MINNEAPOLIS — There was still a second left in the game, so I spent it trying to remember which athlete I’d recently heard say they loved nothing more than to silence a crowd. I knew it was a woman; I was pretty sure it was a basketball player. For the second time in a week, I saw the appeal of that feeling, and wanted to give the mystery woman credit. She had identified this powerful, almost violent transfer of energy. It must feel amazing to be right at the center, to know you’d caused the whole thing.
Sabrina Ionescu, in an improbably tied game, had just skipped over to the left ear of the Minnesota Lynx logo, and put the New York Liberty up 80-77 with a 28-foot three-pointer. One timeout and one second later, the buzzer sounded. Numb fans filed out. “I’m just disappointed,” a security guard mumbled, Minnesotanly, in the tunnel. And then, I remembered: The quote was on 60 Minutes a couple weeks ago, from Lynx star Napheesa Collier. “It's almost more fun,” she told Jon Wertheim. “When you're, like, in a packed arena with the other team. And you hit, like, a big three or a big block or something. And you hear them all go, ‘Oh.’ I love that feeling.”
In Collier’s building on Wednesday night, the biggest crowd in Lynx history went “Oh.” Among the 19,521, there had to have been some Minnesota hoops superfan who had witnessed, in one building, Alana Beard from the corner, Nneka Ogwumike fading away, Luka Doncic over Rudy Gobert, and now this. How were they still a functioning human being? Why did they keep going to basketball games? The distress in the air seemed like too much for any person to bear even once.
In Game 3, the Liberty relieved all of Game 1’s pain by exacting it on their opponents and taking a 2-1 lead in this best-of-five series. Unsatisfied with having to mount big comebacks in New York, the Lynx responded with their own furious start, leading by as many as 15. Minnesota was due for a hot shooting game in these Finals, and Kayla McBride and Bridget Carleton—combining for 17 of Minnesota's 28 points in the first quarter—suggested early on that this might be it. When Breanna Stewart picked up two fouls early, the Liberty down 14, head coach Sandy Brondello subbed in bench big Nyara Sabally, whose few but crucial minutes of rim protection and drives to the basket kept the game within reach.
That New York was even sort of hanging around was, in retrospect, an inauspicious sign for Minnesota. The Liberty can solve every small problem with their three superstars: Stewart, Ionescu, and Jonquel Jones. “Between Sab, JJ and myself, we know when it's our time to step up and to make an impact,” Stewart said after the game. She chose the third and fourth quarters to make hers. With her team down six in the last minute of the third, Stewart hit all manner of ungainly fadeaways, pull-up threes, and free throws to personally score the Liberty's next 13 points and tie up the game with six minutes left. She'd finish her night with 30 points, including a perfect 10-for-10 at the line. Though her shot has come and gone in the last two postseasons, Stewart followed up one clinical defensive performance with another. “We are not fucking losing this game,” she told her team in a fourth-quarter huddle, though with the way she was playing, it was practically redundant. She had the night I could sense was coming when she left the court after warmups, crossed a group of adoring young Lynx fans hoping for high-fives, and strode past them Bill Belichick-style.
Minnesota pretty much neutralized New York’s rebounding advantage, a feature of the first two games, and still came up short. Moments after I looked down at the monitor to confirm the teams were dead even on the glass in the second quarter, Jones erased a Courtney Williams reverse layup attempt, like a reminder that she still existed. The Lynx sent extra bodies to the paint, denying Jones the second-chance looks she'd enjoyed in Game 1. Alanna Smith was particularly excellent on the glass, a striking plus-20 in a three-point game, but foul trouble and a second-quarter back injury she suffered while jostling with Jones made her less effective.
Jones, held to just five rebounds, said after the game that she was disappointed in her night on the glass. But when Lynx head coach Cheryl Reeve keyed in on a play that swung the game, it wasn’t Ionescu’s three or anything from Stewart. Instead, she brought up a three-pointer Jones had made to cut Minnesota’s lead from four to one in the last three minutes of the game.
Jones scored the next bucket too, a layup to give New York its first lead since the game was 5-4. Then it was Ionescu’s turn. Stewart rebounded a bunny McBride had missed, and Ionescu made the Lynx pay with a three over Collier, just her second three of the night. After Minnesota had tied it up again, with Carleton fearlessly taking it past Stewart for an easy layup and a calm-as-ever Collier hitting a pair of free throws with 16 seconds to go, there would be a third.
The shooter admitted afterward that she barely remembered it. Only after a rewatch in the locker room did she see how deep the three was and which hand she’d been dribbling with before she took it. Beyond the stakes, there was nothing special to it, Ionescu insisted. “It's a shot that I take often and I take in practice and that I take before the game. It's not like a Hail Mary, hope this goes in. It's like, once I got it off, I was like, Yeah, this is in.”
McBride, Ionescu’s defender, seemed a little miffed at a question about the last play of the game, and who could blame her? Not only was her excellent shooting night now an afterthought, but she’d also done admirable work on Ionescu for basically all of it. Ionescu had just seven points through three quarters. Unlike in Game 2, when she traded shot-hunting for playmaking in the second half, she wasn’t even racking up assists. The plodding, consistent kind of stardom is easy to stomach, less so the kind that hits you like a truck. “A great player made a good shot,” McBride said. Sometimes it’s just that simple, and all you can say is “Oh.”
