New York Liberty stave off WNBA Finals sweep with 87-73 win over Las Vegas Aces

NEW YORK — After getting run over by the reigning champion Las Vegas Aces in the first two games of the WNBA Finals, the New York Liberty staved off a sweep Sunday afternoon in the best way they could.

And it wasn’t about the offensive firepower of their stars.

The most important side of the 87-73 final score was undoubtedly the second one. New York’s defense was uncharacteristically poor in Games 1 and 2, losses by 99-82 and a whopping 104-76. This time, the Liberty were locked in, holding the Aces to 33.3% field goal shooting and landing eight blocks.

New York led by just three points at the end of the first and second quarters, leaving a sold-out Barclays Center crowd of 17,143 on edge. The big swing came in the third, when Las Vegas mustered just 10 points on 4-of-22 shooting from the floor. Five of the eight blocks came in that frame: two by this year’s MVP Breanna Stewart, two by Jonquel Jones, and one by Sabrina Ionescu.

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“We can be a great defensive team, but you have to be locked in to do it — and we weren’t for two games, which was strange for me,” Liberty coach Sandy Brondello said afterward. “[In] practice, we just had to remind them what that looks like. But in the end, they know what it looks like, they know how it feels.”

Jones finished with a team-high 27 point, including four three-pointers, plus eight rebounds, three assists, three blocks, and three steals. Stewart tallied 20 points with 12 boards, four assists, and two blocks.

“We watched the film and took it personal,” Jones told the crowd in a postgame interview on the court that was barely audible over the fans’ cheers.

She was just as direct in a pregame news conference.

“You can see the disconnection out there with our team, people not being in positions where they should be and helping each other and playing together,” she said. “It kind of feels like we’re fighting many battles and Vegas is fighting a battle as a team.”

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The atmosphere met the moment, too. You don’t have to be from here to know what a New York basketball crowd looks and sounds like: at the Barclays Center, Madison Square Garden, Rucker Park, or the countless courts all over the five boroughs.

It was the Liberty’s biggest attendance since 2017, the team’s last year at Madison Square Garden before being forced to the suburbs. From “MVP!” chants for Stewart to the classic “DE-FENSE!” early and often, this was a proper Big Apple show.

Ryan Ruocco, ESPN’s lead WNBA play-by-play voice, had felt it coming. The Hudson Valley native is a classically-trained New York sports veteran, rising from Fordham to Nets and Yankees TV play-by-play to ESPN, where he also calls NBA and women’s college basketball games.

“Even people who know just that I have an association with the WNBA will bring up the Liberty to me,” he said, from friends and family to a travel agent who recognized his name. “It definitely has been a potent thread through the New York sports fabric that people have wanted to hang on to throughout this postseason run.”

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Ruocco also spoke for his WNBA broadcast partner, Rebecca Lobo, who played for the Liberty when the team was big-time in the WNBA’s early years. When last year’s squad made the playoffs and earned its first postseason home game since 2015, Ruocco recalled: “She said to me, ‘This is the first time I felt what it felt like for me’ when she played in the Garden.”

Las Vegas’ Kelsey Plum led all scorers with 29 points, and star forward A’ja Wilson had a double-double with 16 points and 11 rebounds. They might have to do even more in Game 4, because star point guard Chelsea Gray suffered a lower leg injury late in the fourth quarter and had to be assisted to the locker room in a lot of pain. The exact nature of the injury was not disclosed.

If Gray can’t play in Wednesday’s Game 4 (8 p.m., ESPN, ESPN Deportes) in Brooklyn — which seems likely, given what the TV cameras showed — Aces coach Becky Hammon said a committee of Kelsey Plum, Jackie Young, and Sydney Colson will have to step up.

“No one person’s going to replace her,” Hammon said.