The most momentous WNBA season since the league’s inception nearly 30 years ago is nearing its end. The champs have been dethroned. The New York Liberty and Minnesota Lynx, which hold the two best records, are the last two teams remaining. Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier, the former and future MVP, who were teammates at UConn and on the Olympic team, will duel. Sabrina Ionescu, four years after her final game at Oregon, is finally having her moment. Leonie Fiebich is the last rookie standing in a legendary class headlined by Caitlin Clark, Angel Reese, and Rickea Jackson. Courtney Williams is the greatest begrudging, I-guess-I’ll-run-the-offense point guard of all time. The stage is set.
Here are the biggest stats, story lines, and X factors to watch, plus a final prediction heading into this championship clash.
1. Can Napheesa Collier finally best Breanna Stewart?
Back in 2016, Stewart was putting the finishing touches on the most decorated college basketball career of all time, leading UConn to its fourth title in four years behind a 38-0 season before becoming the no. 1 pick in the draft.
Collier, then a freshman, could only watch in exasperated awe. There were times, like her 12-rebound, six-block, four-steal outing versus LSU in Stewie’s absence, when glimmers of Collier’s do-it-all potential shone through, though. Some former teammates, like Gabby Williams, always saw it.
But she wouldn’t crack 15 points all season. In the 2019 WNBA draft, her teammate Katie Lou Samuelson was selected ahead of her. While Stewie was coming off her first MVP season in the WNBA, scouts were unsure what to make of Collier, this skinny, unselfish 6-foot-1 tweener forward with a 6-foot-6 wingspan and burgeoning but shaky shooting range. It wasn’t clear whether the skill set of a guard was hiding in the body of a power forward all those years ago, waiting to be tapped into. Nevertheless, Phee persisted.
The game evolved, and Collier evolved with it. She worked on her range, rebounding, defense, and stamina, building herself into the MVP runner-up in 2024 under the guidance of her trainer and husband, Alex Bazzell; Hall of Famers like Sylvia Fowles; and Minnesota head coach Cheryl Reeve, who still implores her to be more aggressive.
Throughout their careers, both Stewie and Phee have pushed beyond the positional limitations of the power forward position.
After the Liberty were pushed around by the Aces last postseason, Stewie accomplished the seemingly contradictory task of making her game both tougher and more guard-like, working on her acceleration and declaration to improve her drives to the rim. This postseason, she has protected the rim in stints, guarded A’ja Wilson, taken the primary matchup against scoring guard Kelsey Plum, and assumed playmaking duties from Ionescu when the Aces trapped her, to the tune of five assists in the Liberty’s closeout victory over the Aces in Game 4.
If Stewart is like a cross between Elena Delle Donne and an actualized Karl-Anthony Towns, with more poise and better defense than both, Collier is a hybrid of Lauri Markkanen and Tim Duncan—and, like Duncan, is mentored by the longest-tenured coach in the league. Collier can protect the rim, handle Wilson in the post, and switch onto perimeter players as varied as DeWanna Bonner and Natasha Cloud. Opponents shot 30.1 percent from 3 against the Lynx in the regular season, the stingiest figure in the W. The Lynx’s defense, which ranked second in the league, was 6.9 points per 100 possessions stingier with Collier on the floor, and for that she took home her first Defensive Player of the Year trophy. Collier’s ability to pop, roll, slip, post up, step through, and fade away with equanimity makes her the skeleton key to the most intuitive, free-flowing, and dazzling offense in the WNBA.
She plays fast, hard, and with intention. Take this play, where she screens, rolls, flashes open to save the play, flicks an offensive rebound to the backcourt, spaces out to 3, posts up in the paint, leaves briefly to escape a three-second violation, and then dives back in for the cutting layup. All in the span of 30 seconds.
Her 27.1 points per game, an all-time playoff record thus far; 9.6 rebounds; and 3.9 assists in these playoffs are a product of these sequences accumulating. She also leads the playoffs in PER and win shares, according to Her Hoop Stats (minimum three games played). She covers, according to Sean Hurd, an average of 2.58 miles per game—the highest figure in the WNBA. After coaches, media members, and fans implored her to be more aggressive for years, she still dominates without insisting on herself, operating within the framework of the offense, sneaking out from under the radar only when an opponent dares to cover her one-on-one. When the Mercury tried going that direction in Round 1, she scored 38 points in Game 1 and 42 points in Game 2, tying the single-game record for playoff points.
When she found out that she tied the record, she excoriated herself for missing her final free throw attempt, but the trajectory of the ball provided an offering to an old friendship: It’s a record she now shares with Stewart. Off the court, the duo partnered to develop Unrivaled, a professional women’s basketball league debuting this January, that will offer minimum six-figure salaries and equity to players.
