– by Adesina O. Koiki
A Lot of Sports Talk editor-in-chief
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NEW YORK — It’s a good thing Jonquel Jones has a bad memory, a fact she admitted willingly after tonight’s game as she tried to recollect the moment last month that her team, the New York Liberty, accepted their fate as an underachiever in 2026 despite the championship pedigree littered across the current roster.
But like Agents J and K in Men in Black, possessing the Neuralyzer mind-erasing tool, the Women in Black (uniforms) who took the basketball court tonight followed Jones memory-lapsing lead, putting their substandard regular season aside just in time to make some WNBA Playoffs history … and who knows how much more of tht over the next month.
The Liberty’s Big Three of Jones, Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu combined for 60 points as eighth-seeded New York never trailed in eliminating the No. 1 seed, the Minnesota Lynx, 87-71 in Game 2 inside Barclays Center on Tuesday evening and sweeping the first-round series. The Liberty become the first No. 8 seed to win a first-round series in the current WNBA Playoffs format, though, as Ionescu said soon after the game in an on-court interview …
“We know we’re not a traditional No. 8 seed.”
Number eight seeds don’t have four-fifths of their starting lineup sporting WNBA championship rings from a title won less than two whole years ago. They also don’t have two former WNBA league MVPs. Yet those teams aren’t usually in the predicament the Liberty found themselves in at the end of last week: the last team to qualify for the playoffs, sputtering through a season of injuries, inconsistency and transition that left even the most optimistic of Liberty supporters doubting their past success was going to be anything indicative of 2026 playoff outcomes.
Then the series started on Sunday against the Lynx, as much of a Leviathan as there has been in league history. But 34 points from Breanna Stewart in Game 1 and the Big Three firing on all cylinders in front of a deafening Barclays Center two days later, and, all of a sudden, almost 18,000 people in the arena and many more New York supporters plunged into temporary amnesia about the four months that have passed before this week.
*Editor’s note: Above the byline is the photo gallery from Tuesday evening’s game, with photos taken by ALOST staff photographer Vinnie Lucia. After clicking on a photo to enlarge the picture, press the left and right arrow buttons on either side of the caption to scroll through the rest of the pictures that appear on the first page. Also, click on the numbers and/or arrow appearing immediately below the picture grid to load the next set of photos. There are 21 pictures in total.
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