New York Liberty sweep Atlanta Dream, advance to WNBA semifinals

NEW YORK — Sabrina Ionescu’s final pass of the New York Liberty’s 91-82 Game 2 victory over the Atlanta Dream was to no one in particular. In fact, it was less of a chest pass, and more of a celebratory spike — an emphatic bounce of the basketball around midcourt after a 36-point, nine-assist masterclass that lifted the top-seeded Liberty into the WNBA semifinals. 

Ionescu opened Tuesday’s scoring with a 3-pointer on New York’s first possession and sealed the victory with the series’ final pair of free throws. She did plenty in between after saying the Liberty had no intentions of traveling south for a deciding Game 3.

“We don’t want to go to Atlanta,” Ionescu said Tuesday morning. “That’s not something we want to do.”

It took New York outscoring Atlanta 26-18 in the fourth quarter to prevail and sweep the Dream 2-0. Ionescu expected Tuesday’s contest to be tougher than Sunday’s Game 1, in which the Liberty never trailed and cruised to a 14-point win. Her prediction proved correct, as the Dream played with a renewed sense of urgency.

“We got to throw some punches from the very very beginning and let them know that it’s gonna be a dog fight,” Atlanta coach Tanisha Wright said Tuesday morning. 

Dream All-Star guard Allisha Gray made her first five shots and with 2:18 remaining in the opening quarter had outscored New York herself, 14–13. Still, Atlanta’s nine-point first-quarter lead and five-point halftime cushion proved insufficient. Gray’s 26 points and Rhyne Howard’s 19 were ultimately for naught. 

Ionescu made sure that New York wouldn’t have to board a flight. While she scored 13 points and dished out seven assists in the first half, she ignited the Liberty’s second-half rally, recording 11 points in the third. At one point, she scored nine consecutive points, flipping a three-point New York deficit into a two-point Liberty lead. She celebrated by waving to the crowd, pointing at teammates on assisted baskets and even high-fiving acclaimed director Spike Lee, who was sitting courtside across from the Liberty’s bench, before one layup.

Even with Breanna Stewart going scoreless from the 6:17 mark of the second quarter to the 4:27 mark of the fourth quarter, New York’s offense remained dangerous. Ionescu buried 3-pointer after 3-pointer. She hit five in all. Jones made eight of her 12 shots and finished with a 20-point, 13-rebound double-double, her first time reaching double digits in both categories since Aug. 22.

On Tuesday morning, Brondello reminded those in her locker room how they eked out a win over the No. 7 Washington Mystics in Game 2 of last year’s first round.

“I think the ones that were here last year it’s a memory,” Brondello said. “All the lessons that we learned last year carry over to this year.” 

She referred explicitly to their takeaways from that overtime victory over Washington. But Brondello might as well have been referring to what New York learned from its Finals loss to the Las Vegas Aces. Surely, those lessons will come up again soon enough. 

New York will face the Las Vegas Aces in the WNBA semifinals, which begin Sunday.

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(Photo: Catalina Fragoso / Getty Images)