New York Liberty win first WNBA championship in franchise history

The New York Liberty won their first WNBA championship Sunday, defeating the Minnesota Lynx 67-62 in an overtime thriller to win the series in five games.

The Liberty entered the finals as the lone original WNBA franchise without a championship, having lost in their previous five finals appearances. New York most recently made the championship round last year when it lost to the Las Vegas Aces.

Game 5 required a comeback, as the Lynx raced out to a nine-point lead after the first quarter, which only shrank to seven by halftime. But New York erased the deficit with a big third quarter, outscoring the Lynx 20-10.

After a back-and-forth fourth quarter, Breanna Stewart hit two free throws with 5 seconds left to tie the game before Minnesota couldn’t score on its last possession of regulation.

The Liberty won the final period 7 to 2. It also benefited from some close calls late, including the blocking foul that sent Stewart to the line to tie the game in the fourth, which was upheld on review.

New York shot 25 free throws compared with the Lynx’s eight.

The Liberty’s Game 5 victory was largely led by Jonquel Jones, Leonie Fiebich and Nyara Sabally, as stars Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu struggled for most of the night.

Stewart scored only 13 points on 4-of-15 shooting in the clincher. Last playoffs, she shot 3-of-17 against the Aces in the last game of the finals.

In her fourth season, Ionescu provided heroics on numerous occasions in the postseason. But she scored only five points on 1-of-19 shooting in the final game of the series.

Jones, on the other hand, was a matchup problem in the paint Sunday. She finished with a team-leading 17 points as well as six rebounds. Fiebich and Sabally added 13 each.

Jones, who finished the series averaging 17.8 points per game, was named Finals MVP.

Earlier in the series, Ionescu hit one of the biggest shots in Liberty history, a 3-pointer in the waning seconds of Game 3 that proved to be the winner — and gave New York a 2-1 lead.

The series began with a shocking win by Minnesota, which won Game 1 95-93 in overtime on the road. Late in the fourth quarter, Stewart missed two free throws that could have iced the contest and then also missed the potential game-tying layup at the end of the extra period.

The Liberty rebounded with a comfortable 80-66 win in Game 2, before Ionescu’s deep 3 capped off another nail-biter in Game 3.

Game 4 was another thriller, as Minnesota held on for an 82-80 win that went down to the wire.

The Lynx were led in the playoffs by forward Napheesa Collier, an Olympic teammate of Stewart and Ionescu, who won WNBA Defensive Player of the Year after the regular season. Collier scored 22 points with seven rebounds in Sunday’s loss but fouled out with 13 seconds to go in the extra period.