{"id":164497,"date":"2025-09-18T02:36:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-18T02:36:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/164497\/"},"modified":"2025-09-18T02:36:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-18T02:36:08","slug":"mercury-blow-out-liberty-to-force-game-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/164497\/","title":{"rendered":"Mercury blow out Liberty to force Game 3"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Satou Sabally and Alyssa Thomas each scored 15 points to help the Phoenix Mercury beat the New York Liberty 86-60 in Game 2 on Wednesday night, evening the best-of-three playoff series.<\/p>\n<p>The decisive Game 3 will be Friday night in Phoenix.<\/p>\n<p>Sabally was coming off one of the worst shooting games of her career when she was 2 for 17 in Game 1, but said in practice Tuesday that she was confident she&#8217;d bounce back. Kahleah Copper and DeWanna Bonner each had 14.<\/p>\n<p>New York had a huge emotional lift before the game with Breanna Stewart able to play <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/f3d6a6763f340f31b6eb32f9482cb911\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">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&#8217;t last long.<\/p>\n<p>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<p>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<p>Meesseman had 11 points to lead the Liberty, who only got 32 points out of their starting group.<\/p>\n<p>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<p>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<p>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>___<\/p>\n<p>AP WNBA: <a href=\"https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/wnba-basketball\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">https:\/\/apnews.com\/hub\/wnba-basketball<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"NEW YORK (AP) \u2014 Satou Sabally and Alyssa Thomas each scored 15 points to help the Phoenix Mercury&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":164498,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[355,99],"class_list":["post-164497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-nba","tag-nba","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164497","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=164497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/164497\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/164498"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=164497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=164497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=164497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}