after spraining the MCL<\/a> in her left knee in overtime of Game 1 on Sunday. She was in her customary starting spot, but was mostly ineffective with just six points in 20 minutes. The boost from Stewart playing didn’t last long.<\/p>\n After the 75-69 Game 1 loss, Phoenix players felt they missed a lot of shots they normally hit. Those shots were falling on Wednesday night.<\/p>\n
Phoenix led by 14 at the half and scored the first six points of the third quarter to take a 20-point lead. The Mercury held the Liberty without a basket in the third until Emma Meesseman scored with 1:35 left in the period. New York missed its first 12 shots before that. <\/p>\n
Meesseman had 11 points to lead the Liberty, who only got 32 points out of their starting group.<\/p>\n
Phoenix took control of the game in the second quarter behind Sabally and Thomas. The Mercury led 36-30 before going on a 13-0 run to extend the advantage to 19 with just under 3 minutes left in the half.<\/p>\n
New York got within 51-37 at the half as Natasha Cloud hit a 3-pointer from the corner with 1.8 seconds left that brought the sellout crowd which included Spike Lee, Tracee Ellis Ross and Sue Bird to its feet. <\/p>\n
The Liberty could have been a bit closer, but they struggled from the foul line in the first half. Sabrina Ionescu, who shot 93% from the foul line during the regular season, missed her first four free throws before finally hitting one.<\/p>\n
——<\/p>\n
AP WNBA: https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/wnba-basketball<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK — \u2014 Satou Sabally and Alyssa Thomas each scored 15 points to help the Phoenix Mercury…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":151701,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[49,48,82,630],"class_list":{"0":"post-151700","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\/151700","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=151700"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/151700\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/151701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=151700"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=151700"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=151700"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}