The No. 8 seed New York Liberty just swept the top-seeded Minnesota Lynx out of the playoffs.
I need someone to explain to me what a regular season is even supposed to prove anymore, because New York beat Minnesota 87-71 in Game 2, closed out the first-round series 2-0, and became the first 8-seed in the WNBA’s 30-year history to eliminate a 1-seed.
Not “one of the first.” The first. Ever.
Minnesota was the No. 1 seed in the league entering this series, and Minnesota still got outscored by 32 points combined across two games by a team that barely made the playoffs, which CBS Sports says is the worst two-game differential a No. 1 seed has ever posted in a best-of-three series. That’s not a competitive series that went sideways. That’s a beatdown with a bow on it.
And Lynx fans have extra reason to be furious about the opponent, not just the result.
These are the same two teams that met in the 2024 Finals, when New York won its first championship in five games with Jonquel Jones taking home Finals MVP. Minnesota has now lost the last meaningful series it’s played against this exact roster twice. At some point “bad matchup” stops being an excuse and starts being a pattern.
Jones set the tone again in Game 2, going for 21 points and 13 rebounds. Breanna Stewart matched her with 21 points, five boards, and four assists, and Sabrina Ionescu ran the show late with 18 points and seven assists as New York pulled away for good. ESPN’s box score has Minnesota trailing by at least seven points for the entire fourth quarter, which is a nice way of saying the outcome stopped being in doubt with a full period left to play. The Lynx shot 38.2 percent as a team, and rookie guard Olivia Miles went 1-of-8 for five points in Game 2, finishing the series with 16 points on 20 shots and two assists total.
Cheryl Reeve said before this series that she felt no pressure because she’s “already in the Hall of Fame.” Her team just got dismantled by the No. 8 seed in the entire league, and Courtney Williams put it about as plainly as it gets afterward: “New York is a great basketball team. You dig a hole for yourself and try to get out of it.”
That said, seeding isn’t nothing, and a genuinely good team can run into a bad matchup and go out early without being fraudulent. But a 32-point series margin across two games isn’t a bad matchup, it’s a full accounting.
I had actual money on this series going at least three games, which tells you everything you need to know about how much my gambling instincts are worth.
New York, for what it’s worth, does not sound surprised by any of this. Jones said after the clincher that the Liberty “understand who we are as a team…we feel like we can play with anybody and beat anybody,” and a roster that already has a championship and a Finals MVP on it saying that isn’t bravado, it’s a résumé. This is the same group that leaned on Stewart’s Game 1 outburst on Napheesa Collier to take the opener before finishing the job here. Bleacher Report put the historical weight of it in caps, and that felt about right:
https://twitter.com/BleacherReport/status/2105126843997462928
I watched the bracket breakdowns calling this the most wide-open postseason the league has had in years, and even that undersold it. Nobody had “8-seed sweeps 1-seed” on the board. Even the league’s own account sounded like it needed a second to process its own seeding chart getting shredded:
https://twitter.com/WNBA/status/2105126902365036858
Minnesota’s season is over. New York’s is somehow just getting interesting, and I don’t think anyone left in this bracket wants to see them next.
