The No. 1 seed does not usually spend the last week of September fighting for its life. The Lynx do. Minnesota led Game 1 44-40 at the break, then got outscored 51-31 the rest of the way, fouled its two best defenders off the floor, and lost the opener at home to the eighth-seeded Liberty, 91-75. Our full recap traced how a mismatch on paper turned into a rout on the floor.
Now it is a one-game season. This is a best-of-three, Minnesota is down 0-1, and Game 2 tips Tuesday night in Brooklyn. Lose, and a 33-11 regular season, the best record in basketball, is over. Win, and Game 3 comes home to Target Center on Thursday, where the No. 1 seed was supposed to hold every edge that mattered. The Liberty beat the Lynx for the 2024 title and took the season series 2-1 this year; a No. 8 seed that wins by 16 at Target Center is not a fluke, it’s a bad matchup with a championship pedigree.
The matchups that decide it
Start with the foul math, because it decided Game 1. Napheesa Collier, a two-time MVP runner-up and the Lynx’s best defender, drew the Breanna Stewart assignment. It barely mattered. Stewart went for 34 points, 12 rebounds and six assists. She got to the line 12 times, and both Collier and Natasha Howard fouled out. Every whistle on Collier handed Stewart a smaller, slower defender. Minnesota does not win this game unless Collier plays 35 clean minutes.
Then Olivia Miles. The rookie who ran the WNBA’s best offense all year looked like a first-timer in her playoff debut: 11 points on 3-of-12 with a single assist. The Lynx offense runs through her; it cannot produce another line like that and survive an elimination game on the road.
The third one is the three-point line. New York shot 13-of-25 from deep, with Leonie Fiebich burying four of five, all after halftime. Minnesota built the league’s best defense on running shooters off the arc; on Sunday it watched the ball fly.
The storyline: Collier has to take it over
The loudest note out of Game 1 was that Minnesota’s stars went quiet. The bench, led by Nia Brodie’s 16, kept it respectable while the roster’s stars failed to deliver. The season now asks Collier, averaging 16.8 points and 6.9 rebounds a night, to do what the coverage has demanded since Sunday night: stop being only the defensive anchor and start being the closer. Anchoring the defense is not enough when the defense fouls out from under you.
The thing that beats this Liberty team
Guard without fouling. Make Stewart earn everything at the rim while fresh bodies stay on the floor. Run Fiebich and Sabrina Ionescu off the arc and force twos. And get the stars going early, so the bench isn’t asked to win a road playoff game by itself: Miles settling in the first five minutes, Kayla McBride finding the shot that abandoned her (she missed her first five threes).
What to watch
Watch the first quarter. Minnesota’s whole Game 1 unraveled once the fouls piled up in the third; a clean start on the road buys Reeve the rotations she never had on Sunday. Watch Miles’s first touches for whether the pressure gets to her. And watch the free-throw disparity: if the Lynx are trailing the Liberty to the line again, the same movie is playing.
Prediction: Lynx by four. The better roster gets one desperate night from Collier and drags this back to Target Center for Thursday — but only just.
