CHICAGO \u2014 Breanna Stewart scored 24 points, Rebekah Gardner had 15 and Emma Messemann added 14 as the New York Liberty beat the Chicago Sky 91-86 on Thursday night.<\/p>\n
The Liberty (27-17) start the postseason on the road against the No. 4 seed Phoenix Mercury on Sunday. New York is the fifth seed after closing the regular season on a three-game winning streak.<\/p>\n
Chicago (10-34) lost 13 of its final 15 games to end the season.<\/p>\n
Sabrina Ionescu had 11 points, 11 assists and five rebounds for New York. She became the first player in franchise history to record 11 assists without a turnover. Ionescu also had her third consecutive game with nine or more assists, tying a career high.<\/p>\n
Sky rookie Maddy Westbeld scored a career-high 25 points \u2014 13 in the fourth quarter. Kamilla Cardoso added 21 points, and Rachel Banham had 13 points and 10 assists. Angel Reese (back) did not play.<\/p>\n
Stewart put New York ahead 72-56 with 2:43 remaining in the third quarter. She did not play in the fourth quarter, finishing 9 for 14 from the field with six rebounds and three assists.<\/p>\n
Westbeld scored eight points in the final 1:43 of the fourth. Her 3-pointer pulled Chicago to 88-81. But Marine Johannes made a 3-pointer for New York with 39.5 seconds left for a 10-point lead.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"CHICAGO \u2014 Breanna Stewart scored 24 points, Rebekah Gardner had 15 and Emma Messemann added 14 as the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":26914,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,82,630],"class_list":{"0":"post-137593","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-wnba","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-sports","11":"tag-wnba"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137593"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137593\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/26914"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}