It\u2019s a strong plan not yet discovered in its full and best form. The WNBA and Ally tempered its promotion by making clear these games were both \u201cclassic and emerging rivalries,\u201d and matchups of \u201csome of the league\u2019s best superstars\u201d going head-to-head. They are, by the rivalry definition, \u201cgames of consequence,\u201d a mainstay phrase of Engelbert’s, though still missing necessary kindling for the fire.<\/p>\n
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The event mirrors other major professional sports leagues and their TV partners, brightening dead spots in the calendar with regional rivalries. The NBA, which launched its version in 2022, delivered a trim 10-game slate over five days in January<\/a>. MLB celebrated its first \u201cRivalry Weekend<\/a>\u201d with a slate of 15 matchups in May. A shortened timeframe and regionality boosted the focus.<\/p>\n But the WNBA can lean into that only so much. The brutally condensed schedule makes targeted matchups difficult. Its 13 teams are spread out, often without touching any team\u2019s state boundary, let alone sharing a city. The NBA highlighted New York\u2019s Nets and Knicks, while MLB scheduled the Subway Series between the Yankees and Mets.<\/p>\n Divisive? That\u2019s the point. The WNBA is still working on that type of healthy heat between fan bases.<\/p>\n A mass infusion of new fans views the Chicago-Indiana series as a rivalry between<\/a> Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, but its roots run deeper through decades of back-and-forth results<\/a> sending the other team home along I-65. Indiana won another lopsided one, 92-70, on Saturday. The expansion Golden State Valkyries have no history to base a rivalry on, but since their franchise announcement, one with the in-state Los Angeles Sparks bubbled. The Valkyries won that matchup, 72-59, on Saturday in an important result for playoff positioning<\/a>.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n The unfortunate reality is that historical significance, a key element to a rivalry, is trickier to find in the 29-year-old WNBA. When franchises folded en masse in the 2000s, the best rivalries immediately ceased. The Sparks and Sacramento Monarchs traded postseason success<\/a> against each other before Sacramento, an original team, folded in 2009. The New York Liberty met the Houston Comets in three of the first four WNBA Finals, igniting flares between the two conference standouts. The four-time champion Comets folded in 2008. The Liberty never made it back to the Finals until 2023.<\/p>\n The WNBA website\u2019s promotion of the week\u2019s best games<\/a> reads more as fun matchups of consequence than rivalries. And if the schedule makers are to be believed, New York is now a rival of a quarter of the league. They play three different teams over four games, all of which headline the league\u2019s approach.<\/p>\n Wednesday night\u2019s clash in Las Vegas makes complete sense as the Rivals Week fulcrum. The 2023 \u201csuperteams\u201d (sans leotards, sorry A\u2019ja<\/a>) sped to a meeting in the WNBA Finals. Las Vegas won it in four, celebrating in a silenced Barclays Center arena. They clawed through must-watch regular season games in 2024 and served up a Finals-worthy semifinal in 2024. New York won it in four, ending the Aces\u2019 bid for a three-peat on their own floor. Minor grievances littered off the court, from Kelsey Plum\u2019s post-Finals clincher comments<\/a> to a pair of Sabrina Ionescu\u2019s shoes gone missing in Vegas.<\/a><\/p>\n That they\u2019re heading in different directions<\/a> doesn\u2019t lighten the intensity.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n The Liberty first played on Tuesday in Los Angeles, a contrived rivalry built more on disdain between the locals of two coastal cities than any team history. Pitting the largest two TV markets against each other is big business for broadcasters. These two played the first-ever WNBA regular season game on June 21, 1997. Rivals is a stretch.<\/p>\n Even a week of matchups with the Lynx is taking liberties in the rivalry department. True rivals are not made in one two-week span, even if it is in October. (The Commissioner\u2019s Cup final should also count<\/a>.) And the league bobbled its placement, keeping the first rematch on the back burner<\/a> until two weeks after All-Star and slamming two Lynx-Liberty games into an already bloated Rivals Week.<\/p>\n If the point is elite, intense competition, the WNBA missed the mark entirely. A vital element to rivalries is allowing them room to breathe. A full week of antics leads up to the Friday night football game against the county rival. Even in the everyday baseball environment, schedulers aren\u2019t packing multiple rivals into a week like sardines. No air, and it\u2019s quite possible the fire simply dies.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n The short-handed Liberty, clearly the star of Rivals Week, will be happy to head home at midnight. By Thursday, they will have played three rivals in four days with a cross-country flight shoved in there while Minnesota kicks back at home. And they\u2019ll still have another \u201crivalry\u201d game with the Lynx before it’s over.<\/p>\n Reeve said on Sunday she was tired of talking about the schedule, which for the Lynx features three consecutive games against the Liberty. She didn\u2019t bite on a single rivalry inquiry.<\/p>\n You can’t talk about WNBA rivalries without talking about Maya Moore’s Lynx and Candace Parker’s Sparks of the 2010s. (Photo by Leon Bennett\/Getty Images )<\/p>\n (Leon Bennett via Getty Images)<\/p>\n Then one she sought appeared. Because absent this week is the obvious rivalry the Lynx and Sparks built in the late 2010s<\/a>, an era warped by time surging forward too fast amid the league\u2019s growth. Los Angeles, led then by future Hall of Famer Candace Parker, upset the Lynx dynasty led by Maya Moore and company in the deciding 2016 Game 5 with an iconic second-chance bucket<\/a> by Nneka Ogwumike in the final seconds.<\/p>\n Advertisement<\/p>\n Every meeting in 2017 bore that weight. The star power of Ogwumike, Parker, Chelsea Gray, Moore, Sylvia Fowles, Rebekkah Brunson, Seimone Augustus and Lindsay Whalen made every matchup compelling. They played another five-game Finals series, which the Lynx won.<\/p>\n Maybe that heat died without those players. The Lynx have won 14 of their last 16 meetings dating to 2020. Or maybe it\u2019s lost in the unused appendix of history. Reeve acquiesced that, depending on what happens down the stretch of the 2025 regular season and postseason, the Lynx could repeat the rivalry development with New York.<\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019re there yet,\u201d Reeve said. \u201cBut the league says we are.\u201d<\/p>\n The WNBA will take whichever ones it can build.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Chicago versus Connecticut? How about Golden State vs. Washington? Or, wait \u2026 New York vs. Las Vegas. Ah.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":66430,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[629],"tags":[724,49,735,48,11628,12199,10946,6681,4785,1612,5904,631,14735,1483,1522,632,736,6706,3430,3457,4653,4644,82,3642,630,1505],"class_list":["post-66429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-angel-reese","tag-ca","tag-caitlin-clark","tag-canada","tag-cathy-engelbert","tag-chelsea-gray","tag-cheryl-reeve","tag-chicago","tag-connecticut","tag-golden-state-valkyries","tag-indiana","tag-kelsey-plum","tag-knicks","tag-las-vegas","tag-los-angeles","tag-los-angeles-sparks","tag-minnesota-lynx","tag-nets","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-liberty","tag-nneka-ogwumike","tag-sabrina-ionescu","tag-sports","tag-washington","tag-wnba","tag-yankees"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66429","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=66429"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/66429\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/66430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=66429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=66429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=66429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"LOS](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/08\/318b5550-77bb-11f0-97b7-936c0fbddf8d.jpeg\"\/)
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