There’s a number that explains everything wrong with the Minnesota Lynx’s Game 1, and it isn’t 91 or 75. It’s 61.1, Breanna Stewart’s shooting percentage against the exact defender Minnesota built its whole season around trusting.

Napheesa Collier spent most of Sunday afternoon guarding Stewart. Collier is a two-time WNBA All-Defensive First Team honoree (2024 and 2025) and the league’s 2024 Defensive Player of the Year, a decorated wing defender who has known Stewart’s game since their days as UConn teammates. That resume is a big reason Minnesota felt comfortable carrying the WNBA’s No. 1 seed into this series. Stewart finished with 34 points, 12 rebounds, 6 assists, 2 steals and 2 blocks on 11-of-18 shooting as the Liberty stunned the top-seeded Lynx 91-75 in Game 1 of their first-round series. One number, one matchup, one very bad night for the No. 1 seed’s supposed answer.

Let’s be precise about what got exposed, because it isn’t Collier’s résumé. It’s the idea that this series was ever a formality.

The Box Score Minnesota Couldn’t Afford

Strip away the seeding and the storylines and look at what actually happened on the floor. Stewart shot 61.1 percent from the field against a defense-first roster that finished the regular season with the WNBA’s best record. That’s a possession-by-possession result against the specific player assigned to stop her, in the exact building where the scouting report had all season to get it right.

The context that makes this sting: Collier isn’t a generic assignment. She and Stewart were teammates at UConn, and TSN’s game recap notes Collier drew the primary defensive assignment on her former teammate for most of the game. Minnesota didn’t get caught scrambling into a mismatch. They sent their best available answer, a two-time All-Defensive First Team wing who has studied Stewart’s footwork and release for a decade, and Stewart still shot better than six times out of ten.

Collier’s own night was fine in isolation: 12 points, 5 rebounds and 3 assists, per Fox 9’s box score breakdown. The failure is narrower than a bad game across the board — it’s the single assignment that mattered most, in the one game Minnesota genuinely could not afford to lose it.

Who Guarded Breanna Stewart in Game 1?

Napheesa Collier, Minnesota’s two-time All-Defensive First Team forward and Stewart’s former UConn teammate, drew the primary defensive assignment on Stewart for most of Game 1. Stewart scored 34 points on 11-of-18 shooting anyway as the Liberty upset the No. 1-seeded Lynx 91-75, The Score reported.

The record book needs a correction, though: Collier is not this season’s reigning Defensive Player of the Year. She won the league’s official Kia DPOY award in 2024, and the 2025 honor was shared by Alanna Smith and A’ja Wilson. The 2026 winner hasn’t been named yet, though Atlanta’s Angel Reese just collected the Associated Press’s separate defensive honor, a media-panel award that isn’t the same trophy. Collier’s credentials are still real. Back-to-back All-Defensive First Team nods in 2024 and 2025 put her in rare company, and she remains one of the more switchable, instinctive wing defenders in the league. The honest framing is a decorated defender losing a marquee individual matchup, not a reigning-DPOY collapse. The former doesn’t need an inflated title to make the point.

Two Points From a Franchise Record

Stewart’s 34 points landed two shy of the Liberty’s own franchise record for a single playoff game, a number The Score’s recap flagged alongside her full stat line. In plain terms: on the road, against the best regular-season team in the league, in a building that had every incentive to rattle her, Stewart put together one of the two or three best individual scoring nights in her franchise’s playoff history. She did it efficiently, not by chucking. Eighteen shot attempts for 34 points is a true shooting clip that would headline an MVP case in a lower-stakes month.

History matters here more than the record chase. This is a rematch of the 2024 WNBA Finals, which the Liberty won in five games over this same Minnesota core. The Lynx spent the regular season building the league’s best record specifically to avoid a repeat: home-court advantage, the top seed, presumably a cleaner matchup against New York. Game 1 said none of that mattered once the ball went up.

The official league account caught the sequence that told the story best:

https://twitter.com/WNBA/status/2104301932739482094

None of that matters if you don’t understand the shot profile behind it. Stewart scored at an elite clip against a top individual defender, in a scheme built by a staff that had a full season to prepare plus two years of Finals history to draw from. When the sample is that clean and the shooting percentage still lands above 60, you’re looking at a real individual mismatch dressed up as a coin-flip series.

What This Means for Game 2

The data here is unambiguous about the stakes. Game 2 is Tuesday in New York, where the Liberty can close this best-of-three series out entirely. If it goes to a Game 3, that game is back at Target Center in Minneapolis, and Minnesota would need to have solved the Stewart-Collier matchup by then or found a credible plan B: doubling earlier, sending help from the weak side, giving up switches that put a different body on Stewart at the cost of exposure elsewhere.

I ran the framing three different ways and kept landing in the same place. One game doesn’t erase the résumé that made Minnesota the No. 1 seed all season. It doesn’t need to. The record was earned against every other opponent over five months. This series only needs three games, and the Lynx just lost the first one to the exact matchup their seeding was supposed to neutralize. A No. 1 seed can survive a bad shooting night from an opponent. It’s much harder to survive its best individual defender getting solved in the game that mattered most so far. For more on how the rest of the postseason field stacks up, our WNBA playoff coverage is tracking every series.

Give me the New York Liberty to close this out Tuesday. Minnesota has two years of history and one more home game to find an answer nobody’s found yet.