The Minnesota Lynx winning streak is over at 10, and it ended the way these things usually end: not in a blowout, but in about ninety seconds of a game they had been winning all night. Los Angeles beat the WNBA-leading Lynx 89-82 on Thursday night behind a game-ending 8-0 run, and Minnesota now has roughly a day and a half to file it away before Las Vegas walks into their building.
Rae Burrell led the Sparks with 17. Erica Wheeler had four points inside that closing run. Four points does not sound like a headline until you understand where they landed.
How the Sparks ended the Minnesota Lynx winning streak
An 8-0 finish to a seven-point loss tells you the whole story in one line of arithmetic. Minnesota was in this game. Minnesota was probably ahead in this game. And then the last stretch belonged entirely to Los Angeles, which is the cruelest way for a streak to die, because there is no bad shooting night to blame and no lopsided quarter to point at. Somebody else just made every play at the end.
Burrell's 17 was the top line for the Sparks, and the preview material coming out of Minnesota has Miles fresh off a 23-point outing, so this was not a night where the Lynx forgot how to score. It was a night where the closing possessions got away from a team that had spent 10 games not letting that happen.
What a 25-7 Lynx team actually looks like
Here is the context that keeps this from being a crisis: Minnesota is 25-7, and 15-2 inside the Western Conference. That is still the best body of work in the league. A ten-game winning streak is not something you stumble into over the course of four months, and losing one game at the end of it changes the record by exactly one game.
What it changes is the mood, and the mood matters more in August than it does in June.
| Team | Overall | Conference |
|---|---|---|
| Minnesota Lynx | 25-7 | 15-2 (West) |
| Las Vegas Aces | 22-9 | 13-4 (West) |
| Indiana Fever | 19-12 | 7-4 (East) |
| Portland Fire | 12-19 | 3-10 (West) |
| Chicago Sky | 12-19 | 2-9 (East) |
| Seattle Storm | 6-27 | 1-14 (West) |
Three games separate the top two teams in the West. That is the entire subplot of the rest of this season.
Who Minnesota plays next
Saturday at 1:00 PM ET, Las Vegas at Minnesota. Of course it is.
And the Aces are arriving off a Thursday night that belonged in a highlight reel museum: Chelsea Gray hit a buzzer-beating three to force overtime against Indiana, then hit another buzzer-beating three to win it 86-84. Two buzzer beaters in one game. Whatever Vegas has been carrying around all season, they are carrying it into Minneapolis with the volume turned up.
checked the almanac: the Sparks have made a habit of being the team standing in the way of somebody's good story, dating back to the Lisa Leslie years and those back-to-back titles in 2001 and 2002. Spoiler is a role, and Los Angeles knows the lines.
What comes next for the people in it
For the Lynx, the honest read is that a 10-game streak inflates every loss that follows it. The pressure of a streak is real, players will tell you it gets heavier the longer it runs, and there is a version of Saturday where a team plays looser without it. There is also a version where a 25-7 club takes losing very personally in front of its own crowd at one in the afternoon.
For the Sparks, this is the kind of night a season gets built around. You beat the best team in the league on the road end of a run, in the last ninety seconds, with your bench guard making the plays. That travels.
What I'm watching Saturday: whether Minnesota's closing lineup looks like a group that just got burned in the final minute, or a group that has been waiting two days to prove Thursday was the outlier. Ten in a row says outlier. One game will tell us more.
