Liberty isn’t celebrating beating the Aces with the WNBA Finals on the horizon

LAS VEGAS (AP) – The celebration was relatively quiet considering how long the Liberty had been waiting to exact revenge on the Aces for beating New York on their home court in last 12 months’s WNBA Finals.

Except Sunday’s victory 76:62 it wasn’t exactly the moment Liberty had dreamed of.

They are three wins away from realizing this vision, and in a best-of-seven series against the Connecticut Sun or Minnesota Lynx, they may have home court advantage. The final series starts on Thursday.

“We made it to the finals last year,” Breanna Stewart said. “We didn’t do anything.”

The Liberty spent almost a 12 months making the most of a finals loss to a short-handed Las Vegas team, playing with a singular focus on establishing the best record in the league. Being two wins in need of a championship won’t be ok this 12 months.

While it was satisfying to beat the Aces, it wasn’t the title.

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Not only does last 12 months’s events hang in the shadow for Liberty, but there may be also a particularly close history of the organization. New York reached the Finals in three of the first 4 years of the league’s existence and lost to the Houston Comets every time. Two years later, Liberty lost to the Los Angeles Sparks.

Maybe this 12 months they may succeed.

One of the important benefits of ending the series against Las Vegas in 4 games was that New York had additional time to rest while the Sun and Lynx played a winner-take-all Game 5 on Tuesday. The winner will then should travel from Minneapolis.

“The playoff schedule is extremely condensed,” Stewart said. “If you go to the fifth match, you have one day to prepare for the first final match. This is crazy.”

Crazy may be an apt description for the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which attracts large, energetic crowds stuffed with celebrities, including famous courtsider Spike Lee.

Now that the Liberty are back in the finals, you’ll be able to expect the hype to be even louder.

“I hope it’s sold out,” Stewart said. “I hope it’s 18,000. The home field advantage is really obvious, especially when you get to that point because it’s so loud you can’t hear it. “Especially for us in the third game, it was so loud here (in Las Vegas) that we couldn’t hear, and that’s hard on the road.”