In the NBA, no team has ever won a playoff series after being down 0-3 and, in the WNBA, no team has ever won a playoff series after being down 0-2…
After their two defeats in New York, the Aces of MVP A'ja Wilson are facing history!
“I like being in the history books, so I might as well try to be the first to do so”, laughs Chelsea Gray to motivate herself. “That has to be our mentality. »
From now on, the double reigning champions no longer have the right to make mistakes since the slightest defeat would send Liberty to the Finals. The good news is that the series now switches to Nevada, with the next two games in Las Vegas. And that Becky Hammon's troop was not far from winning Game 2.
Human nature at stake?
The bad news is that the defensive absences were still too numerous, and that Gregg Popovich's former assistant had to refrain from calling timeouts, so as not to yell too much at her players.
“I wasn’t mad at the referees, nor at the New York Liberty” she explained. “I was furious with us for the number of layups we gave up. It was already a problem in Game 1, and it was still a problem in Game 2. And if it's still a problem in Game 3, they're going to win. Because they are strong. »
In the first two matches, Sabrina Ionescu and her teammates indeed managed to provoke the “matchups” they wanted, particularly to get good shots in the racket. In Game 2, they scored 44 points near the circle, while A'ja Wilson and the Aces were collectively limited to 24 points in the paint.
“We were the best team last year. They were the best team this year. Because they built habits, they had this motivation all season, enormous attention to detail” concludes Becky Hammon. “Quite frankly, we didn’t have that motivation. We found it last month. But the feeling was different from the start [de cette série]. This is why it is difficult to do the “three-peat”. The whole league has been angry for eight months – my players are in commercials, this and that. And they are celebrities. They are distracted. That's why it's difficult. Human nature is distracting.”
