the field was released<\/a>.<\/p>\nOn Tuesday, the WNBA announced a group of six contestants for the 3-point shootout: Bridget Carleton, Azzi Fudd, Natisha Hiedeman, Rhyne Howard, Marina Mabrey and Janelle Sala\u00fcn. League sources told The Athletic that the WNBA also invited Ionescu, Caitlin Clark and Kayla McBride to participate, but the trio declined.<\/p>\n
Ionescu denied that report, saying she was surprised to see it and wanted to set the record straight.<\/p>\n
McBride posted a message to her Instagram story Wednesday, writing, \u201cI received a half-ass invite to the 3 pt contest, thru my agent, in a text randomly 48 hours ago.. not officially.\u201d<\/p>\n
Why are the Liberty struggling?<\/p>\n
Clark has not addressed her contest invite publicly. Both players are in the top five in the league in 3-pointers made per game (2.6). McBride is shooting 39.8 percent from that distance, while Clark has made 34.5 percent of her attempts.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur general process is to reach out to agents to determine a player\u2019s interest, and some accept and some decline,\u201d a WNBA spokesperson said in a statement.<\/p>\n
Ionescu, who set the contest record for WNBA and NBA players in 2023 with a 37-point final round, is a two-time champion. She is one of two multi-time champions in the WNBA\u2019s history, along with four-time winner Allie Quigley. Ionescu also competed in a W\/NBA crossover event at the 2024 NBA All-Star against NBA all-time 3-point leader Stephen Curry.<\/p>\n
Ionescu was not voted as an All-Star in 2026 after missing 12 of the first 13 games of the season. She was an All-Star the previous two times she competed in the 3-point contest as well as both times she competed in the skills challenge.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After not appearing in the list of contestants for the 2026 WNBA All-Star 3-point contest, New York Liberty…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":780245,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[73],"tags":[1077,436,99,434],"class_list":["post-780244","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wnba","tag-minnesota-lynx","tag-new-york-liberty","tag-sports","tag-wnba"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780244","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=780244"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/780244\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/780245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=780244"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=780244"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=780244"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}