Hello, hoopheads! Thirteen of the 15 teams in the WNBA are set to enjoy at least a second straight day off as June gives way to July, but the grind goes on for the Las Vegas Aces (14-5) and New York Liberty (12-8) (7:00 ET, Prime Video), who are set to meet for the Commissioner’s Cup tonight. The Liberty come in as one of five teams tied for the league lead with 20 games under their belts while Las Vegas’ 19 games are (obviously) tied for the next-most, and given the fact that the season is only 54 days old, it’s fair to say the teams have been rather busy. That’s particularly been the case over the last few weeks, as the Liberty are about to play their seventh game in 14 days while the Aces play a fifth in 10 days and ninth in 20 days. The good news, particularly for my Liberty as they’ve looked pretty sluggish over their last few games, is that there’s no shortage of added motivation tonight. The teams are set to split a $500,000 purse, with bonuses working out to around $30,000 for players on the winning team and $10,000 for the runners-up. The potential payday is not as momentous in the age of seven-figure WNBA salaries and minimums north of $200,000 as it was when the supermax was just shy of $250,000, but it’s still a payday. I’ve also learned a closely guarded secret in my time around athletes that I’m now going to divulge for the first time: they love winning and fucking hate losing.
Whichever team overcomes its fatigue and the opponent will become the first two-time winner of the Commissioner’s Cup, which has had five different winners over its first five iterations. The Seattle Storm won the inaugural Cup over the Connecticut Sun in 2021 behind MVP and current Liberty star Breanna Stewart, whose speech in the aftermath has been playing during breaks on League Pass lately and reminding me of a time when she actually made 3-pointers on a regular basis. The Aces beat the Chicago Sky the following season, with the “Point Gawd” Chelsea Gray winning MVP, followed by a 19-point Liberty win over the Aces in 2023 in Las Vegas behind Jonquel Jones’ MVP performance. That game is set to make this one the first rematch for Cathy’s Cup. The Minnesota Lynx took down the Liberty in 2024 behind an MVPhee performance from Napheesa Collier in the second straight WNBA Finals preview in the Cup finale, both of which portended a Finals matchup which went the opposite way. The Aces won the 2023 WNBA title over the Liberty and the Liberty took the 2024 crown from over the Lynx.
Last season, the Indiana Fever became the fourth double-digit winner in the Cup final when they beat the Lynx, with that also marking the first time since 2021 that neither participant went on to the WNBA Finals (five of 10 Cup finalists have done so). Only one Cup finalist didn’t reach at least the WNBA semifinals, with that happening when Stewart missed the 2021 postseason due to a foot injury suffered that September. Perhaps the most curious bit of Cup lore so far is that home teams have gone 0-4 with the trophy on the line following a neutral-court win for the Storm in 2021. I will note, however, that the Liberty’s 2024 loss wasn’t at Barclays Center due to a scheduling conflict, but was instead held at Long Island’s UBS Arena. I choose to believe the Libs would’ve won that game — the only close Cup final so far, which Minnesota won 94-89 — if it was played at the corner of Flatbush and Atlantic.
A further testament to how much basketball these teams have been playing is how long ago it feels like it was that the Liberty beat the Aces in their only meeting this season, despite that game occurring exactly a week ago. The final margin of 87-76 didn’t really represent how one-sided the game felt for about 30 minutes from the middle of the first quarter through the middle of the fourth, but the Liberty did ultimately need 3-pointers from Jones, Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu over the final three minutes to hold off the Aces’ late push. Significant edges at the 3-point line (where New York was 13-for-31 compared to Las Vegas’ 8-for-27) and free throw line (14-for-16 compared to 6-for-8) made the biggest differences for the Liberty, although they also had a slight edge on the boards (34 to 32) and similar slight advantages in field goal percentage and fouls committed. Stewart led all players with 20 points while she and the Liberty collectively held the GOAT A’ja Wilson to a season-low 16 points on 7-for-18 from the field (38.9%, her first time under 40% this season) and the Aces to their third-lowest offensive rating so far according to Her Hoop Stats (96.2 points per 100 possessions).
Las Vegas comes in having won two in a row since losing to the Liberty, both of them fairly one-sided games, against the Dallas Wings (99-84) and Chicago Sky (107-99), with the latter having tightened up a bit in the fourth quarter. Like in the Aces’ first 18 games this season, all it really took to secure the win against Chicago was playing a little bit of defense — in this case, about a second quarter’s worth of it, which is when Vegas created the separation it maintained the rest of the way. The reigning champs improved to 13-0 this season when holding their opponent under the fairly high bar of posting an offensive rating of at least 110 points per 100 possessions according to Her Hoop Stats, but they’re 1-5 when opponents reach that threshold. The win over Chicago turned scary for the Aces, however, when Wilson spent a couple of moments on the floor and then a couple of minutes in the locker room after seeming to roll her right ankle.
