And now after a 40-game regular season and three playoff rounds, just one game remains in 2024, the WNBA Finals’ Game 5 on Sunday night at Barclays Center in Brooklyn.
The Lynx forced that decisive Game 5 with Friday’s 82-80 home victory over the New York Liberty, won on Bridget Carleton’s two made free throws with two seconds left.
The Lynx shrugged off elimination and sent the best-of-five series back east for one last game — the eighth Finals Game 5 in league history and the first since Washington beat Connecticut in 2019.
The Liberty are in the WNBA Finals for the sixth time, dating to 1997. They also are 0-5 so far. The Las Vegas Aces won their second consecutive title by beating them in four games last year.
Minnesota is going for a record fifth WNBA title. The Lynx won four championships in seven years — the last in 2017 — and lost in the Finals two other times with such stars as Maya Moore, Lindsay Whalen, Seimone Augustus, Sylvia Fowles and Rebekkah Brunson.
Reeve will have been involved in six of the eight WNBA Finals Game 5s: As a Detroit Shock assistant coach in 2006 and 2007, and with the Lynx in 2015, 2016, 2017 and now 2024. Her teams won in 2006, 2015 and 2017, and sustained a blowout, 108-92 home loss to Phoenix in 2007, when the Shock lost the series’ last two games and the chance to be repeat champions.
That loss also was the first time in the WNBA’s first 11 years a visiting team won the title on the road, a challenge the Lynx now face.