Stewie has a 7-3 lead in their head-to-head matchups, but two of Phee’s three victories have come this season. The Lynx are the only team that has beaten the Liberty twice this season, in large part because Phee is one of the only players in the WNBA who can guard Stewie one-on-one and live to tell the tale. This is a great rivalry not only because of their history but also because they play the same position and are often each other’s primary matchup. The Lynx held Stewie to 38.5 percent shooting from the field this season and 21.1 percent from beyond the arc. The Liberty turned Phee into a passer, and her teammates responded by shooting 42.5 percent from beyond the arc over the course of three games.
It would have been hard to envision it eight years ago, but in Game 1, when the duo faces off, Collier will be the best player on the floor. A championship would stamp her season among the greatest and give Minnesota a WNBA-high six titles, one more than the Houston Comets and Seattle Storm, with whom Stewart won her two titles.
Stewart is already one of the most accomplished players in history. Winning her third championship and giving her home state’s team its first title (she was born in Syracuse) would put her next to Candace Parker and Chelsea Gray as one of the few players in WNBA history to play a starring role on two championship teams, marking another way in which she is at the forefront of the game’s evolution.
2. Is it finally Sabrina Ionescu’s time?
Postponement, arguably the defining trait of Ionescu’s career, has given this moment an air of concentrated anticipation, like a volcano waiting to erupt.
To understand why it’s such a big deal for Ionescu to reach the Finals, we have to take a trip down memory lane, after Oregon lost to Baylor in the 2019 Final Four. Ionescu faced a decision: declare for the draft and be taken no. 1 by the Las Vegas Aces or return to college in hopes of leading her Ducks to their first women’s basketball title. She chose the latter and made waves with every logo 3 that splashed through the hoop.
On February 24, 2020, she flew to Stanford after speaking at Kobe Bryant’s memorial and dropped her 26th triple-double, running up a college record (men’s and women’s) that only Clark, with 17, has come close to sniffing.
Ionescu wasn’t the same international phenomenon that Clark became in her senior year of college, but her trajectory, like the arc of her long triples, was similar to Clark’s. Just look at the YouTube comments from that Oregon-Stanford game, which echo the sentiments Clark has inspired.
Ive never watched women’s basketball, but something about this was different. I’m starting to become a fan!
Being honest, I would have never clicked on this video highlight before. But here I am, watching and now commenting. This girl, can ball!!!
Two weeks later, she’d drop 20 points on 12 shots, get 12 dimes, and collect eight rebounds against Stanford again, leading the Ducks to a Pac-12 championship victory. Four days later, COVID-19 would shut down the Ducks. March Madness was canceled. The Ionescu wave washed out before it reached its peak.
Still, she entered the WNBA with palpable buzz; she was a logo-shooting triple-double machine who had the star-making power of Nike, founded in her college backyard, behind her.
Five months later, in her second WNBA game, she dropped 33, seven, and seven:
The next game, she suffered a Grade 3 ankle sprain. Her season, and her ankle, would be put on ice for the rest of the year. The next season, Ionescu became the youngest player in the WNBA to ever record a triple-double (a record Clark later broke), but it took her until this season to fully recover and become the player she once was.
“Getting hurt derailed me a little bit, confidence-wise, of being able to take hits and take off on one leg and land on one leg inside the paint,” Ionescu told Alexa Philippou. “It’s nice to see the work that I put in now come to life, especially in the playoffs.”
The context of the league, and what Ionescu is tasked with, has shifted in the past four years. No longer burdened with being the savior, she seems looser and willing to show more personality.
In the first round of the playoffs, she dapped up Spike Lee courtside and told reporters afterward that she “felt like New York was just injected into my veins. I was like, ‘We’re winning this.’”
Now, with the collective energy of Spike, Ellie, and the raucous Liberty fan base—who live and die with her triples and hit-ahead passes—behind her, this could finally be her moment.
The Aces, once the W’s standard, prepared her for it. After losing to them in the WNBA Finals last year, Ionescu bolstered her defense, improved her first step, and hit the weight room. In Game 3 of the semifinals this season, Las Vegas blitzed her and forced her into the worst playoff performance of her career.
She responded in the next game with five 3s, working off the ball, driving around doubles, evading traps, and setting screens before flashing open, à la Curry, while Stewart and Fiebich took over playmaking duties.
The Lynx will likely use Kayla McBride’s size, as well as the collective wingspans of Collier and Alanna Smith, to slow her down. What those players lack in brute strength, they make up for with agility and IQ. This will be a new test for Ionescu, but it’s one she’s spent the past few years studying for. She is stronger now, able to hold her space in pressurized situations, and harder to rush. She can dribble out the delay and use it to her advantage.
