhaps I’m channeling Williams, who was asked where her go-ahead four-point play ranked in her career, and replied, “It’s one right now, because we’re here. I like to be where my feet are planted.” The Lynx were down 15 points with five minutes left to play, a deficit from which no team had ever overcome in the Finals. But a blend of tactical changes and clutch plays erased the Liberty’s lead—and my memories of it.

Collier, a basketball player’s basketball player, has never been accused of flash, and that often belies the scope of her talents. After Collier won Defensive Player of the Year over A’ja Wilson, Las Vegas Aces coach Becky Hammon said she didn’t think voters should be sent down “a rabbit hole of analytics” to make awards picks. But the case marshaled on Thursday night hardly required a connoisseur’s eye. Collier grew and shrank as needed, switching onto Sabrina Ionescu and killing the Liberty pick-and-roll herself. (Ionescu’s ugly final line: 8-of-26 shooting.) More often she guarded Breanna Stewart, who is three inches taller and shot 1-for-11 with Collier as her primary defender. For her final trick, Collier defeated an even taller Jonquel Jones and blocked a shot on a possession she had begun facing the other way. She would finish the night with three steals and six blocks to go along with 21 points. Crucially, Collier managed late-game stops at the five, to help a small-ball Lynx lineup get back in it.

Williams set up the game’s chaotic final minute of regulation, which the referees more or less improvised. The guard hit a game-tying three and drew a shooting foul, giving the Lynx a one-point lead with five seconds left in regulation. On the Liberty’s next inbounds play, Collier was able to swat the ball away, and it appeared to go out of bounds off Stewart’s shoe, but the refs went with a “jump ball” call. Crew chief Isaac Barnett told the pool reporter later that none of the game’s officials had “definitive knowledge” of the last player to touch the ball. Such plays are reviewable only if challenged; because neither team had a timeout left to challenge the call, the jump ball stood. When Williams was called for a jump-ball violation to give New York possession, the Liberty looked like they might escape. Stewart was fouled on her shot attempt with 0.8 seconds left in the game. She made her first free throw but missed the second, and the game headed to overtime.

An extra five minutes presented the full range of Courtney Williams. When the Lynx were up four, she tried a pass that Ionescu swiped to make it a 93-91 game with 32 seconds left to play. (Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve needled Williams about it after the game: “The five assists, does the one you threw to Sab—does that count?”) Another steal later, this time from Jones, and the game was tied again with eight seconds left. But it had to end, and it ended at the hands of the woman who was always going to be at the postgame presser, no matter what. Collier spun through the Liberty frontcourt’s tangle of arms and hit a game-winning fadeaway, coolly, over Jones.

To the Liberty, the Lynx might have seemed strangely secure in their disadvantages. When Collier has struggled in these playoffs, she’s been bothered by length, and this big Liberty team tends to pose the same matchup problems as the Connecticut Sun. On the offensive glass, New York thrashed Minnesota, 20-5. Jones, poised to cash in inside, led all scorers with 24 points. But like McBride, her night became the flotsam of a hundred game stories written and discarded. Minnesota went with an undersized lineup to close the game—“If the bigs weren’t rebounding, might as well go small. Couldn’t get any worse, right?” Reeve explained—and the George Costanza opposite strategy worked. The Lynx showed up on the glass when it mattered: Alanna Smith, whose game Reeve described as “understated,” rebounded a Williams miss and gave her another chance at the game-tying shot.

Sometimes I have trouble squaring Liberty fandom as depicted—the stylish elephant; the affirming, pleasant vibes!—with Liberty basketball, the actual and frequently vexing product. It can feel a bit like going to a birthday party at the dentist’s office. It’s an ungenerous thing to say about a talent-rich one-seed that just dispatched their last Finals opponent and has four more chances at a championship this year, but no team has a worse ratio of stressful watching to relief in victory.

This time, they didn’t win. The Liberty chalked up the result to execution, and they’re not wrong. Stewart called a smoked layup at the end of overtime “one of my cleanest looks,” though she’d had an even cleaner chance to end the game in regulation, at the free throw line. This game might have felt stolen by its victor either way, but it can’t be called anything other than a crushing loss for New York. Minnesota’s concession on the offensive glass, and a raft of live-ball turnovers in the first quarter, meant the Liberty took 90 shots to Minnesota’s 71. New York led by as many as 18 points, even as Ionescu and Stewart put up stinkers. Ionescu, the star of the Liberty’s series win over Vegas, had an especially bad night; with her closeout, she ultimately turned Williams’s attempt to tie the game into something more.

I’m not sure either team has yet seen a fully realized version of the other, which should frighten them both but thrill us all. Courtney Vandersloot, an elder stateswoman party to both a magical title run and an unthinkable playoff choke job, said after Thursday’s game that it was the craziest she’d been a part of. For the first time in a long time, the only thing WNBA fans had to lose their mind about was basketball. Every existential matter commissioner Cathy Engelbert had addressed in her pregame state-of-the-league remarks fell away except for one: Beginning next year, the Finals will be played as a best-of-seven series. All you could ask for after that was more.