The Sun took this so well that they fired coach Stephanie White, tore up the roster, had the second-worst record (11-33) in the regular season and now face the prospect of moving to Boston, if the NBA\/WNBA get their way.<\/p>\n
The morale of the story: Those Game 3s in a best-of-5 series seem to carry a lot of weight.<\/p>\n
The last of the Lynx\u2019 four championships includes the greatest comeback from a Game 3 playoff loss in franchise history. That was 2017, Target Center was being remodeled and the playoff games were moved to Williams Arena.<\/p>\n
The Lynx lost the opener at home, 85-84, to that outstanding L.A. Sparks collection. They survived Game 2, 70-68, at Lindsay Whalen\u2019s favorite arena. And when they went to L.A. and lost Game 3, 75-64, it was looking like curtains \u2014 another Finals loss to the team that had beaten them in the full five games in 2016.<\/p>\n
Backed up to what was then the Staples Center wall, Sylvia Fowles scored 22, Rebekkah Brunson had 18, Maya Moore 15, and Whalen had eight assists, and Lynx won, 80-69. To earn a return trip to the Barn. Where they won the title, 85-76, over a tremendous opponent.<\/p>\n
So there is proof in Lynx history that a Game 3 loss in a tied series can be overcome. It\u2019s just that it would\u2019ve been much safer (and saner for the coach) not to have to do it that way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Sun took this so well that they fired coach Stephanie White, tore up the roster, had the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":185545,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[99,434],"class_list":["post-185544","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185544","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=185544"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185544\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/185545"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185544"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185544"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185544"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}