Only three teams have reached the WNBA Commissioner’s Cup championship game twice, but this season, the New York Liberty and the Minnesota Lynx could both make it three. They sit atop their respective conference standings through one week of Cup play.
The Liberty should have a decent chance to put themselves in an even more comfortable position tonight, as they face the cellar-dwelling Connecticut Sun at 7 p.m. ET. Connecticut will host the game at the Mohegan Sun Arena, where it is playing its final season before relocating to become the Houston Comets next spring.
Each player will have a key absence; for New York, Sabrina Ionescu (back) remains out, while the Sun’s Brittney Griner (rib) has the same designation. Connecticut might also be without Kennedy Burke (illness), who’s questionable.
The Liberty are 12.5-point favorites on DraftKings Sportsbook (-850 Moneyline), with the total set at 163.5 points. The Sun are +575 on the Moneyline. Below, I’ll break down the day’s first matchup and offer a prediction.
Liberty at Sun prediction, pick
Even though Ionescu has only played one game this season, Natasha Cloud left in free agency, and Satou Sabally has been limited to just six games because of injury, New York has still been pretty competitive, sitting fifth overall in the standings with the eighth-best offensive rating and third-best defensive rating in basketball. Pauline Astier and Marine Johannes have filled in nicely for Cloud’s and Ionescu’s spots in the starting lineup. Meanwhile, Connecticut is in the second season of what will likely be a prolonged rebuild, as at 2-10, it has the WNBA’s worst record, second-worst offensive rating, and second-worst defensive rating. Nine of the Sun’s 14 players are rookies or second-year pros (as compared to just four of the Liberty’s), so the road ahead is long. If Burke sits, no active player will have been born in the 1900s.
Connecticut has actually been better at penetrating the interior, averaging 5.1 more restricted-area attempts per game than New York, but the Liberty have been better at finishing, converting their layups at the league’s second-highest rate. The Sun’s interior edge could be limited somewhat today without Griner, as she ranks second on the team in restricted-area tries per game, and among all players who average at least three shots per game in that zone, she ranks eighth in shooting percentage. New York is better defensively, as it has conceded the fewest layups per game at the same percentage as Connecticut. Its primary rim protector, Jonquel Jones, is a four-time All-Defensive honoree and one-time blocks champ, while the Sun will surely be worse without Griner, a two-time DPOY and eight-time blocks champ.
Additionally, Griner’s absence could matter on the boards. The Liberty, who start Jones (six-foot-six), Breanna Stewart (six-foot-four), and Leonie Fiebich (six-foot-four), rank fourth in the league in rebounding percentage, and while Connecticut ranks a solid eighth, it has been marginally worse without Griner on the court, and its tallest starter tonight will likely be six-foot-three Aaliyah Edwards. The young, scrappy Sun have been a better transition offense team, but they’ve also been extremely turnover-prone and haven’t hustled back in transition. They also have a significantly negative foul differential, while New York’s has been slightly positive.
Even without Ionescu, the Liberty can still shoot, and Connecticut can’t. New York ranks third in three-point attempts per game and fifth in three-point percentage, while the Sun rank second-to-last in attempts and dead last in percentage. That should be pretty sustainable for the Liberty; Marine Johannes shot 43.7% from deep across a full season in 2022, Fiebich could be due for some improvement after hitting at least 42.5% from deep in each of her first two WNBA campaigns, and 17.6% is an outlier for Stewart. It’s hard to suggest that Connecticut will continue to make only a quarter of its three-point attempts, but none of its most frequent shooters besides Burke have ever had much of a track record in the league. Defensively, both teams have allowed pretty high percentages, though New York has given up more attempts.
The Liberty are a particularly bad matchup for the Sun because of their play style. Connecticut isn’t well-suited to take advantage of their biggest defensive weakness (their propensity to give up relatively easy threes), and New York’s solid interior defense and rebounding could prove problematic for the Sun, since they like to operate from inside the arc. Connecticut has scored at least 75 points in each of its past three games, but it failed to reach that mark either in the season opener against the Liberty or in any of its last three games without Griner.
