The New York Liberty look to rebound from their first loss of the season when they take on the Minnesota Lynx on Saturday afternoon in Minneapolis.
The Liberty (4-1) are coming off a 90-81 loss to the Chicago Sky at home on Thursday. Sabrina Ionescu scored 19 points with six assists but made just 2 of 8 3-point shot attempts, and Breanna Stewart had 18 points and 10 rebounds for New York.
As a team, the Liberty didn’t seem satisfied with their overall performance against Chicago.
“It was a bad night in the office,” New York coach Sandy Brondello said, according to the New York Post. “It’s not the end of the world. The sun comes up tomorrow.”
New York is 2-0 on the road this season with wins at Washington and Indiana.
Stewart leads the team in scoring and rebounding at 19.4 points per game and 8.8 boards, and the rebounding average ranks eighth in the league. Ionescu (6.0) was tied for fifth in the WNBA in assists per game entering Friday.
The Lynx (2-1) are in the middle of a stretch of three games in four days in three different cities. After Minnesota lost 83-82 in overtime to the Connecticut Sun on the road Thursday, it faces the Liberty at home in an early afternoon game, then heads to Atlanta to play the Dream on Sunday.
Napheesa Collier, the reigning Western Conference Player of the Week, scored 31 points and grabbed 11 rebounds in the loss to the Sun. She also missed four of nine free-throw attempts, and two misses came in overtime.
“(If) I would have made my free throws, we wouldn’t have gone to overtime, when we went to overtime we could have won the game,” Collier told the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
“When you miss free, easy baskets like that, that costs you the game, I just take a lot of that responsibility.”
Entering Friday, the Lynx led the WNBA in points per game (89), field-goal percentage (45.9), assists (24.3) and steals (14.7).
–Field Level Media