That roll of the ankle is presumably the reason Wilson is listed as questionable on Las Vegas’ injury report with a right leg injury, but I’d be shocked if the GOAT didn’t at least try to play with a trophy on the line. The injury also didn’t prevent Wilson returning to the game against the Sky and finishing with 30 points, 15 rebounds, 4 steals and 3 blocks, an unsurprisingly unprecedented stat line in WNBA history (she’s pretty much the only one I’d suspect of having done it anyway). As a Liberty fan, I think it would probably be wise for Las Vegas to play it safe with the four-time WNBA MVP and the league’s top scorer with 25.7 points per game this season, but I don’t think Aces coach/Liberty ring of honor member/Basketball Hall of Famer Becky Hammon is going to take my sage advice.
(UPDATE: Wilson was ruled out as of the 10:00 am injury report, and I am both somewhat shocked and wish her a speedy recovery)
The win over Chicago also notably saw Las Vegas get reserve guard Chennedy Carter back from a two-week absence due to an illness which, thanks to the busy schedule, cost her five games. Carter scored 11 points in just shy of 16 minutes — her longest run in her last four appearances dating back to late May — against her former team and is not listed on the injury report as of Monday night.
My Liberty, on the other hand, have lost a pair of fairly one-sided games since leaving Las Vegas — always the Sheryl Crow song over the Nic Cage movie when making that reference, despite my undying affection for Nic Cage movies — first giving Stewart the night off against her former team while letting the Seattle Storm snap a franchise-record 11-game skid on Friday (99-88) and then being held to a season-low 67 points on Sunday at Ballhalla while falling to 0-2 against the Golden State Valkyries. Some of that season-low owes to the Valkyries’ league-slowest tempo, which Golden State coach Natalie Nakase seems intent on ratcheting to its slowest level against the Liberty. That said, it also wasn’t a good offensive performance. The Liberty finished that loss with a rating of 97.1 points per 100 possessions according to Her Hoop Stats, their fourth-lowest this season and worst since a three-game skid in late May. New York has been almost as tough to beat when it plays even decent offense, going 11-2 so far when it has a triple-digit offensive rating, with those two losses coming on the road on a buzzer-beating putback by Sarah Ashlee Barker and a buzzer-beating 3-pointer by Nneka Ogwumike. They’re 1-6, however, when they don’t reach 100 points per 100 possessions according to HHS, and only the league’s bottom five teams have more such games — Connecticut (13 of 19), Portland, Seattle (both 10 of 20), Chicago (8 of 19) and Phoenix (8 of 20). Being a fair-minded nuggetmonger, I will note that four other teams (Washington, Los Angeles, Dallas and Golden State) also have seven games under 100 points per 100 possessions, so the “only the worst teams have more” framing was perhaps a bit harsh, if accurate.
Stewart’s team-best 19.2 points per game have her well ahead of pace to put up at least 18 for the 10th time in as many seasons to start her career, extending her own WNBA-record streak. No other player except Wilson, who’s on pace for her eighth such season in nine years, had more than seven 18-ppg seasons over their first 10 in the WNBA. Stewart’s 3-point struggles over the last few of her still-highly-productive seasons are not news, but I made them Chekhov’s Stewart’s 3-point struggles when I referenced them earlier, so let’s fire that gun on the mantle already. After a 3-for-6 showing over her last two games, Stewart’s hitting just 25.4% from deep on 528 attempts in all competitions — WNBA regular/postseason/Cup, Unrivaled, Olympic and Fenerbahçe games — since the start of the 2023 WNBA playoffs. I must confess, I had forgotten to include Stewie’s 2-for-3 effort in the 2024 Cathy’s Cup finale in these numbers until now, but that outing doesn’t move the needle much more than the last two games. All of this is why I think it’s time to introduce the Breanna Stewart 3-Point Challenge, which functions just like a Coach’s Challenge in that she starts the game with one attempt, and if she makes it, she gets another one. I don’t even think we should limit her to one bonus attempt per game like the WNBA does to coaches, which it does, I guess, because it stops mattering once the official has fucked up three times. Once Stewie misses from deep, however, that’s that till the next game. Much like maintaining one’s Harry Potter fandom in 2026, I don’t think the Libs should make this challenge public. It’s the kind of thing best kept to yourself, but it’s also high time they stop throwing possessions away on shots that are being left wide open for a reason.