When the WNBA changed its playoff format two seasons ago, it wasn’t universally loved. Change, after all, can be a challenge — and the new format was something unique to other North American professional sports. But it was necessary, and the past two postseasons have proven it.
WNBA’s new playoff format has Lynx-Sparks rivalry front and center
The two teams will face each for the second straight year as Los Angeles goes for a repeat.
Photo by Hannah Foslien/Getty Images
We’ll watch a rematch of the Minnesota Lynx and Los Angeles Sparks next Sunday. (The week-long wait is unfortunate, but both teams wrapped up their series in just three games.) This is the reality that the WNBA knew they might face, where the league’s best two teams reside in the same conference.
Under the prior format, the WNBA played an eight-team tournament seeded by conferences — the traditional playoff format that a majority of sports use. But what if the Warriors and the Cavaliers both existed in the Western Conference? The NBA Finals have benefited from three straight duels between the league’s two best teams, but they’re lucky: both exist in different conferences, allowing them to meet in the Finals that has sparked a terrific rivalry and peak pettiness.
The WNBA is ready for the Lynx and Sparks to develop that same rivalry
Last year’s WNBA Finals lived up to every expectation, and then some. The decisive Game 5 was one of the league’s best games all season, and the stakes of a winner-take-all duel heightened the final moments, when the lead changed three times in the final 20 seconds and Nneka Ogwumike sunk the game-winning layup while falling to the ground.
Now we get that again. The series doesn’t have to live up to last year’s, but the precedent has been set. These two teams are pretty equally matched — the Lynx won 27 games in the regular season while the Sparks won 26. They each breezed through the semifinals with three-game sweeps. They have star power; they have the last two reigning WNBA MVPs; they are the two hegemonic powers of the WNBA, and there’s nothing immediately threatening to usurp their times on top of this league.
The WNBA is beaming at the possibility of these two teams emerging as rivaling powers for all those reasons above. If another team emerges — the Mercury getting help around Diana Taurasi and Brittney Griner, or the Mystics finding a more consistent identity, maybe — that’s fine. A competitive balance of power is fine. But basketball is historically a sport that has been dominated on all levels by powerhouses, by dynasties that last for years and even decades. If the WNBA does the same, that might be a good thing.
If not, we’ll at least have these Finals between the only two teams we’d want playing a five game series against each other.
