Down 12 points to the Los Angeles Sparks with 4 minutes remaining Sunday, the Phoenix Mercury faced a season that was all but over. Then it almost wasn’t.
Down 12 points with four minutes remaining Sunday, the season was all but over for the Phoenix Mercury. Then, it almost wasn’t.
Diana Taurasi returned to the lineup to lead a furious rally at Talking Stick Resort Arena that brought the Mercury even with the Los Angeles Sparks with 10 seconds left in Game 3 of a WNBA bestof-5 semifinal series.
Taurasi, WNBA career scoring leader, made three 3-pointers during a 13-2 run, the last off a cross-court inbounds pass from Stephanie Talbot to 6-9 Brittney Griner, who fed Taurasi for her sixth 3-pointer.
“She’s one of the greatest players ever to play the game,” Sparks coach Brian Agler said. “She’s going to make
plays. Her final shot was the exact play we drew up in the timeout and we had her guarded and she still hit the shot. That’s how good she is.”
But Candace Parker is a superstar too.
So after a timeout, Agler put the ball in Parker’s hands and she delivered, streaking past Camille Little to the hoop for the game winner. Griner said she should have come over to help on the play and also was down for missing a baseline 15-footer that could have forced overtime.
Instead, defending champion Los Angeles escaped with an 89-87 win, setting up a WNBA Finals best-of-5 rematch with Minnesota starting Sept. 24. The Lynx won 81-70 Sunday to complete a semifinal sweep of the Washington Mystics.
“Brian drew up kind of a read play,” said Parker, who inbounded to Odyssey Sims then got the ball back. “Camille took away my right hand and forced me left. I had an option to go on a dribble handoff with Chelsea (Gray) or come back and play with O (Sims).”
Or she could put the pressure on herself with the thought of also getting to the free-throw line.
“They jumped and I just saw the lane,” said Parker, who was three rebounds shy of a triple-double (21 points, 11 rebounds and seven boards).
"Just like Diana did the last three minutes making plays, Candace did the same thing," Mercury coach Sandy Brondello said. "Maybe we could brought a little bit more congestion (in the lane). But we're not going to look back. It's no one's fault there. It's just something we can learn from and get better for next year."
The Mercury, now 0-8 in the WNBA semifinals or finals since 2015, trailed 63-60 going into the fourth quarter and still were down by three with 7:15 left. But three steals in the first four minutes of the fourth helped the Sparks go on an 11-2 run to an 81-69 lead. Los Angeles finished with 18 points off 13 Mercury turnovers, a problem through the series.
Urged on by a vocal crowd of 12,043, Phoenix refused to fold. Leilani Mitchell and Little converted steals into layups during the final run and Stephanie Talbot, in her first series appearance, played well off the bench to complement Taurasi.
The Mercury needed some scoring from the power-forward position and Little provided it with 12 in the first quarter and a playoff career-tying high 18 overall on 8-of-10 shooting. Griner, though, did not have a good shooting night (7 of 23) for her 18 points.