Breanna Stewart vs. Napheesa Collier duel is star attraction in WNBA Finals

NEW YORK — Breanna Stewart and Napheesa Collier have known each other for nearly a decade, going back to when Stewart hosted a high school-age Collier on a recruiting visit at Connecticut.

They won a college championship together in 2016, and Olympic golds in 2016 and this year. They’re business partners in the new Unrivaled women’s three-on-three league that will tip off this winter to help WNBA players make more money in the offseason.

And of course, they’ve played against each other many times since Collier began her pro career in 2019. But there’s never been a matchup quite like this one, their first in the WNBA Finals.

Collier won the first round, hitting the winning turnaround jumper in Game 1 and collecting 21 points, eight rebounds, six blocks and three steals. Stewart, meanwhile, had the game’s two biggest misses: a free throw to win at the end of regulation and a layup at the end of overtime.

Sunday’s Game 2 wasn’t full-blown revenge, but Stewart upheld her post-Game 1 pledge that “we’ll be ready.” She scored a game-high 21 points and tallied eight rebounds, five assists, one block and a whopping seven steals in New York’s 80-66 win.

“Yeah, absolutely, just not letting history repeat itself,” Stewart said after grabbing three of those steals in the fourth quarter.

“I think that the moment the game ended Thursday night, I was looking forward to Sunday, just to be able to kind of change things,” she later added. “Change the narrative a little bit, and know that I’m going to come out and be the same that I was — and be, obviously, better.”

Laney-Hamilton breaks out

She wasn’t the day’s only hero. Betnijah Laney-Hamilton, daughter of Philadelphia hoops scion Yolanda Laney, broke out of a month plagued by health issues with 20 points on 8-of-14 shooting, including 4 of 6 from 3-point range.

“It felt really good,” Laney-Hamilton said. “Because I know I’ve been struggling, physically, mentally, as I’ve been going through everything. So to see a glimpse of what I’m capable of, it felt really good.”

Stewart praised her teammate: “What she brings is this grit, this toughness, and all of us know she’s giving us whatever she’s got. The way that she continued to be aggressive, they were going under on her [defensively] and she knocked that thing down with confidence.”

A sellout crowd of 18,046 at the Barclays Center that included Jennifer Hudson, Fat Joe, Geno Auriemma and C. Vivian Stringer was understandably on edge for most of the afternoon. And just as the fans started to really get into things, Minnesota mounted another gritty comeback. After New York raced out to another big early lead, a 51-41 halftime margin slowly shrank to 57-53 with 1 minute, 37 seconds to go in the third quarter.

Stewart took the ball from there, and drove hard to draw fouls on back-to-back possessions. Then she blocked a layup attempt by another UConn product, Dorka Juhász, and came back the other way to hit a long 2.

The Lynx still kept coming, with a Collier layup cutting the deficit back to 66-64 with 5:30 left in the fourth. But Courtney Williams’ layup with 3:40 to go was the their last score of the game, as the hosts allowed the visitors just four shots the rest of the way.

Leonie Fiebich’s steal and 3-pointer put the Liberty up 75-66 with 1:30 left, cutting the tension in the crowd once and for all. An explosion of noise greeted the ball as it fell through the net. Two Lynx misses later, Stewart iced the cake with a put-back layup through traffic.

Settle in for a long series

There may have been some “scramble defense,” as Liberty coach Sandy Brondello called it, but she nailed her own shot when she added, “We’re down 1-0, so, you know, we should be playing like that.”

Lynx coach Cheryl Reeve wasn’t surprised that Stewart was there when it mattered.

“I don’t think that making or missing the shot or the free throw — I mean, we do this long enough, those things happen,” Reeve said. “She’s resilient. She played exactly like we thought she would. I thought she played great in Game 1.”

Reeve praised Stewart’s steals, saying “her impact defensively was something that we felt … and she’s been doing that in these playoffs.”

Now the best-of-five series is tied at a game apiece heading to Collier’s court in Minneapolis for Wednesday’s Game 3 and Friday’s Game 4. The way things are going, it won’t be surprising if New York hosts a decisive Game 5 next Sunday. (All three games will be 8 p.m. tipoffs on ESPN.)

And it certainly won’t be surprising if Collier and Stewart remain the central figures in this compelling drama.

“Obviously, you want to steal one on the road,” Collier said. “We’re really disappointed, I think, in how we played today, but excited to go home and play in front of our crowd. And we have to respond.”