{"id":138104,"date":"2025-09-12T07:56:09","date_gmt":"2025-09-12T07:56:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/138104\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:56:09","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T07:56:09","slug":"valkyries-fall-aces-rise-in-standings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/138104\/","title":{"rendered":"Valkyries fall, Aces rise in standings"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"play\"<\/p>\n

Fever clinch playoffs without Caitlin Clark<\/p>\n

USAT’s Meghan Hall breaks down the Indiana Fever team as they head into the playoffs with several notable injuries to their roster.<\/p>\n

Sports Pulse<\/p>\n

The final day of the 2025 WNBA regular season<\/a> mimicked a game of musical chairs.<\/p>\n

Eight teams had punched their tickets to the playoffs coming in,<\/a> but only three teams had locked in their playoff seeding entering Thursday’s slate — meaning a lot was at stake.<\/p>\n

The Golden State Valkyries<\/a> controlled their own destiny, needing a win over the No. 1 overall seed Minnesota Lynx<\/a> to lock in the No. 7 seed. The Valkyries weren’t up to the challenge, suffering a 72-53 loss at Target Center to end the season on a three-game skid. With the loss, the Valkyries drop to the No. 8 seed and, to add insult to injury, set up a first-round matchup against the Lynx, who they lost to four times in the regular season.<\/p>\n

More: 2025 WNBA playoff bracket: Everything you need to know from matchups to X-factors<\/a><\/p>\n

The Las Vegas Aces<\/a> also held their future in their hands. With their win over the Los Angeles Sparks<\/a> on Thursday, which marks their 16th consecutive win of the season, the Aces moved up to the No. 2 seed to face the No. 7 Seattle Storm in the first-round. The Aces are 2-2 against the Storm.<\/p>\n

Here’s how the standings shake out after those key matchups:<\/p>\n

WNBA first-round matchups bracketNo. 1 Minnesota Lynx vs. No. 8 Golden State Valkyries<\/a>No. 2 Las Vegas Aces vs. No. 7\u00a0Seattle StormNo. 3 Atlanta Dream vs. No. 6 Indiana FeverNo. 4 Phoenix Mercury vs. No. 5 New York Liberty<\/p>\n

The USA TODAY app gets you to the heart of the news \u2014 fast.\u00a0Download for award-winning coverage, crosswords, audio storytelling, the eNewspaper and more<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fever clinch playoffs without Caitlin Clark USAT’s Meghan Hall breaks down the Indiana Fever team as they head…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135857,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[10228,3044,505,732,461,49,48,8522,10230,1612,1458,3460,7079,3043,632,8521,8456,2598,736,2034,5268,3457,44,1333,2042,8455,3461,36547,3009,7675,1611,12195,457,6367,82,865,1426,6363,1440,1335,10231,1459,630,26214,4134,4143,5841],"class_list":["post-138104","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-aces","tag-angeles","tag-atlanta","tag-atlanta-dream","tag-basketball","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-dream","tag-golden","tag-golden-state-valkyries","tag-las","tag-las-vegas-aces","tag-liberty","tag-los","tag-los-angeles-sparks","tag-lynx","tag-mercury","tag-minnesota","tag-minnesota-lynx","tag-neutral","tag-new","tag-new-york-liberty","tag-news","tag-overall","tag-overall-neutral","tag-phoenix","tag-phoenix-mercury","tag-playoffs","tag-scores","tag-seattle","tag-seattle-storm","tag-sparks","tag-sport","tag-sport-scores-u0026-statistics","tag-sports","tag-sports-news","tag-state","tag-statistics","tag-storm","tag-u0026","tag-valkyries","tag-vegas","tag-wnba","tag-wnba-playoffs","tag-womens","tag-womens-sports","tag-york"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138104","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=138104"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/138104\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135857"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=138104"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=138104"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=138104"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}