A year ago, Las Vegas beat New York to win its second straight title. Their WNBA Finals rematch opens Sunday in the semifinals.
It was inevitable, wasn’t it?
The New York Liberty and Las Vegas Aces will meet again in the WNBA playoffs. Only this time, it’s in the semifinals, 11 months after the Aces beat the Liberty in the WNBA Finals.
Top-seeded New York hosts No. 4 seed and two-time defending champion Las Vegas in a best-of-five series starting Sunday. Both teams advanced after sweeping their first-round opponents Tuesday.
The Aces struggled just enough for parts of the regular season to end up as the fourth seed. But it makes for a blockbuster series featuring the past two MVPs: Las Vegas’ A’ja Wilson and New York’s Breanna Stewart.
The Aces hit their low point after a 90-82 loss to New York on June 15 in Las Vegas; they were 6-6 at that point. Wilson vowed in the postgame news conference that things would get better. While there were still some ups and downs, the Aces have looked like themselves in recent weeks. They finished the regular season winning nine of their past 10 games, and then swept the fifth-seeded Seattle Storm 2-0 in the first round.
New York has the league’s best regular-season record (32-8) and defeated the No. 8 seed Atlanta Dream 2-0. The Liberty also swept the regular-season series with the Aces 3-0.
Wilson and Stewart were teammates and the top players for Team USA, which won its seventh consecutive Olympic gold medal at the Paris Games. Stewart, 30, and Wilson, 28, have five MVP awards between them and each have two WNBA titles.
Stewart won her championships with Seattle in 2018 and 2020, and came as a free agent to New York last season. The narrative of 2023 was Las Vegas and New York as «superteams», and they lived up to it with a Finals matchup that the Aces won 3-1.
Now, we will see which one makes it to the 2024 Finals. ESPN takes a look at the upcoming high-wattage series.
Voepel: Yes, because the Aces are now playing more like the Aces who won the past two titles, not the team that lost 13 regular-season games.
