The WNBA Won Won Won With 1-1-1
A good crowd can smudge the chalk. A fired-up team might erase it. There were only two games in Tuesday night’s WNBA first-round playoff slate, but a third winner emerged nonetheless. The league’s new playoff format is a lot of fun.
With a new charter travel program and some owners suddenly interested in playoff revenue, the WNBA announced last fall that the best-of-three first round of the playoffs would now follow a 1-1-1 sequence, which guarantees every postseason team at least one home game. For all the travel complications this introduced, there was little mourning for the old playoff format, a 2-1 first round that guaranteed the better team more home games but let the worse team host the elimination game. This was something of a sports oddity—and it was fun to consider, just as a philosophical question, what the “advantage” in home-court advantage actually is—but the most exciting scenario still never came to pass. For the three years the 2-1 playoff system was in effect, lower seeds only won three games total, and never a series. Last year’s first round ended with a set of four sweeps by the higher seeds. There are all kinds of considerations to weigh when tweaking a playoff structure, which the WNBA has done a few times now in the last five years, but this time it feels like they landed on an important one: This is supposed to be an entertainment product.
And if you put the entertainment product in front of more people, they might even make it more entertaining. Down 1-0 in their series against a well-rounded but occasionally suspect Atlanta team, the Indiana Fever got to come home to one of the league’s three best buildings. (In the past two seasons, I’ve been to one Pacers playoff game there and a couple regular-season Fever games, and detected no difference in noise level.) Basically every Fever player on the floor earned the game’s best crowd pop, which happened in the final seconds of the third quarter, when old friend Shey Peddy deflected an inbounds pass to Kelsey Mitchell, who came up with it, and swung it over to Aliyah Boston, who swung it again to Lexie Hull for a three. The Fever won, 77-60, in a game they never trailed.
The crowd pop finally happened, but first, things were nervier in Seattle, where the Storm returned after a Game 1 beatdown in Vegas. The Aces have sort of owned the Storm for the last few postseasons, and the first game in the series didn’t suggest their 2025 win streak would stop at 17. (The league record is the 2001 Sparks’ 18.) But Storm fans were treated to a star-making breakout game from teen French rookie Dominique Malonga, who used the education she got from A’ja Wilson in Game 1 of the series to ace the retest.
Malonga entered the game when Seattle trailed by 10, midway through the fourth quarter. Bothering Wilson in the paint and rim-running on the other end, she helped turn the game around, and appropriately had the go-ahead free throw. Wilson wouldn’t score for the last six minutes of the game as the Storm won, 86-83.
Aces head coach Becky Hammon grumbled a little about the new format—“I think the lower seed should have to win a game to come get one at home, but it is what it is,” she said afterward—but she tipped her cap to Malonga and was focused more on the real culprit: “Trash garbage” was how she described the Aces’ perimeter defense.
After Malonga’s shot, Skylar Diggins iced things with a mid-range shot on the Storm’s last possession. In the postgame press conference, she and fellow veteran Nneka Ogwumike considered the rookie performance they’d just seen. “Not only is Dom wise,” Ogwumike began, “but I also feel like there is a bit of naïveté that contributes …”
Diggins understood where her Stanford-educated teammate was going with this and cut in, smiling. “Yeah,” she said. “She don’t know no better.” It’s nice to be at home when your kid takes her first steps.
