They meet again: Three keys to Liberty-Aces WNBA semifinals clash

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.

Can the Aces reverse how dominant the Liberty were in their regular-season meetings?

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. As Las Vegas coach Becky Hammon said just before the first round when asked about taking the temperature of her team: “I think the temperature is rising.”

Hammon pointed to the Aces’ 93-90 loss at the Dallas Wings on Aug. 27 as particularly galling; Las Vegas gave up 32 points in the fourth quarter.

“I just kind of went crazy,” Hammon said of going off on her team’s defense after the loss.

The Aces responded, and it marked a turning point. They’ve lost just once since: 75-71 on Sept. 8 at New York, when Wilson missed the game with an ankle injury.

The Aces can look at their losses to the Liberty this way: Point guard Chelsea Gray was still out for the first one (she returned June 19) and Wilson missed the third. In the Aces’ 79-67 loss to the Liberty on Aug. 17, guard Jackie Young played but was a shadow of herself, dealing with illness and shooting 1-for-8 from the field for 4 points.

None of this is meant to diminish the Liberty’s victories or make excuses for Las Vegas. But the Aces are a better, more complete team now than they were for any of those games.

Both teams had several players step up in the first round. What’s the key matchup in this series?

Creme: In a series loaded with stars and intriguing individual matchups, the Young-Sabrina Ionescu battle might be the one that most shifts the outcome. But it’s notable that Young didn’t play to her level in any of the three regular-season meetings with New York. She averaged 8.7 points on 32.3% shooting against the Liberty (she averaged 15.8 PPG and shot 43% on the season). Even with the Aces now whole, with their Big Four all active and healthy, it’s essential that Young perform better against New York.

And not just offensively. Young will likely be matched up against Ionescu on defense in the semifinals. Given how great Ionescu was in the series clincher against Atlanta — 36 points and 9 assists — the Aces will need Young’s best at the defensive end of the floor as well.

Until Tuesday, Ionescu had been struggling. In the three games prior, including the playoff opener, she was a combined 9-of-35 from the field and totaled 21 points. But she changed her momentum Tuesday.

Young was solid at the end of the regular season as Las Vegas made a run at the No. 3 seed. However, she was quiet Tuesday — 3-for-10 from the field for 9 points, though she also added 9 rebounds and 5 assists — as Wilson (24 points, 13 rebounds), Kelsey Plum (29 points, 11-of-15 from the field) and Gray (12 points, 9 assists) had big nights. To beat the 2024 version of the Liberty, Las Vegas needs all four scoring.

What can we expect from another Wilson-Stewart showdown?

Voepel: Last season, Stewart won a tightly contested three-way race for MVP, with Wilson third. But Wilson was the dominant winner of WNBA Finals MVP; she averaged 23.8 points, 11.8 rebounds and 2.3 blocks in the Aces’ nine playoff games.

Stewart didn’t fully look like herself in the playoffs last season. She still averaged 18.4 points and 10.2 rebounds in the Liberty’s 10 playoff games, but she shot just 35.8% from the field and 19.6% from behind the arc.

Hammon said Tuesday after the Aces’ Game 2 victory over Seattle that she thought the Liberty had been playing with an edge all this season after the disappointment of losing the Finals last year. For Stewart in particular, this postseason might feel particularly big because, let’s face it, she left Seattle to win a championship in her home state. She wants that badly.

By the same token, Wilson’s fire has been blazing all this season because she wanted to prove without a doubt she was the MVP. So we’ve got two superstars who are very motivated. And it’s not that there aren’t a lot of important moving parts around them (most notably another former MVP in Liberty forward Jonquel Jones).

But it feels like a lot of this series might still come down to whomever can impose her will the most between Wilson and Stewart.