3. Will Jonquel Jones swing the series?
If there is one clear weakness the Minnesota Lynx possess, it’s rebounding. And nobody is better equipped to exploit it than Jones, the 6-foot-6 bruiser who averaged the sixth-most rebounds in the league this season.
But she was also 15th in average fouls committed. When she sits, New York has to either play small with Kayla Thornton or abandon the five-out spacing that Jones gives them by going to the more post-oriented Nyara Sabally.
Jones, given the defensive prowess of the Liberty backcourt and Collier, is also the Liberty star with the best chance of creating advantages through mismatches, although Smith and her 6-foot-8 wingspan will have something to say about that. Smith, so far, has held up one-on-one against the size of Brittney Griner, Alyssa Thomas, and Brionna Jones. Even when she loses the matchup, Minnesota wins because it doesn’t have to send a double. If that trend holds up against the Liberty and Ionescu can’t get free, either, New York might revert to the your-turn, my-turn style that did it in down the stretch in the Commissioner’s Cup.
4. Can Courtney Williams keep this up?
After being released from DeWanna Bonner’s and DiJonai Carrington’s death grips last round, Williams will get a bit of a respite with the ball in her hands—the operative phrase here being “a bit” because the Liberty’s Fiebich and Betnijah Laney-Hamilton just got finished with making Chelsea Gray’s life impossible.
The Lynx, unlike the Aces, are chock-full of playmaking talent, but nobody brings the offense together like Williams, whose midrange accuracy puts constant pressure on opponents in the pick-and-roll, allowing her to slice through defenses with her playmaking. Even though she’s played the point guard position for just two years, she’s a natural, threading pocket passes to rollers, eye faking her opponents, and whipping one-handed crosscourt passes to shooters.
But there were times last round when the Sun made Williams overthink, and the Liberty’s new jumbo starting lineup, with Fiebich in the middle, could do the same.
In the same way that the Aces’ traps tested Ionescu, the Sun tested Williams, who eventually figured out how to get the best of them by being patient with her midrange shot and speeding up and decelerating to draw fouls. In Game 5, she hit her first six shots and finished with 24 points and seven assists.
The Lynx brought back only five returning players this season. Williams herself was a free agent acquisition, and her playmaking has accelerated Minnesota’s newfound chemistry. Bridget Carleton and Smith, two 3-point shooters who can pop and dive, are great understudies for Collier. McBride, who’s been shooting at 40.7 percent, might have the quickest release in the W. Williams’s ability to find openings in the Lynx’s orchestrated chaos makes it all cohere.
5. Can the Lynx stop the Liberty’s new Death Lineup?
Before their first game of the playoffs, Liberty coach Sandy Brondello inserted Fiebich, a Sixth Woman of the Year candidate, into the starting lineup. Over the course of the postseason, albeit in a small sample size of 83 minutes, the Liberty starting lineup has boasted a whopping 19.8 net rating—by far the best mark in the W—carrying over from that lineup’s regular-season mark of 23.8. For comparison’s sake, the Lynx’s starting lineup, at second among lineups that have played more than 50 minutes, has a postseason net rating of 4.9.
In the even smaller sample size of 24 regular-season minutes (not including the Commissioner’s Cup), the Liberty outscored the Lynx by 42.4 points per 100 possessions when that lineup shared the floor. By comparison, when Courtney Vandersloot played alongside the Liberty starters, they were outscored by 42.1 points per possession.
Intuitively, it makes sense. Fiebich, at 6-foot-4, allows the Liberty to switch 2 through 5 and occasionally 1 through 5, protecting Jones from being attacked in drop coverage and making initiating difficult for Williams. There’s a chance that the Lynx won’t have an answer.
6. Will experience win out? A humble prediction.
History, and the comforting familiarity of the hero’s journey, tells us that you have to lose before you win. That you have to come up against the hard edges of your flaws in that final critical hour to understand exactly how to overcome them. For the Liberty, this was when Stewie learned to play with physicality, Ionescu worked on her defense, and the team added depth.
Kelsey Plum’s recent comments that the Liberty were just a team of individuals stung more because there was an element of truth to the jab, forcing the Liberty to come together to learn how to make their big three cohere.
The Lynx and Collier, conversely, might have to learn to embrace the supremacy of the individual. Or maybe their greatest challenge will be something as simple as rebounding. Williams has been to multiple Finals. Myisha Hines-Allen has won a championship. But this group has never gone this far together.
The Lynx are no slouches when it comes to attention to detail, but the Liberty are operating with the focusing power of heartbreak. Stewart kept the receipts, but beyond a lone pair of Timberlands set on the Aces logo by New York’s social team, they haven’t cashed them in. Eleven days and five hard games from now, I think they will. Ellie, it’s time to get your ring size measured.
