The Lynx Are Running a Clinic. The Liberty Are Taking Notes.
Minnesota is 25-6 with a 10-game win streak. New York has the only player to ever complete the MVP Grand Slam. One of these things matters more in September.
Diddja catch what Minnesota just did to Indiana? 108-100 on Saturday, extending their win streak to ten games. The Lynx are 25-6, best record in the league by daylight, and they're not slowing down.
Meanwhile, in New York, Jonquel Jones just completed something nobody's ever done. The MVP Grand Slam — regular season, Finals, Commissioner's Cup, All-Star. She's the only player in WNBA history to hold all four. That's not a footnote. That's a Hall of Fame line.
The problem is the box scores don't care about historical firsts.
The Liberty are 17-13. Fourth in the East. 5-5 in their last ten. They're not bad — they're just not Minnesota. And Minnesota is the team standing between Jonquel Jones and the Finals MVP that would make this position pay off.
Kid ran the numbers and the gap is brutal. The Lynx are 19 games over .500 on the season. The Liberty are 4 games over. That's not a gap you close with individual brilliance. That's a gap you close with a completely different team.
The All-Star MVP is not the Finals MVP. The All-Star MVP says you're the best player in a midseason exhibition. The Finals MVP says you were the best player when it mattered most. Jones has the former. For the latter, she needs the Liberty to climb six spots in the standings and then beat whatever comes out of the West — which right now looks a lot like Minnesota.
I'm not killing the position. Jones at 0.42 to win Finals MVP is still live. But the distance between her individual dominance and her team's trajectory is the story of this WNBA season. She's doing everything. It might not be enough.